‘Ain’t I a feminist?’: the politics of gender violence,anti-violence,and education in Oakland,CA

This article focuses on the ways gender violence politics become reduced to liberal narratives of victimization in contemporary U.S. deployment of feminist identity politics, within academic and activist discourses. Such victimization narratives, I argue, exploit suffering and reproduce social stratification between a growing middle class in the academy and poor black people outside of it. This article draws from moments in California’s Bay area when questions of feminism, gender violence, and anti-violence in schools arose. In each case, left feminists had an opportunity to reshape these questions towards new political paradigms and new academic discourses. Instead, amidst the ‘safety’ of left discourse and practice, each moment confronted contradictory silences that called into question such ‘safety’ and made generative political movement impossible. I analyze the dynamics of this silencing as constitutive of the co-optation of feminist identity politics within a capitalist university that reproduces an oppressive race and class order. We face a problem of language to adequately explain and disrupt the incapacity for collective social change that victimhood, identity politics, and reformism have produced. Each instance I present function as moments of history making from which we may reflect and strategize forward movement against capitalist oppression and racial dehumanization.     

A Note on the Meaning of Ḥamas in Ezekiel

ABSTRACT

The entries for ?amas in the biblical lexicons read “violence, wrong”; “treat violently”; or “theft, exploitation, social oppression;” namely, this word is understood as referring to the social sphere. On this basis, in the usual exegesis of the verses in which it appears in Ezekiel, ?amas is understood to refer to social violence. I suggest, however, that a closer examination of each of the seven occurrences of this term in Ezekiel indicates that it refers to the sins of the people that led to the destruction of the Temple—including idolatry and bloodshed—and that Ezekiel utilized and adjusted this pentateuchal concept to his prophetic needs.     

Hope in Hebron: The Political Affects of Activism in a Strangled City

The negative affects of this violent occupation—fear, threat, humiliation—quell hope, setting limits on the potentials of political agency. This article documents the corporeality of the Occupation in Hebron, evoking the body as materially contingent to explore agential capacities within the delimiting affects of the violent sensorium. Drawing on fieldwork with Palestinian activists engaged in providing political tours of Hebron, I argue that by reappropriating the violent affects of occupation, this form of activism demonstrates agency that resists “political depression”. Theoretically, I argue further, at hand is an empirical account of the “autonomy of affect” giving rise to critical hope amid a sensorium of fear. The research presented, therefore, contributes to addressing a key question for resistance in Palestine (and beyond): how fear—a predominant affective register of contemporary politics—might be harnessed towards (renewed) political agency and resistance to oppression.     

Human Rights,Care Ethics and Situated Universal Norms

Abstract: As interest in the relationship between geography and ethics grows, it becomes important to examine how different approaches to ethical philosophy may fit with geographic scholarship. To that end, this article focuses on a particular approach to ethical responsibility—international human rights law—and asks how that approach can be put into conversation with discussions in geography about morality, distance and care. It explores three contributions of such a conversation: first, it examines how the relational ontology of care ethics provides a new perspective on the moral value of human rights, so that the relationships and context in question drive the relative value of rights. Second, the article discusses contributions that human rights can bring to questions of caring across distance. Finally, it unpacks the duties that accompany human rights and questions the scope of duty that attaches to the norm of equality.     

The Injustice of Some Attacks: A Response to Stephen Strehle

Abstract

Despite Stephen Strehle's criticisms, the ‘just war’ tradition can be a useful and appropriate way of thinking through the ethical problems of war. If it remains grounded in the memory of human suffering, including the suffering of the enemy, then it is a flexible framework, open to new developments, which can guide ethical reflection. In fact, the just war tradition is a good example of the appropriate relation of religion to politics. Religious traditions must neither dictate political options directly, nor be separated from them entirely, but must engage the political sphere ‘indirectly’, via reasoned argumentation. Four elements of this indirect relation are described.     

Senseless Violence: Liminality and Intertwining

The claim of this article is that the perpetrators of violence are “liminal” figures, being inside and yet outside of the world in which they act. It is this liminality, this existing on the border, that makes their violence senseless. Because of it, their actions can be understood in terms neither of the actual reality of their victims nor of the imagined reality that the perpetrators placed them in. Sense, here, fails, for the lack of a common frame. Liminality exists in a number of forms: economic, religious, and political—each with its potential for violence. What distinguishes political liminality is the scale of its violence. As Carl Schmitt shows, the liminal sovereign or ruler is both inside and outside the state, employing its means for violence even as he is unconstrained by its laws. I contend that this sovereign exists in a continuum with the practitioners of terrorist violence, who are also liminal figures. To analyze this liminality, I explore the intertwining between the self and the world that sets up the common frame that gives sense to actions. I then examine the causes of its breakdown.     

