In The Wake Of Violence

In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the "orthography of the wake." Activating multiple registers of "wake"—the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness—Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation. Initiating and describing a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of "the wake," "the ship," "the hold," and "the weather," Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and "wake work" as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward.

How acts of violence are rhetorically "managed" by social movements: In the Wake of Violence explores the immediate and longer term aftermath of violence committed by independent radicals involved in single-issue movements. Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp explores several specific incidents in recent history—the arson of a Vail ski resort by environmentalists, the murder of Dr. John Britton by an antiabortion activist, and the torching of a University of California research laboratory by animal rights activists among them—to discover how the perpetrators of the violence and the majority of reformers involved in their movements rhetorically framed the violent act for a potentially outraged public. In the Wake of Violence, claims Jorgensen-Earp, the perpetrators are often forthcoming with both explanations for and a defense of their actions, casting themselves as righteous actors or martyrs for a cause. However, ardent reformers within the same cause might look with genuine revulsion at the actions of their own radical wing. This study claims that the nonviolent majority in single-issue reform movements employs a predictable constellation of rhetorical strategies to manage the impact of radical fringe violence. The primary goal of this rhetoric is to avoid a backlash against the larger movement by a public alienated by violent acts. In examining specific rhetorical responses by the nonviolent majority in antiabortion, animal welfare, environmental reform, abolition, and women’s suffrage movements, Jorgensen-Earp considers a wide range of discourse types—from newspaper articles, interviews, and editorials to private letters; from editorial cartoons to the homemade signs of movement activists; and from speeches to modern Internet sites. She discovers that the image restoration techniques brought to bear for a reform cause are similar to those employed by a corporation accused of wrongdoing. Ultimately, she finds that the majority of proponents of the causes she examines believe that the violence can or will be condoned and that it must be rhetorically mitigated.

In the Wake of Medea examines the violence of seventeenth-century French political dramas. French tragedy has traditionally been taken to be a passionless, cerebral genre that refused all forms of violence. This book explores the rhetorical, literary, and performance strategies through which violence persists, contextualizing it in a longer literary and philosophical history from Ovid to Pasolini. The mythological figure of Medea, foreigner who massacres her brother, murders kings, burns down Corinth, and kills her own children, exemplifies the persistence of violence in literature and art. A refugee who is welcomed yet feared, who confirms the social while threatening its integrity, Medea offers an alternative to western philosophy’s ethical paradigm of Antigone. The Medean presence, Cherbuliez shows, offers a model of radically persistent and disruptive outsiderness, both for classical theater and for its wake in literary theory. In the Wake of Medea explores a range of artistic strategies integrating violence into drama, from rhetorical devices like ekphrasis to dramaturgical mechanisms like machinery, all of which involve temporal disruption. The full range of this Medean presence is explored in treatments of the character Medea and in works figuratively invoking a Medean presence, from the well-known tragedies of Racine and Corneille through a range of other neoclassical political theater, including spectacular machine plays, Neo-Stoic parables, didactic Christian theater. In the Wake of Medea recognizes the violence within these tragedies to explain why violence remains so integral to literature and arts today.

A harrowing story of blue on black violence, of black lives that seemingly did not matter. On September 4, 2005, six days after Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in New Orleans, two groups of people intersected on the Danziger Bridge, a low-rising expanse over the Industrial Canal. One was the police who had stayed behind as Katrina roared near, desperate to maintain control as their city spun into chaos. The other was the residents forced to stay behind with them during the storm and, on that fateful Sunday, searching for the basics of survival: food, medicine, security. They collided that morning in a frenzy of gunfire. When the shooting stopped, a gentle forty-year-old man with the mind of a child lay slumped on the ground, seven bullet wounds in his back, his white shirt turned red. A seventeen-year-old was riddled with gunfire from his heel to his head. A mother’s arm was blown off; her daughter’s stomach gouged by a bullet. Her husband’s head was pierced by shrapnel. Her nephew was shot in the neck, jaw, stomach, and hand. Like all the other victims, he was black—and unarmed. Before the blood had dried on the pavement, the shooters, each a member of the New Orleans Police Department, and their supervisors hatched a cover-up. They planted a gun, invented witnesses, and charged two of their victims with attempted murder. At the NOPD, they were hailed as heroes. Shots on the Bridge explores one of the most dramatic cases of police violence seen in our country in the last decade—the massacre of innocent people, carried out by members of the NOPD, in the brutal, disorderly days following Hurricane Katrina. It reveals the fear that gripped the police of a city slid into anarchy, the circumstances that drove desperate survivors to the bridge, and the horror that erupted when the police opened fire. It carefully unearths the cover-up that nearly buried the truth. And finally, it traces the legal maze that, a decade later, leaves the victims and their loved ones still searching for justice. This is the story of how the people meant to protect and serve citizens can do violence, hide their tracks, and work the legal system as the nation awaits justice. Named one of the top books of 2015 by NewsOne Now, and named one of the best books of August 2015 by Apple Winner of the 2015 Investigative Reporters and Editors Book Award

