Violence and the Limits of Representation explores the representation of violence in literature, film, drama, music and art in order to demonstrate the ways in which the work done by researchers in the Arts and Humanities can offer fresh perspectives on current social and political issues.

First published in 1989, this collection of essays brings into focus the history of a specific form of violence – that of representation. The contributors identify representations of self and other that empower a particular class, gender, nation, or race, constructing a history of the west as the history of changing modes of subjugation. The essays bring together a wide range of literary and historical work to show how writing became an increasingly important mode of domination during the modern period as ruling ideas became a form of violence in their own right. This reissue will be of particular value to literature students with an interest in the concept of violence, and the boundaries and capacity of discourse.

This volume opens up new ground in the field of social representations research by focusing on contexts involving mass violence, rather than on relatively stable societies. Representations of violence are not only symbolic, but in the first place affective and bodily, especially when it comes to traumatic experiences. Exploring the responses of researchers, educators, students and practitioners to long-term engagement with this emotionally demanding material, the book considers how empathic knowledge can make working in this field more bearable and deepen our understanding of the Holocaust, genocide, war, and mass political violence. Bringing together international contributors from a range of disciplines including anthropology, clinical psychology, history, history of ideas, religious studies, social psychology, and sociology, the book explores how scholars, students, and professionals engaged with violence deal with the inevitable emotional stresses and vicarious trauma they experience. Each chapter draws on personal histories, and many suggest new theoretical and methodological concepts to investigate emotional reactions to this material. The insights gained through these reflections can function protectively, enabling those who work in this field to handle adverse situations more effectively, and can yield valuable knowledge about violence itself, allowing researchers, teachers, and professionals to better understand their materials and collocutors. Engaging Violence: Trauma, memory, and representation will be of key value to students, scholars, psychologists, humanitarian aid workers, UN personnel, policy makers, social workers, and others who are engaged, directly or indirectly, with mass political violence, war, or genocide.

The Properties of Violence focuses on two connected issues: representations of lynching in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century American photographs, poetry, and fiction; and the effects of those representations. Alexandre compellingly shows how putting representations of lynching in dialogue with the history of lynching uncovers the profound investment of African American literature—as an enterprise that continually seeks to create conceptual spaces for the disenfranchised culture it represents—in matters of property and territory. Through studies ranging from lynching photographs to Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Beloved, the book demonstrates how representations of lynching demand that we engage and discuss various forms of possession and dispossession. The multiple meanings of the word “representation” are familiar to literary critics, but Alexandre's book insists that its other key term, “effects,” also needs to be understood in both of its primary senses. On the one hand, it indicates the social and cultural repercussions of how lynching was portrayed, namely, what effects its representations had. On the other hand, the word signals, too, the possessions or what we might call the personal effects conjured up by these representations. These possessions were not only material—as for example property in land or the things one owned. The effects of representation also included diverse, less tangible but no less real possessions shared by individuals and groups: the aura of a lynching site, the ideological construction of white womanhood, or the seemingly default capacity of lynching iconography to encapsulate the history of ostensibly all forms of violence against black people.

This unprecedented exhibition of viscerally potent art focuses on how Sierra Leonean Artists have documented the atrocities of war and how these representations of violence spur conscious action.

Conceptualizing Mass Violence draws attention to the conspicuous inability to inhibit mass violence in myriads forms and considers the plausible reasons for doing so. Focusing on a postcolonial perspective, the volume seeks to popularize and institutionalize the study of mass violence in South Asia. The essays explore and deliberate upon the varied aspects of mass violence, namely revisionism, reconstruction, atrocities, trauma, memorialization and literature, the need for Holocaust education, and the criticality of dialogue and reconciliation. The language, content, and characteristics of mass violence/genocide explicitly reinforce its aggressive, transmuting, and multifaceted character and the consequent necessity to understand the same in a nuanced manner. The book is an attempt to do so as it takes episodes of mass violence for case study from all inhabited continents, from the twentieth century to the present. The volume studies ‘consciously enforced mass violence’ through an interdisciplinary approach and suggests that dialogue aimed at reconciliation is perhaps the singular agency via which a solution could be achieved from mass violence in the global context. The volume is essential reading for postgraduate students and scholars from the interdisciplinary fields of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, History, Political Science, Sociology, World History, Human Rights, and Global Studies.

The first in a four-volume set, The Cambridge World History of Violence, Volume 1 provides a comprehensive examination of violence in prehistory and the ancient world. Covering the Palaeolithic through to the end of classical antiquity, the chapters take a global perspective spanning sub-Saharan Africa, the Near East, Europe, India, China, Japan and Central America. Unlike many previous works, this book does not focus only on warfare but examines violence as a broader phenomenon. The historical approach complements, and in some cases critiques, previous research on the anthropology and psychology of violence in the human story. Written by a team of contributors who are experts in each of their respective fields, Volume 1 will be of particular interest to anyone fascinated by archaeology and the ancient world.

Media and Violence pays equal attention to the production, content and reception involved in any representation of violence. This book offers a framework for understanding how violence is represented and consumed. It examines the relationship of media, gender, and real-world violence; representations of violence in screen entertainment; the effects of violent media on consumers; the ethics and gender politics of the production processes of screen violence; and the discussions are illustrated with topical and well-known examples, enabling the reader to critically engage with the debates.

According to media reports, Latin America is one of the most violent regions in the world—a distinction it held throughout the twentieth century. The authors of Violence and Crime in Latin America contend that perceptions and representations of violence and crime directly impact such behaviors, creating profound consequences for the political and social fabric of Latin American nations. Written by distinguished scholars of Latin American history, sociology, anthropology, and political science, the essays in this volume range from Mexico and Argentina to Colombia and Brazil in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, addressing such issues as extralegal violence in Mexico, the myth of indigenous criminality in Guatemala, and governments’ selective blindness to violent crime in Brazil and Jamaica. The authors in this collection examine not only the social construction and political visibility of violence and crime in Latin America, but the justifications for them as well. Analytically and historically, these essays show how Latin American citizens have sanctioned criminal and violent practices and incorporated them into social relations, everyday practices, and institutional settings. At the same time, the authors explore the power struggles that inform distinctions between illegitimate versus legitimate violence. Violence and Crime in Latin America makes a substantive contribution to understanding a key problem facing Latin America today. In its historical depth and ethnographic reach, this original and thought-provoking volume enhances our understanding of crime and violence throughout the Western Hemisphere.

This edited volume brings together a series of contributions exploring the socio-cultural and psychological representation of peace and conflict. It ventures into areas of the humanities and social sciences not typically foregrounded in Peace Studies, such psychology, sociology, media studies, cultural studies, history, and geography.