Terrorism and Ressentiment in Revolutionary Russia*

2019 ◽  
Vol 246 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-226
Author(s):  
Susan K Morrissey
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Small Groups ◽  
State Violence ◽  
The Body ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Messages ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Terrorist Acts

Abstract During the late nineteenth century, revolutionary terrorism emerged as a political tactic in Europe and across the world, where it formed one part of anti-colonial, anti-capitalist and national liberation movements. While its public spectacle took advantage of the new media landscape to communicate affective and political messages, terrorism was ultimately a ‘weapon of the weak’, a means for individuals and small groups to fight against the increasingly powerful modern state. The turn to insurgent violence was consequently imbricated with the experience of state violence. Focusing on a period of revolutionary unrest and heightened political violence in early twentieth-century Russia, this article takes a micro-historical approach to examine how individuals and radical parties came to explain, justify, and incite terrorist acts through narratives of vengeance and ressentiment. Drawing on recent scholarship by anthropologists and historians of emotion and bypassing psychological modes of explanation, it tracks specific articulations of political subjectivity that combine claims to (popular) sovereignty, universalism, dignity and rights with the language of honour and shame. The terrorist act was frequently justified as a sovereign right derived from the experience of state violence upon the body.

Reviews

Screen Bodies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 86-98
Author(s):  
Josh Morrison ◽  
Sylvie Bissonnette ◽  
Karen J. Renner ◽  
Walter S. Temple
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New Media ◽  
The Body ◽  
Media Art ◽  
University Of Minnesota ◽  
Body Images ◽  
New Media Art

Kate Mondloch, A Capsule Aesthetic: Feminist Materialisms in New Media Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 151 pp. ISBN: 9781517900496 (paperback, $27) Alberto Brodesco and Federico Giordano, editors, Body Images in the Post-Cinematic Scenario: The Digitization of Bodies (Milan: Mimesis International, 2017). 195 pp., ISBN: 9788869771095 (paperback, $27.50) Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper, editors, What’s Eating You? Food and Horror on Screen (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). 370pp., ISBN: 9781501322389 (hardback, $105); ISBN: 9781501343964 (paperback, $27.96); ISBN: 9781501322419 (ebook, $19.77) Kaya Davies Hayon, Sensuous Cinema: The Body in Contemporary Maghrebi Cinema (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018). 181pp., ISBN: 9781501335983 (hardback, $107.99)

The Word of God in One’s Hand: Touching and Holding Pendant Koran Manuscripts

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 338-357
Author(s):  
Cornelius Berthold
Keyword(s):  
Haptic Feedback ◽  
The Body ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Rare Occurrence ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Solid Objects ◽  
Cylindrical Form ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Era

AbstractKoran manuscripts that fit comfortably within the palm of one’s hand are known as early as the 10th century CE.For the sake of convenience, all dates will be given in the common era (CE) without further mention, and not in the Islamic or Hijra calendar. Their minute and sometimes barely legible script is clearly not intended for comfortable reading. Instead, recent scholarship suggests that the manuscripts were designed to be worn on the body like pendants or fastened to military flag poles. This is corroborated by some preserved cases for these books which feature lugs to attach a cord or chain, but also their rare occurrence in contemporary textual sources. While pendant Korans in rectangular codex form exist, the majority were produced as codices in the shape of an octagonal prism, and others as scrolls that could be rolled up into a cylindrical form. Both resemble the shapes of similarly dated and pre-Islamic amulets or amulet cases. Building on recent scholarship, I will argue in this article that miniature or pendant Koran manuscripts were produced in similar forms and sizes because of comparable modes of usage, but not necessarily by a deliberate imitation of their amuletic ‘predecessors’. The manuscripts’ main functions did not require them to be read or even opened; some of their cases were in fact riveted shut. Accordingly, the haptic feedback they gave to their owners when they carried or touched them was not one of regular books but one of solid objects (like amulets) or even jewellery, which then reinforced this practice.

Between Civilization and Savagery: How Reconstruction Era Federal Indian Policy Led to the Indian Wars

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-188
Author(s):  
Boyd Cothran
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Indian Policy ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Reservations ◽  
Federal Indian Policy ◽  
Indian Wars ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
Moral Necessity

Abstract This article considers the event of a single year, 1873, to explain how President Ulysses S. Grant’s federal Indian policy led to the Indian wars of the late nineteenth century. Some historians have argued that Grant’s so-called Peace Policy failed due to systemic mismanagement and corruption; others have suggested it was due to administrative incompetence or ambivalence, while still others have accused the administration of cynicism in its approach to Indigenous affairs. This article argues that the Peace Policy reflected the unresolved tensions inherent in the era’s zeitgeist and that it failed to usher in a lasting peace because it did not account for the enmeshed reality of life in the American West where the boundaries and borders between Indian reservations and settler communities were entangled to say the least. The article begins with a detailed consideration of the Grant administration’s Indian policy as articulated by Francis Amasa Walker in the winter of 1872–73. Largely overlooked by historians of post–Civil War Indian policy, Walker was an influential thinker in his day whose policy recommendations emphasized the moral necessity of proprietary individualism and racial segregation on isolated reservations. The article then turns to the unfolding drama of the Modoc War (1872–73) to explore why the federal government abandoned the project of peacefully incorporating Indigenous people into the body politic, leading to a harsher and more militant approach to Indian affairs. By focusing on the nexus of ideas and events as they played out at this critical historical juncture, this article argues that the Modoc War was the precipitating event that marked the end of Grant’s so-called Peace Policy and the resumption of the Indian wars in the decades following the Civil War.