Living With the Other's Pain: The Ethical Implications of Mitsein in Simone de Beauvoir's Le sang des autres

This article establishes that the suffering of the other represents a serious philosophical and ethical problem in Beauvoir's first post–World War II novel. In fact, the other's suffering poses such a complex problem in Le sang des autres particularly because Beauvoir depicts her characters’ world as a kind of Mitsein, which is Heidegger's word to describe how our lives necessarily intertwine with and envelop the lives of others while still allowing for the existential experience of separation. In the novel, the main characters’ potential responses to the other's suffering—quietism, indifference, charity, and empathy—fail according to the novel's existentialist ethical framework because of the ways these responses deny the fundamental ambiguity of Beauvoirian Mitsein. Only in accepting separation and connection as codependent ethical values do the characters find an ethically palatable response to the other's suffering at the end of the novel.     

Marx,Engels, and the Ethics of Violence in Revolt

Marx and Engels's thought—combined with the way in which it has been interpreted—has tended to militate against discussion of an ethics of violence in revolt. Along with Sorel and Fanon, their attitude towards violence is often seen simply as one where the ends justify the means and where violence in pursuit of a just society is necessarily defensible. However, we can (and should) look to certain sources within Marx and Engels for inspiration for an ethics of violence in revolt, which places emphasis on the humanizing aspects of their work, on the core ideas of freedom, moving beyond dehumanization and moving beyond violence. I argue that this approach suggests an abhorrence of any violence and can thus be combined with a pacifist-influenced approach to the ethics of violence in revolt. This is compatible with Ernst Bloch's interpretation of Marxism, which he describes as “concrete utopianism.” Classical Marxism can, then, offer fruitful pointers to an ethics of violence in political change, although Marx and Engels's texts must be used with considerable care and must be combined with the work of other thinkers, in particular those who display more explicit moral objection to violence of any kind.     

Wounded cities: Memory-work and a place-based ethics of care

What would it mean to think about cities marked by past structures of violence and exclusion as wounded but also as environments that offer its residents care? My current book in progress, Wounded Cities, focuses on creative practices and politics in Bogotá, Cape Town, Berlin, Minneapolis, and Roanoke, cities in which settlement clearances have produced spaces so steeped in oppression that the geographies of displacement continue to structure urban social relations. Precisely in and through these ‘wounded cities’, residents, artists, educators, and activists reconsider the meanings of the ‘right to the city’ and to theorizing the city more broadly. Drawing upon ethnographic research and theories from postcolonial theory, social psychiatry, social ecology, feminist political theory, and art theory, I introduce my concepts of ‘wounded city’, ‘memory-work’, and a ‘place-based ethics of care’ to retheorize urban politics. Artists and residents in wounded cities encourage political forms of witnessing to respect those who have gone before, attend to past injustices that continue to haunt contemporary cities, and create experimental communities to imagine different urban futures. I argue that a deeper appreciation of the lived, place-based experiences of inhabitants of most cities would enable planners, policy makers, and urban theorists to consider more ethical and sustainable forms of urban change than those that continue to legitimate disciplinary forms of governmentality.     

Restitution over coffee: truth,reconciliation, and environmental violence in East Timor

Truth commissions have become an almost obligatory component of the process by which national societies attempt to reconstruct themselves in the aftermath of, and recover from, periods of violent, authoritarian rule, and/or war, especially of the civil variety. Proponents of truth commissions see them as indispensable to promoting reconciliation between former adversaries as well as a transition to a more just, democratic, and peaceful political order, while serving as an important component in nation-state-(re)building. This paper analyzes and critiques the boundaries that typically define the tasks of truth commissions with a focus on East Timor’s. It contends that commissions achieve less than they might in terms of their goal of facilitating a justice-infused notion of reconciliation between conflicting parties because of their tendency to focus on individual acts or events of violence, while giving relatively little weight to systemic or structural forms of violence. To substantiate this argument, the paper analyzes the relationship of coffee—East Timor’s primary export commodity—to the violence and terror that the country’s truth commission addresses. In doing so, the paper illustrates the dynamic links between violence and the environment and how said environment comes to embody that violence and to reproduce it in various forms. It also demonstrates the limits of truth commissions as conventionally defined as they relate to matters of social justice. In doing so, it potentially points the way toward more ambitious, and more successful, truth-telling and reconciliation processes—if we assume the goal is to promote a just and peaceful coexistence between former adversaries. The framework employed is one of a Third World political ecology of violence, one that understands violence not only in terms of direct acts of physical brutality, but also in terms of indirect acts and social structures that cause injury.     

