Violence.
‘Mercurial Gestalt’.
LEVIN, Tobe (Ed.)
Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2008, IX, 250 pp.

Series:
At the Interface/Probing the Boundaries 47

“One afternoon, a patient who had been in three times weekly ... psychotherapy ... left my office after her session, drove down to the train tracks half a mile from my office, and sat down facing an oncoming train.” This tragic event opens the essay by psychoanalyst Susanne Chassay who explores the relationship between private and political terrorism. Her viewpoint complements analyses of violence – that ‘mercurial gestalt’ – by other contributors to this collection derived from a 2003 Cultures of Violence conference held at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, organized by the Inter-disciplinary Net. From fields as diverse as philosophy, sociology, psychology, history, political science, literary criticism, and forensics, authors consider, for instance, hostility to European minorities; military training and torture; the ‘endemic violence’ aesthetically recorded by Haitian novelists; child abuse in film; female genital mutilation in fiction; or the massacre of Koreans during the 1923 Japanese earthquake. Violence in contact zones in Northern Ireland or in the memory of South African museum directors trying to comply with Truth and Reconciliation Commission mandates is also an object of scrutiny here. Finally, that vexed, primordial issue of violence – nature or nurture? – is probed.

Contents
Tobe LEVIN and Patricia TURRISI: Introduction – Violence: “Mercurial Gestalt”
Violence in Theory and Praxis: Torture, Terror, Suicide
Patricia TURRISI and Michael J. SHAFFER: Theories of Violence and the Explanation of Ultra-Violent Behaviour
Oleg PILETSKY: E Pluribus Unum: European Nationalism, or Shopping for Identities in the European Union
Jessica WOLFENDALE: From Soldier to Torturer? Military Training and Moral Agency
Kaiama L. GLOVER: A Literature of Terror and Mourning
Susanne CHASSAY: Hurtling Toward Darkness: Faces of Violence in the Contemporary World
Violence Secret and Sanctioned: Child Abuse, Apartheid, FGM
Larissa N. NIEC, Elizabeth V. BRESTAN, and Linda Anne VALLE: Violence on the Screen: Psychological Perspectives on Child Abuse in American Popular Film 1992-2001
Tobe LEVIN: Creative Writing of FGM as an Act of Violence and Human Rights Abuse
M.K. FLYNN and Tony KING: Re-Constructing South African Identity after 1994: Museums and Public History
Karen LYSAGHT: Speaking of Contested Sites: Narrative and Praxis of Spatial Competition in Belfast, Northern Ireland
Eleonore WILDBURGER: Racism and Violence: Anti-Racist Strategies in Intercultural Contact Zones
Violence and Institutions: Butchery, Execution, Riots
Jin-hee LEE: The Enemy Within: Earthquake, Rumours and Massacre in the Japanese Empire
William VLACH: When Saviour Becomes Serpent: The Psychology of Police Violence
Vivien MILLER: “Equality in Life Presumes Equality in Death”: Gender and Execution in Sunbelt America
Notes on Contributors

Tobe Levin, Ph. D., is collegiate professor, University of Maryland University College in Europe and adjunct, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main. She specializes in African American and Jewish women's writing, edits a journal, Feminist Europa. Review of Books, and is currently a non-resident 'Fellow' at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute, Harvard University. Chair of FORWARD - Germany and founding member of the European Network (EuroNet) FGM, she has been active against female genital mutilation since 1977. Fluent in German, French and Spanish, she translated the well-received autobiography by Fadumo Korn and Sabine Eichhorst. Born in the Big Rains. A Memoir of Somalia and Survival. Trans. and Afterword Tobe Levin. NY: The Feminist Press, 2006.

SUMMARIES

Part 1. Violence in Theory and Praxis: Torture, Terror, Suicide

Patricia Turrisi and Michael J. Shaffer. “Theories of Violence and the Explanation of Ultra-violent Behaviour.” What role does early exposure to violence play in ultra-violent behaviour defined as “gratuitous attacks not perpetrated in self-defence”? Turrisi and Shaffer open the volume with heuristic skepticism. Philosophy cannot answer this question although philosopher Lonnie Athens claims to have done so. Instead, his experiential theory pre-empts discussion, because he makes responses to brutality the central, indisputable facts in violent socialization processes. This may indeed be true, but experience itself is not at stake; rather, the authors argue against a caveat approach to a complex issue implied by Athens’ philosophical model. “Why does violence occur?” Athens claims to know. Turrisi and Shaffer differ.

