Full Description
"One afternoon, a patient who had been in three times weekly ... psychotherapy ... left my office after her session, drove down to the train tracks half a mile from my office, and sat down facing an oncoming train." This tragic event opens the essay by psychoanalyst Susanne Chassay who explores the relationship between private and political terrorism. Her viewpoint complements analyses of violence - that 'mercurial gestalt' - by other contributors to this collection derived from a 2003 Cultures of Violence conference held at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, organized by the Inter-disciplinary Net. From fields as diverse as philosophy, sociology, psychology, history, political science, literary criticism, and forensics, authors consider, for instance, hostility to European minorities; military training and torture; the 'endemic violence' aesthetically recorded by Haitian novelists; child abuse in film; female genital mutilation in fiction; or the massacre of Koreans during the 1923 Japanese earthquake. Violence in contact zones in Northern Ireland or in the memory of South African museum directors trying to comply with Truth and Reconciliation Commission mandates is also an object of scrutiny here. Finally, that vexed, primordial issue of violence - nature or nurture? - is probed.
Contents
Tobe LEVIN and Patricia TURRISI: Introduction - Violence: "Mercurial Gestalt"
Violence in Theory and Praxis: Torture, Terror, Suicide
Patricia TURRISI and Michael J. SHAFFER: Theories of Violence and the Explanation of Ultra-Violent Behaviour
Oleg PILETSKY: E Pluribus Unum: European Nationalism, or Shopping for Identities in the European Union
Jessica WOLFENDALE: From Soldier to Torturer? Military Training and Moral Agency
Kaiama L. GLOVER: A Literature of Terror and Mourning
Susanne CHASSAY: Hurtling Toward Darkness: Faces of Violence in the Contemporary World
Violence Secret and Sanctioned: Child Abuse, Apartheid, FGM
Larissa N. NIEC, Elizabeth V. BRESTAN, and Linda Anne VALLE: Violence on the Screen: Psychological Perspectives on Child Abuse in American Popular Film 1992-2001
Tobe LEVIN: Creative Writing of FGM as an Act of Violence and Human Rights Abuse
M.K. FLYNN and Tony KING: Re-Constructing South African Identity after 1994: Museums and Public History
Karen LYSAGHT: Speaking of Contested Sites: Narrative and Praxis of Spatial Competition in Belfast, Northern Ireland
Eleonore WILDBURGER: Racism and Violence: Anti-Racist Strategies in Intercultural Contact Zones
Violence and Institutions: Butchery, Execution, Riots
Jin-hee LEE: The Enemy Within: Earthquake, Rumours and Massacre in the Japanese Empire
William VLACH: When Saviour Becomes Serpent: The Psychology of Police Violence
Vivien MILLER: "Equality in Life Presumes Equality in Death": Gender and Execution in Sunbelt America
Notes on Contributors