Resisting popular feminisms: gender,sexuality and the lure of the modern

Abstract

This article tracks discursive and political use of gender and sexual equality in nationalist and popular accounts of feminism, focusing on the ways in which such discourses produce a particular linking of time and space in the articulation of ‘the Modern’ in both colonial and postcolonial contexts. It further explores the increasing popularity of feminism in some media and celebrity contexts that have historically been so hostile to it, asking for care in tracking how and under what conditions feminism is cited as ‘universally desirable’ in light of this history. I suggest that feminism is partly reframed in this way insofar as it is newly sutured to femininity rather than masculinity, but also to singular rather than multiple or intersectional understandings of women’s oppression. A related claim of this article is that this shift of affective association with feminism is only possible when that singular cause of gender oppression is firmly understood as sexual oppression. I will be suggesting that if feminism is understood primarily or even only a fight against sexual oppression by men then the oppositional gendered roles that allow for its tethering to nationalism remain intact yet simultaneously obscured. In conclusion the article calls for an appreciation of feminism as a minority pursuit attentive to multiple power relations and histories.     

Schooling in the University Town: The Racial Capitalist Foundations of Education

This article focuses on how educational institutions are crucial sites for understanding how racial capitalism and anti-Black violence are reproduced. Centring Chapel Hill, home of the University of North Carolina (UNC), and its neighbouring town of Carrboro as a university town built by racial capitalist and anti-Black practices, I analyse how the university functions as a social reproductive force that structures the town and its local public education system. Building on my ethnographic research, Black studies literature, and Black geographic thought, I argue that the university partakes in the political, economic, and ideological restructuring of a community that enables hierarchical differences to be produced in schools in terms of how success is rooted with liberal notions of the individual and proximity to whiteness. Paying attention to these relationships challenges us to think about the need for the total eradication of oppression in all forms to truly have liberated educational spaces.     

HISTORY: A HANDMAID'S TALE

Historians are generally coy and diffident when it comes to engaging with the moral question despite it being a critical aspect of doing history. However, historians of empire cannot evade the moral question given the ethical dilemmas that imperialism posed for the men at its helm. To portray the colonists as hypocrites is too facile and cynical an explanation. So, what allowed the British colonists to manage the conscience that they indeed possessed? As Priya Satia boldly argues in Time's Monster: How History Makes History, the answer to this question resides in historicism, which became the new ethical idiom from the nineteenth century onward. It enabled the British colonists to assuage their conscience and made the empire an ethically thinkable reality. It helped whitewash colonial violence and generate public acceptance for colonization. The historians’ power lay in anointing history as providence and in using it to paper over the cracks in the British conscience. Being able to narrate was itself a manifestation of power. It was only after the Second World War that history renounced its pact with power and a reimagination of the historical idiom emerged. Various shades of South Asian and Caribbean anti-colonial leaders and postcolonial writers began to think beyond the historicist category of the empire. These efforts to dismantle the empire's historical narratives were paralleled by the writings of British historian E. P. Thompson, although he remained tied to the idea of history as progress. The moral question, however, remains unsettled. It endures for present-day historians because the teleserials, nostalgic period dramas, and “great men” histories continue to hold sway over the public mind, generate debates about the “benefits” of the empire, and feed Britain's anti-immigrant sentiments. Satia's book lies at the intersection of three sets of historiographies—histories of British political thought, postcolonial writings that highlight alternate conceptions of the past and the significance of orality, memory, and community history, and, lastly, histories of violence—all of which engage the moral question in some form or another.     

Female Suicide,Subjectivity and the State in Eighteenth‐Century China

This article examines the social and political significance of female suicide in Qing Dynasty China and its implications for women's agency, feminine subjectivity and the state's interpretation of violence. Tracing the development of state and elite interpretations of the propriety of women's suicides, it situates the discourse on female suicide in the context of state efforts to control the definition and enactment of moralised violence and pervasive rhetoric about women's incapacity for moral agency. Demonstrating the problematic ethical and judicial status of suicides committed in the wake of a violation of chastity, in particular, it argues that such suicides represented a distinctively female definition of moral order and the role of violence within it.     

