1st Edition
The New Violent Cartography Geo-Analysis after the Aesthetic Turn
This edited volume seeks to propose and examine different, though related, critical responses to modern cultures of war among other cultural practices of statecraft. Taken together, these essays present a space of creative engagement with the political and draw on a broad range of cultural contexts and genres of expressions to provoke the thinking that exceeds the conventional stories and practices of international relations.
In contrast to a macropolitical focus on state policy and inter-state hostilities, the contributors to this volume treat the micropolitics of violence and dissensus that occur below [besides and against] the level and gaze that comprehends official map-making, policy-making and implementation practices. At a minimum, the counter-narratives presented in these essays disturb the functions, identities, and positions assigned by the nation-state, thereby multiplying relations between bodies, the worlds where they live, and the ways in which they are ‘equipped’ for fitting in them.
Contributions deploy feature films, literature, photography, architecture to think the political in ways that offer glimpses of realities that are fugitive within existing perspectives. Bringing together a wide range of theorists from a host of geographical, cultural and theoretical contexts, this work explores the different ways in which an aesthetic treatment of world politics can contribute to an ethics of encounter predicated on minimal violence in encounters with people with different practices of identity.
This work provides a significant contribution to the field of international theory, encouraging us to rethink politics and ethics in the world today.
Introduction : The New Violent Cartography: Geo-analysis After the Aesthetic Turn Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro Part 1: Violence, Literary and Narrative Cartographies 1. Maps and the Geography of Violence: Farah’s Maps and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness Russell West-Pavlov 2. Chronotopicity in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun Christopher Ouma 3. Beyond Imaginary Geographies: Critique, Cooptation and Imagination in the Aftermath of The War On Terror Angharad Closs Stephens Part 2: Warring Bodies and Bodies Politic 4. Mapping the Politics of Trauma: The U.S. Injured-Soldier Body in Annie Proulx’s "Tits-Up in a Ditch" Brianne Gallagher 5 . Eater of Death Shailja Patel 6 . Diplomatic Dissensus : A Report on Humanitarianism and the Body in Pain Sam Okoth Opondo 7. Reassembling Memory: Rithy Panh’s S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim 8. The Triad of Vision and the Grounds of the Violent Photographic Image in Israel’s "Cast Lead" Operation in Gaza Meir Wigoder 9. Violent Masculinities and the Phallocratic Aesthetics of Power in Kenya Grace Musila Part 3: Continuing Violent Cartographies and the Redistribution of the Sensible 10. The North West Frontier of Pakistan: Preoccupation with "Unveiling" the Battlefield and "Violent Cartography" Syed Sami Raza 11. Cyprus, Violent Cartography and the Distribution of Ethnic Identity Costas M. Constantinou 12. Dignity, Memory, Truth and the Future Under Siege: Reconciliation and Nation Building in Post-Apartheid South Africa Bhekizizwe Peterson 13. The International Aesthetic of the Yasukuni Jinja and Yûshûkan Museum Geoffrey Whitehall and Eric Ishiwata 14. Repartitioning the U.S.-Mexico Border: Cinematic Thought, Shock, and Empathy in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil David Toohey 15 . A Continuing Violent Cartography: From Guadalupe Hidalgo to Contemporary Border Crossings Michael J. Shapiro
Biography
Sam Okoth Opondo is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa where he is writing a doctoral dissertation on Black Diplomacies: Colonialism, Race and the Poetics of Mediating African Estrangement. Most broadly, his research interest lies in the study of estrangement, politics of aesthetics and cultural translation in colonial and postcolonial societies.
Michael J. Shapiro is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. Among his publications are Methods and Nations: Cultural Governance and the Indigenous Subject (2004), Deforming American Political Though: Ethnicity, Facticity, and Genre (2006) and Cinematic Geopolitics (2009).
