States of violence
By: Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski, editors.
Contributors: Coronil, Fernando, 1944-; Skurski, Julie, 1945-
Series: Comparative studies in society and history book series
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Ann Arbor
Language: eng
Number of pages: 472
ISBN-13: 9780472098934; 9780472068937
Subjects: Violence.; Political violence.; State, The.; Power (Social sciences)
Description: This extraordinary collection of essays recasts prevailing understandings of the role of violence in the formation of the modern world. By illuminating the links between exceptional ruptures and the routine maintenance of social order, the collection expands and redefines our understanding of political violence. By means of a combination of detailed historical studies and imaginative reflection, this book explores the often unrecognized violent foundations of modern nations. Focusing on the relations between the state and the domestic order, it directs attention to contests over the establishment and representation of meanings and addresses the impact of state-centered categories and narratives on the organization and collective remembering of violence. The essays cover a wide range of regions, time periods, and processes, including the Middle East, South Asia, Latin America, the United States, and Europe, and span violent uprisings as well as the quotidian administration of the law. As its title suggests, States of Violence brings together the stable and the transient, the institutional and the experiential, the state sanctioned and the insurgent, inviting recognition of the multiple intersections of practices of governance and processes of feeling.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: States of violence and the violence of states / Julie Skurski and Fernando Coronil; title: Civilization and barbarism : cattle frontiers in Latin America / Silvio R. Duncan Baretta and John Markoff; title: Dismembering and remembering the nation : the semantics of political violence in Venezuela / Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski; title: Mad mullahs and Englishmen : discourse in the colonial encounter / David B. Edwards; title: Tea talk : violent measures in the discursive practices of Sri Lanka's estate tamils / E. Valentine Daniel; title: Better occasional murders than frequent adulteries : discourses on banditry, violence, and sacrifice in the Mediterranean / Paul Sant Cassia; title: Of crowds and empires : Afro-Asian riots and European expansion, 1857 to 1882 / Juan R.I. Cole; title: Ethnic violence on the South African gold mines / T. Dunbar Moodie; title: Violence in the big house : the limits of discipline and the spaces of resistance / Charles Bright; title: Sexual violence, discursive formations, and the state / Veena Das; title: Violence and vision : the prosthetics and aesthetics of terror / Allen Feldman.