scholarly journals Digital action campaigns in the global public sphere

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jumoke Giwa
Keyword(s):  
Civic Engagement ◽  
New Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
New Media Technologies

<p>This research project undertakes a critical analysis of the use of new media technologies by community activists engaging in local and global communities. Increasingly, community organizations are using digital media to augment their various activities and conduct campaigns. I will consider this development with regard to WorldPulse.com, a global organization whose aim is to foster and facilitate civic engagement. More specifically, the website attempts to function and serve as a global public sphere and vehicle for the expression and discussion of political, social and cultural issues relevant to women. The analysis conducted in this thesis focuses on the website’s digital action campaigns on gender-based violence, girl child education, and women’s access to technology between 2012 and 2014, and its ‘Voices of Our Future’ citizen journalism training program.  This project employs digital ethnographic methods using content and discourse analysis, participant observation, online web survey, semi-structured email interviews and a researcher’s journal to examine the potential of worldpulse.com to serve as a global public sphere for women. The research makes use of critical studies theories and data triangulation methodologies in order to identify and evaluate if, and to what extent, the site facilitates public sphere activity and activism. I have developed an inductive typology to assess levels and kinds of civic engagement that is enabled and augmented by the interconnection of online and offline advocacy. This thesis aims to contribute to the body of scholarly literature researching and evaluating the extent to which new media technologies enable and facilitate public sphere engagement.</p>

scholarly journals The Allegory of Political Violence in Sony Labou Tansi’s Life and a Half

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manizha Sepas
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
State Violence

An embodied reading of Sony Labou Tansi's absurdism which functions as a tool for discoursing colonisation, state violence and the hypersexual masculinity of power as symbolised through the metaphor of cannibalism.

To belong or not to belong: the Roma, state violence and the new Europe in the House of Lords

Legal Studies ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 569-593 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Fraser
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
State Violence ◽  
The Body ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Refugee Status ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
Legal Controls ◽  
New Britain ◽  
Political Decisions ◽  
The Ideal

Issues of national sovereignty and membership in the body politic are central to many current political and legal debates surrounding ‘New Britain’ and Europe. Traditional understandings of citizenship and belonging are grounded in the ideal of a territorially limited and defined nation state. In this article, I explore a series of judicial and political decisions surrounding the fate of Roma or Gypsies, both as claimants to refugee status in Britain, or as subjects of domestic legal controls. I argue that these decisions construct this nomadic Other as a fundamental danger and challenge to the coherence of the legally protected body politic of the nation state ‘Britain’. I argue that the deconstructive excess found in the construction of the Roma as dangerous nomads, without allegiance to a fixed and geographically delimited nation state, might contain the kernel for a possible re-imagining of the basis of our understandings of citizenship and belonging.

The accumulation of 137Cs by brackish water invertebrates and its relation to the regulation of potassium and sodium

1963 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 541-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. W. Bryan
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Brackish Water ◽  
Sea Water ◽  
Indirect Evidence ◽  
The Body ◽  
Limiting Factor ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Concentration Factors ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Potamopyrgus Jenkinsi

The relationship between the ability of brackish water invertebrates to regulate Na and K and the extent to which the radioactive fission product 137Cs can be accumulated has been studied.The brackish water isopod Sphaeroma hookeri and the gastropod Potamopyrgus jenkinsi have been acclimatised to a wide range of sea-water dilutions. Unfed Sphaeroma can survive in sea-water concentrations of 100–2·5%, while Potamopyrgus can live fairly indefinitely in concentrations of 50–0·1%. Measurements of Na and K in the whole animals of both species and in the blood of Sphaeroma have been made. Salt movements are quite rapid and acclimatization to new media is achieved by both species in less than 10 h. Concentration factors for inactive K in particular increase to high values in the more dilute media.Uptake of the isotopes 42K and 137Cs from solution has been examined in both species over a range of sea-water concentrations. All of the body K is exchangeable with 42K and in Sphaeroma exchange of 42K between the blood and tissues is so rapid that the body surface appears to be the limiting factor in the uptake of the isotope. Both species exchange 42K more rapidly in the higher concentrations of sea water and one reason for this may be the existence of an exchange diffusion component of exchange which increases as the salinity of the medium is raised. Indirect evidence suggests that the excretion of 42K in urine is probably not an important factor in exchange.

Radical Pessimism

2019 ◽  
pp. 109-136
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Extractive Industries ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Personal Interest ◽  
Political Imaginary ◽  
Extreme State

This chapter describes radical pessimism as a neoliberal democratic political affect that combines of radical worldviews with a belief that change is impossible. It begins with the question of how past and present forms of political violence have shaped Mayan conceptions about the limits of democracy and of their own political agency, leading many to “sell out” for personal interest. It documents how Sampedranos retain elements of radical political imaginary that predominated in the region in the 1970s, prior to the extreme state violence of the 1980s, but that routine acts of state violence targeted at social movements that informs engagements with hostile sovereign forces, including authoritarian political parties. The chapter also describes how these political imaginaries are being reconfigured through more recent forms of politics in defense of territory against extractive industries. The conclusion reflects on the possibility of a radical organization of pessimism.

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