InPopular Trauma Culture, Anne Rothe argues that American Holocaust discourse has a particular plot structure-characterized by a melodramatic conflict between good and evil and embodied in the core ...characters of victim/survivor and perpetrator-and that it provides the paradigm for representing personal experiences of pain and suffering in the mass media. The book begins with an analysis of Holocaust clichés, including its political appropriation, the notion of vicarious victimhood, the so-called victim talk rhetoric, and the infusion of the composite survivor figure with Social Darwinism. Readers then explore the embodiment of popular trauma culture in two core mass media genres: daytime TV talk shows and misery memoirs.Rothe conveys how victimhood and suffering are cast as trauma kitsch on talk shows likeOprahand as trauma camp on modern-day freak shows likeSpringer.The discussion also encompasses the first scholarly analysis of misery memoirs, the popular literary genre that has been widely critiqued in journalism as pornographic depictions of extreme violence. Currently considered the largest growth sector in book publishing worldwide, many of these works are also fabricated. And since forgeries reflect the cultural entities that are most revered, the book concludes with an examination of fake misery memoirs.
What must be done after the end of a dictatorship so that the suffering of those persecuted comes to an end and history does not repeat itself? Only rarely have long-term studies academically ...investigated the effects that measures implemented within the context of transitional justice have actually achieved. Taking seven countries as examples, this volume analyses what coming to terms with dictatorships can accomplish – and where its limits lie.
This groundbreaking book examines how the notion of "the object"
was transformed in Japanese experimental art during a time of rapid
social, economic, and environmental change.
Reviving the legacies ...of the historical avant-garde, Japanese
artists and intellectuals of the 1960s formulated an aesthetics of
disaffection through which they sought to address the stalemate of
political and aesthetic representation. Ignacio A. Adriasola Muñoz
draws from psychoanalytic theories of melancholia to examine the
implications of such an approach, tracing a genealogy of
disaffection within modernist discourse. By examining the
discursive practices of artists working across a wide range of
media, and through a close analysis of artwork, philosophical
debates, artist theories, and critical accounts, Adriasola Muñoz
shows how negativity became an efficacious means of addressing
politics as a source for the creative act of undoing .
In examining ideas of the object advanced by artists and
intellectuals both in writing and as part of their artwork, this
book brings discussions in critical art history to bear on the
study of art in Japan. It will be of interest to art historians
specializing in modernism, the international avant-garde, Japanese
art, and the history of photography.
Two preeminent Norwegian scholars of politics and law offer a comprehensive first-hand account of Norway's relationship with the EU and how this affects the country's legal and political system, ...setting out what Britain can learn from Norway's experience and how transferable these lessons are.
Günter Grass has primarily been perceived by research and the public as an author. But he was also an influential political actor. His political work was not just limited to the Brandt era but also ...helped to define the Berlin Republic. By harnessing his communicative power, he shaped public discourses as an intellectual and advised top politicians, as unpublished sources and background conversations show.
Made up of both material and symbolic elements, the urban space is always dynamic and transitional; it brings together or separates the past and the present, the public and the private, the center ...and the periphery. The present volume focuses on the interaction between the social processes and spatial forms that shape the identity of Italian cities. Using both canonical and less well-known texts along with cultural artifacts, the essays in the volume deprovincialize the Italian city, interpreting the material and symbolic practices that have made it into a unique entity whose enduring influence extends far outside Italy.
Bowling for Fascism Satyanath, Shanker; Voigtländer, Nico; Voth, Hans-Joachim
The Journal of political economy,
04/2017, Letnik:
125, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Using newly collected data on association density in 229 towns and cities in interwar Germany, we show that denser social networks were associated with faster entry into the Nazi Party. The effect is ...large: one standard deviation higher association density is associated with at least 15 percent faster Nazi Party entry. Party membership, in turn, predicts electoral success. Social networks thus aided the rise of the Nazis that destroyed Germany’s first democracy. The effects of social capital depended on the political context: in federal states with more stable governments, higher association density was not correlated with faster Nazi Party entry.
The international relations of the Middle East have long been dominated by uncertainty and conflict. External intervention, interstate war, political upheaval and interethnic violence are compounded ...by the vagaries of oil prices and the claims of military, nationalist and religious movements. The purpose of this book is to set this region and its conflicts in context, providing on the one hand a historical introduction to its character and problems, and on the other a reasoned analysis of its politics. In an engagement with both the study of the Middle East and the theoretical analysis of international relations, the author, who is one of the best known and most authoritative scholars writing on the region today, offers a compelling and original interpretation. Written in a clear, accessible and interactive style, the book is designed for students, policymakers, and the general reader.
Congo Style presents a postcolonial approach to discussing the visual culture of two now-notorious regimes: King Leopold II’s Congo Colony and the state sites of Mobutu Sese Seko’s totalitarian ...Zaïre. Readers are brought into the living remains of sites once made up of ambitious modernist architecture and art in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. From the total artworks of Art Nouveau to the aggrandizing sites of post-independence Kinshasa, Congo Style investigates the experiential qualities of man-made environments intended to entertain, delight, seduce, and impress. In her study of visual culture, Ruth Sacks sets out to reinstate the compelling wonder of nationalist architecture from Kinshasa’s post-independence era, such as the Tower of the Exchange (1974), Gécamines Tower (1977), and the artworks and exhibitions that accompanied them. While exploring post-independence nation-building, this book examines how the underlying ideology of Belgian Art Nouveau, a celebrated movement in Belgium, led to the dominating early colonial settler buildings of the ABC Hotels (circa 1908–13). Congo Style combines Sacks’s practice as a visual artist and her academic scholarship to provide an original study of early colonial and independence-era modernist sites in their African context.
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