Oleg Piletsky. “E Pluribus Unum: European Nationalism, or Shopping for Identities in the European Union.” Political scientist Piletsky has identified a new brand of “nationalistic and ethnic antagonism” growing in response to increasing numbers of immigrants into the European Union. Underlying it he sees not only scarcity, competition for resources and mistrust of government-authored security, but a sinister play of psychological states mutually reinforcing and leading to separatist ethnic identities. To enhance loyalty to the idea of Europe and overcome “cult[s] of ethnic origin, ideolog[ies] of return to national roots, religious fundamentalism and ... intolerance,” he finds that, in the context of European integration, the most pressing task is navigating the fault lines between “social citizenship and multiculturalism.”

Jessica Wolfendale. “From Soldier to Torturer? Military Training and Moral Agency.” Wolfendale argues that the “rhetorical portrait of the ideal soldier – honourable, judicious, reflective, and unlikely to commit human rights abuses – is unsustainable in light of training ... that use[s] B.F. Spinner’s Operant Conditioning to disarm these very moral and intellectual qualities.” Wolfendale questions a slippage between career rhetoric and desensitization to detainees’ pain, seeing in professionalism itself an entry point into “the prosecutor’s role.” She unveils “the high-minded military idiom” that stimulates rather than subverts the propensity to obey orders and too easily leads, in interrogation, to deployment of banned techniques.

Kaiama L. Glover. “A Literature of Terror and Mourning.” Glover focuses on that image of Haiti unveiled by creative writers sometimes “literally under siege” as they trigger the pen to “acknowledge, counter and condemn” dictatorial regimes that promote “endemic violence.” A literary critic, she shows how form is suited to content, revealing how hostility is conveyed – as raw agony layered with grace in a prose that both “mimics and critiques” the terror. Philoctète, Frankétienne and three other novelists are illuminated by her analysis that pinpoints threats to national identity in the promotion of martial policies, the island sabotaged by inheritance of the dynamic of master and slave.

Susanne Chassey. “Hurtling toward Darkness: Faces of Violence in the Contemporary World.” Psychoanalyst Susanne Chassey asks the hard question: how do public and private acts of terror relate to one another? Opening with the “spectacular, demonstrative, even theatrical gesture” of a patient facing an oncoming train, Chassey pairs this “individual outrage” with terrorist performances, spiraling out to global violence in order to return to herself engaged in a template of negotiation. Now trapped underneath the bell far of despair at having failed her client and at the same time chafing under what feels like punishment, she asks, “If the roots of self-violence grow so deep, how can we begin to heal the world?”

Part 2 Violence secret and sanctioned: Child Abuse, Apartheid, FGM

Larissa N. Niec, Elizabeth V. Brestan, Linda Anne Valle. “Violence on Screen: Psychological Perspectives on Child Abuse in American Popular Film 1992-2001.” Considering how cinema explains, reproduces or discourages aggression, Niec, Brestan and Valle pioneer the empirical study of child maltreatment on screen and then interrogate the seepage into popular culture. Looking at the fifty top-grossing movies covering a ten year period they discover that Hollywood reverses what science knows regarding child abuse. In life, neglect is most common, sexual abuse least so. Movies however err in over-representing sexual abuse as well emotional and behavioral dysfunction. Myths also suggest that “victims deserve or encourage maltreatment” and that “perpetrators are not like us.” These misguided topoi can skew policy and funding.

Tobe Levin. “Creative Writing of FGM as an Act of Violence and Human Rights Abuse.” Assessing two novels about activism against FGM (female genital mutilation), Tobe Levin compares Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) and Fatou Keita’s Rebelle (1998). Unequivocal in their condemnation, both protagonists who have suffered the blade view the ‘rite’ as gruesome. Walker’s heroine, however, chooses to undergo it in her late teens as a misguided gesture of nationalist solidarity only to discover the extent to which she has been duped, immigration making this mistake all too clear. Keita’s central character, a feminist leader in her homeland, also emigrates, carrying her defiant spirit with her. Both “coming-to-consciousness” narratives illuminate the incompatibility of genital torture with dignity, health and equality of women.

