Irene Kacandes - On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence

ISBN 9783110753264

e-ISBN (PDF) 9783110753295

e-ISBN (EPUB) 9783110753356

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

This book offers to academic and general public readers timely reflections about our relationships to violence. Taking cues from the self-reflexivity, themes, and subject matters of Holocaust, queer, and Black studies, this large group of diverse intellectuals wrestles with questions that connect past, present, and future: where do I stand in relation to violence? What is my attitude toward that adjacency? Whose story gets to be told by whom? What story do I understand this image to be telling? How do I co-witness to anothers suffering? How do I honor the agency and resilience of family members or historical personages? How do past violence and injustice connect to and affect the present? In smart, self-conscious, passionate, and often painfully beautiful prose, cultural practitioners, historians, and cultural studies scholars explore such questions, inviting readers to do the same. By making available compelling examples of thinkers performing their own work within the cauldron of crises that came to a boil in 2020, On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence models some strategies and lines of thought for moving forward with hope.

April 2020 to April 2021. This is the year in which this project was conceived and carried out. It is a period saturated with disease of many natures. Covid-19 may well end up being the problem that remains most associated with this time frame. The new virus and the pandemic it caused certainly succeeded in bringing the whole world to an almost complete standstill for a while, and huge resources of money and effort were required to bring the disease somewhat under control. However, the consequences of the diseases of systemic racism, ecological devastation, poverty, and political polarization seeded centuries prior by colonialism, chattel slavery, imperialism, and industrial capitalism were similarly brought into the consciousness of more people in this same period than perhaps ever before. Particularly in the United States, news and images of police killings of Black Americans were relentless throughout this year. The murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin on 20 May 2020 became known to the whole world through the video filmed at the scene of the crime by teenager Darnella Frazier. Images of traumatized would-be migrants to Europe from Africa and Asia rescued from near-drowning in the Mediterranean and of would-be migrants from Central America at the southern border of the United States also became quotidian. For many believers in democracy, the scenes of insurgents storming the US Capitol building on 6 January 2021 to disrupt the verification of a fairly executed election will not soon be forgotten. What was perhaps the most novel about this period for the ordinary citizen was the increasing evidence of how these scourges, historical and contemporary, were connected. A closer consideration of the pandemic provides evidence.