Spectre Of Violence

An Illuminating Inquiry Into The Play Of Power And Dominance Behind 1857 On 27 June 1857, Rebels Publicly Slaughtered Over 300 Men, Women And Children Of The Master Race At The Satichaura Ghat In Kanpur. On 15 July, A Group Of Women And Children Who Had Survived Were Killed At The Bibighur. Two Days Later, General Havelock Reclaimed Kanpur And Colonel James Neill Decimated The Rebel Population. This Sequence Of Violence Has Held Sway Over Indian And British Imaginations For Generations, And Historians And Commentators Have Recounted The Massacres With Horror. Locating The Massacres In The Upheaval Which Overtook North India In The Early Nineteenth Century, Rudrangshu Mukherjee, An Eminent 1857 Historian, Analyses The Nature Of The Violence. Mukherjee Argues That The Absence Of Rebel Accounts And Chronicles Inhibits A Telling Of Their Version Of The Story. What Is Available Are The Contemporary Accounts Of British Survivors, Diaries Of British Loyalists And Depositions As Part Of The Official Report Prepared By The British. By Reading These Sources Against Their Grain And By Examining The Manner In Which The Evidence Was Stitched Together, Spectre Of Violence Brings To Light Fresh Directions Of Inquiry Into The Events Of 1857.

Specter of Peace challenges historians to take peace as seriously as violence. Early American peacemaking was a productive discourse of moral ordering fundamentally concerned with regulating violence. Histories of peacemaking, the volume argues, sharpens our understanding of colonialism and empire.

In this book, Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani provides the first examination of the applicability of Emmanuel Levinas' work to social and political movements.

Following the 1971 Bangladesh War, the Bangladesh government publicly designated the thousands of women raped by the Pakistani military and their local collaborators as birangonas, ("brave women”). Nayanika Mookherjee demonstrates that while this celebration of birangonas as heroes keeps them in the public memory, they exist in the public consciousness as what Mookherjee calls a spectral wound. Dominant representations of birangonas as dehumanized victims with disheveled hair, a vacant look, and rejected by their communities create this wound, the effects of which flatten the diversity of their experiences through which birangonas have lived with the violence of wartime rape. In critically examining the pervasiveness of the birangona construction, Mookherjee opens the possibility for a more politico-economic, ethical, and nuanced inquiry into the sexuality of war.

Much has been written on the how colonial subjects took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. The possibility of reverse influence has been largely overlooked. Insurgent Empire shows how Britain's enslaved and colonial subjects were not merely victims of empire and subsequent beneficiaries of its crises of conscience but also agents whose resistance both contributed to their own liberation and shaped British ideas about freedom and who could be free. Insurgent Empire examines dissent over the question of empire in Britain and shows how it was influenced by rebellions and resistance in the colonies from the West Indies and East Africa to Egypt and India. It also shows how a pivotal role in fomenting dissent was played by anti-colonial campaigners based in London at the heart of the empire.

Zizek argues that the physical violence we see is often generated by the systemic violence that sustains our political and economic systems. With the help of eminent philosophers like Marx, Engel and Lacan, as well as frequent references to popular culture, he examines the real causes of violent outbreaks like those seen in Israel and Palestine and in terrorist acts around the world. Ultimately, he warns, doing nothing is often the most violent course of action we can take.

Recently, numerous multi-national states have disintegrated along national lines, and today many more continue to witness bitter secessionist struggles. This study brings together a series of essays on the ethics of secession.

The relationship between customary land tenure and ‘modern’ forms of landed property has been a major political issue in the ‘Spearhead’ states of Melanesia since the late colonial period, and is even more pressing today, as the region is subject to its own version of what is described in the international literature as a new ‘land rush’ or ‘land grab’ in developing countries. This volume aims to test the application of one particular theoretical framework to the Melanesian version of this phenomenon, which is the framework put forward by Derek Hall, Philip Hirsch and Tania Murray Li in their 2011 book, Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia. Since that framework emerged from studies of the agrarian transition in Southeast Asia, the key question addressed in this volume is whether ‘land transformations’ in Melanesia are proceeding in a similar direction, or whether they take a somewhat different form because of the particular nature of Melanesian political economies or social institutions. The contributors to this volume all deal with this question from the point of view of their own direct engagement with different aspects of the land policy process in particular countries. Aside from discussion of the agrarian transition in Melanesia, particular attention is also paid to the growing problem of land access in urban areas and the gendered nature of landed property relations in this region.