As violence in the United States seems to become increasingly more commonplace, the question of how communities reset after unprecedented violence also grows in significance. After the Bloodbath examines this quandary, producing insights linking rampage shootings and communal responses in the United States. Diamond, who was a leading attorney in the community where the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy occurred, focuses on three well-known shootings and a fourth shooting that occurred on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota. The book looks to the roots of Indigenous approaches to crime, identifying an institutional weakness in the Anglo judicial model, and explores adapting Indigenous practices that contribute to healing following heinous criminal behavior. Emerging from the history of Indigenous dispute resolution is a spotlight turned on to restorative justice, a subject no author has discussed to date in the context of mass shootings. Diamond ultimately leads the reader to a positive road forward focusing on insightful steps people can take after a rampage shooting to help their wounded communities heal.

“An engrossing, moving, and utterly motivating account of the human stakes of gun violence in America.”—Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Education of an Idealist Is America destined to always be a violent nation? This sweeping history by U.S. senator Chris Murphy explores the origins of our violent impulses, the roots of our obsession with firearms, and the mythologies that prevent us from confronting our national crisis. In many ways, the United States sets the pace for other nations to follow. Yet on the most important human concern—the need to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe from physical harm—America isn’t a leader. We are disturbingly laggard. To confront this problem, we must first understand it. In this carefully researched and deeply emotional book, Senator Chris Murphy dissects our country’s violence-filled history and the role that our unique obsession with firearms plays in this national epidemic. Murphy tells the story of his profound personal transformation in the wake of the mass murder at Newtown, and his subsequent immersion in the complicated web of influences that drive American violence. Murphy comes to the conclusion that while America’s relationship to violence is indeed unique, America is not inescapably violent. Even as he details the reasons we’ve tolerated so much bloodshed for so long, he explains that we have the power to change. Murphy takes on the familiar arguments, obliterates the stale talking points, and charts the way to a fresh, less polarized conversation about violence and the weapons that enable it—a conversation we urgently need in order to transform the national dialogue and save lives.

Until recently, domestic violence, as it has been referred to, was a problem to be dealt with inside the family. In this ground-breaking work, Hattery's unique approach provides a detailed theoretical discussion of race, class, and gender-effects on intimate partner violence and a thoughtful discussion of the interactions of these factors.

In the wake of modern genocide, we tend to think of violence against minorities as a sign of intolerance, or, even worse, a prelude to extermination. Violence in the Middle Ages, however, functioned differently, according to David Nirenberg. In this provocative book, he focuses on specific attacks against minorities in fourteenth-century France and the Crown of Aragon (Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia). He argues that these attacks--ranging from massacres to verbal assaults against Jews, Muslims, lepers, and prostitutes--were often perpetrated not by irrational masses laboring under inherited ideologies and prejudices, but by groups that manipulated and reshaped the available discourses on minorities. Nirenberg shows that their use of violence expressed complex beliefs about topics as diverse as divine history, kinship, sex, money, and disease, and that their actions were frequently contested by competing groups within their own society. Nirenberg's readings of archival and literary sources demonstrates how violence set the terms and limits of coexistence for medieval minorities. The particular and contingent nature of this coexistence is underscored by the book's juxtapositions--some systematic (for example, that of the Crown of Aragon with France, Jew with Muslim, medieval with modern), and some suggestive (such as African ritual rebellion with Catalan riots). Throughout, the book questions the applicability of dichotomies like tolerance versus intolerance to the Middle Ages, and suggests the limitations of those analyses that look for the origins of modern European persecutory violence in the medieval past.