Kate Flynn and Tony King. “Reconstructing South African Identity after 1994: Museums and Public History.” Looking at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s influence on symbolic reparation for the abuses of apartheid, Kate Flynn and Tony King found that, despite good will, nuseum directors flounder on the task of promoting “a cross-racial and –cultural civic identity [to replace] the predemocratic premise of ... legally unequal ethnic communities.” Research conducted throughout the nation revealed that although the inclusive “reconciliation” ideal governs rhetoric among museum boards, institutions “have been [un]able to capitalize on this sentiment.” Why? Visitors are mainly students and tourists, a demographic that asks: can museum narratives “enhance civic cohesion and cross-racial or –cultural understanding”? Or does this historical gerrymandering bode ill for an otherwise peaceful transition?

Karen Lysaght. “Speaking of Contested Sites: Narrative and Praxis of Spatial Competition in Belfast, Northern Ireland.” Concerned with the “anchoring of group myths” in politicized spaces, Lysaght combines discourse analysis with geography to describe the investment in aggression by Catholics and Protestants against one another. A template emerges with which to examine other locations as diverse as South Africa, Sri Lanka, or integrated cities in the American South. Lysaght’s main finding: despite the peace settlement’s aim to provide hostile populations with “parity of esteem,” politically, culturally and economically, a myriad of factors continue to sabotage tranquillity. Tensions around volatile spaces continue, each side interpreting intervention from their own belligerent perspective. “Distrust is traditional” and anchors in a form of mutual racism.

Eleonore Wildburger. “Racism and Violence: Anti-Racist Strategies in International Contact Zones.” Because “political acts” construct and propagate a stereotype of the “Other,” and because “racism must be made unacceptable ... on all levels of human encounter,” Wildburger focuses on language and geography, contrasting words deployed by government and media to create a manipulative ‘truth’. “Contact zones” should therefore be managed as among the few sites able to dismantle this intent. “Interculturally appropriate venues” permit re-assessment of the “’Other/s’ in intersubjective learning processes” allowing an alternative ideal of “Otherness” to emerge.

Jin-hee Lee. “The Enemy Within: Earthquake, Rumours and Massace in the Japanese Empire.” Lee analyses the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, natural devastation erupting into unprecedented violence perpetrated by the Japanese against immigrant Koreans. Focusing on discourse in ringleaders’ post-disaster trials, Lee finds that equivocal evidence leaves the incident an “historical enigma.” Yet it reveals how scapegoating and stereotyping take shape. In fact, “disproportionately light sentences [given] Japanese defendants not only compromise humanitarian ‘criteria for moral and legal judgment of mass murder’” but show how Japanese identity, by drawing an exclusionary ethnic boundary, rewarded vigilante action seen as “sacrifice out of loyalty” to the state. If competing narratives leave historians to infer “government’s ... role not only in condoning but also encouraging the slaughter,” rumours determine how “the colonized were imagined” and deployed as objects of attack.

William Vlach. “When Saviour Becomes Serpent: The Psychology of Police Violence.” Psychologist William Vlach examines “the mythic power of police work,” sharing insight and anecdotes from twenty years’ experience with urban law enforcement personnel. Vlach’s “psycho-ethnography of a culture of violence” mines historical background and socio-cultural factors to illuminate the “psychological dynamics” behind officers’ unwarranted aggression and discovers that loss of control emerges as the most potent threat to equanimity. Resilience theory and law enforcement professionalism inspire suggestions for preventing deviation from prescribed roles as protectors and helpers, including scrutiny of violence-prone personalities during candidate screening, legal sanction, counseling, and increased diversity on the police force.

Vivien Miller. “Equality in Life Presumes Equality in Death: Gender and Execution in Sunbelt America.” Analysing controversy surrounding Karla Faye Tucker, axe-murderer turned born-again Christian and first Texas female executee in over a century; and Judias Buenoana, the “Black Widow” four times convicted of poisoning husbands for insurance money, Miller finds females to be both more vilified for their crimes than males and less likely to be punished for them. The paradox draws on sympathy, religious feelings and profound gender expectations in the American South. And although discussions of equality in sentencing remain inconclusive, Miller argues that a focus on prison conditions and the death penalty itself remain fruitful. They also reveal an entire range of attitudes toward violence, most of them drawing on cultural bias not uncritical of ‘masculine’ aggression.