‘Barbarity more suited to Savages’: British soldiers’ views of Spanish and Portuguese violence during the Peninsular War, 1808–1814

This article explores British soldiers’ reactions to the violence that Iberian soldiers, guerrillas and civilians perpetrated against wounded French soldiers and prisoners of war during the Peninsular War. Whilst they saw this violence as retaliatory, and sympathized with the suffering of the occupied, British soldiers were shocked, disturbed and outraged, often leading them to self-identify with their very enemy — the French. On one level, this violence was seen as a fundamental violation of customary rules of war. Yet further, in British minds it revealed a deeper Iberian culture of violence and way of war, which set the Iberian peoples apart from ‘civilized’ nations.     

New Meanings in the Archive: Privacy,Technological Change and the Status of Sources**

This essay reflects on how technological changes in biomedicine can affect what archival sources are available for historical research. Historians and anthropologists have examined the ways in which old biomedical samples can be made to serve novel scientific purposes, such as when decades-old frozen tissue specimens are analyzed using new genomic techniques. Those uses are also affected by shifting ethical regimes, which affect who can do what with old samples, or whether anything can be done with them at all. Archival collections are subject to similar dynamics, as institutional change and shifts in ethical guidelines and privacy laws affect which sources can be accessed and which are closed. I witnessed just such a change during my research into human genetics using archives in the Wellcome Collection. A few years into my project, those archives had their privacy conditions reassessed, and I saw how some sources previously seen as neutral were now understood to contain personal sensitive information. This paper describes the conditions of this shift—including the effects of technological change, new ethical considerations, and changing laws around privacy. I reflect on how these affected my understanding of the history of human genetics, and how I and others might narrate it.     

Religion and Violence: A Challenge to the Unity of the Churches

Abstract

The article explores the relationship between religion and violence—both in the role religion has played in overcoming violence and in sometimes being at the heart of violence. Recent Indian history of religiously fuelled violence is the case study in this article. Additionally, the history of Christianity is dotted with violence—imperialism and colonialism have been justified by some historians. This should be the basis for a challenge to the imperial and implicitly ‘Christian’ designs that accompany the present war against Iraq.

The Bible and Christian theology contain violent images. There is ambiguity in defining violence, because sometimes it is difficult to name the more subtle forms of violence. The authority of the Church is questioned as it has sometimes been silent about the violence within its own life.

The Churches need to engage in intra-Christian dialogue so as to mutually focus on the ministry of reconciliation and healing. The Churches need also to engage in inter-religious dialogue, recognizing a common spirituality of non-violence present in all religions.     

Droughts,state-citizen relations and support for political violence in Sub-Saharan Africa: A micro-level analysis

Droughts are unlikely to influence support for political violence unless they coincide with unfavourable social and political conditions. In this article I suggest that support for violence in times of drought depends on people's relationship with their government and the way in which this relationship determines their vulnerability to adverse climatic shocks. Droughts impose serious economic pressures on affected people, especially in Sub-Saharan countries, where access to alternative sources of water is often limited. People who enjoy good relations with the sitting regime and who benefit from a wide range of public services are more likely to overcome these pressures. On the other hand, politically neglected, marginalised and disaffected people have many more difficulties in coping with drought and are likely to blame their government for it. This, in turn, can pave the way for endorsing more radical attitudes and even violence against the government and its (presumed) political supporters. The results of my analysis partly confirm this idea. Exposure to drought per se does not seem to influence attitudes towards political violence in a statistically significant way. However, I find both people who are politically discriminated against and people who do not trust their head of state to be more inclined to endorse political violence when hit by severe drought. These findings, which are consistent across a number of alternative model specifications, show that fragile state-citizen relations play an important part in the processes linking drought exposure and support for political violence.     

Addressing structural violence through US reconciliation commissions: The case study of Greensboro,NC and Detroit,MI

Across the United States, communities encumbered by violence, economic injustice, legacies of oppression and continued social, economic, and political marginalization are increasingly turning toward truth and reconciliation commissions (TRC) to address and remedy persistent inequality. While modeled after the international truth movement, TRCs in the United States are often not state-sanctioned and characterized by fundamental differences that beg the question: How are peace and justice dialectically linked to, and flow from geographic specific understandings of violence? Drawing from the TRC experiences of Greensboro (NC) and Detroit (MI), this paper examines the way communities that were burdened with a history of violence are turning toward TRCs as viable vehicles for addressing violence and inequality in contemporary US society. This paper furthers our understanding of the geographic ruptures violence creates in communities and the often hidden realities that the legacy and memory of violence has for oppressed people in the United States.