Redemptive Violence Research Articles

Stigmatizing ‘evildoers’: how beliefs about evil and public stigma explain criminal justice policy preferences

ABSTRACT Characterizations of offenders as ‘evil’ appear in popular entertainment, political rhetoric, and scholarship and may be rooted in widely endorsed cultural narratives. Integrating psychological and criminological literatures, we argue that endorsement of good-and-evil myths may be associated with criminal justice policy support via stigmatizing attitudes about those who engage in crime. We partially tested these hypotheses in a preliminary study using an online convenience sample (recruited using Amazon MTurk in 2015), then tested the full theoretical model using more comprehensive measures in a survey of American adults conducted via Qualtrics Panel in 2021 (N = 1,162). We found that both belief in evil (i.e. belief in evil forces) and belief in redemptive violence (i.e. belief in a clash between good and evil) were positively associated with punitive policy support, and stigmatizing attitudes partially mediated the effects of both. While belief in redemptive violence was negatively associated with rehabilitative policy support and stigmatizing attitudes mediated that relationship, belief in evil was not associated with support for rehabilitation. We consider the implications of our findings for mitigating the harms of public stigma and punitive criminal justice policy.

‘Now I Have a Machine Gun, Ho-Ho-Ho’: Masculinity, Family, and Redemptive Violence in Home Alone and Die Hard

ABSTRACT In a 2017 article for the comedy website Cracked, Christopher Daed argues that “Die Hard and Home Alone are the EXACT same movie.” Daed was not the first to make this connection: a cursory search reveals frequent comparison on social media. Very little scholarship, however, has seriously engaged with this pairing. In this paper, I examine how both Die Hard (1988) and Home Alone (1990) use narratives of redemptive violence to define idealized American masculinity. Both films portray families ruptured by influences both foreign (the imposition of foreign culture) and domestic (maternal neglect) that are restored by their protagonists’ defense of Christmas, family, and by extent, old-fashioned American values. I situate both Die Hard and Home Alone within the canon of American Christmas films, arguing that their enduring, linked popularity is indicative of a rejection of the perceived weakness and femininity associated with many other Christmas narratives. I focus in particular on the films’ oft-overlooked treatment of religion: Christmas, after all, is a religious holiday, and its relationship to American identity cannot be separated from the ubiquity of Christianity in American life. I argue that both Kevin McCallister’s church attendance and his violent defense of his home align him with John McClane as all-American defenders of Christmas and the family.

To Break Russia's Chains: Boris Savinkov and His Wars against the Tsar and the Bolsheviks

As he did in The Black Russian, his 2013 biography of Frederick Bruce Thomas, the son of formerly enslaved Mississippians who became a millionaire nightclub owner in pre-1917 Moscow, Alexandrov combines brilliant research and brisk storytelling to tell the story of Boris Savinkov (1879–1925), a notorious Russian terrorist of the first quarter of the twentieth century. While today only specialists in modern Russian history and literature are likely to recognize Savinkov's name, in his day he was an international celebrity, feted in the pages of leading European and American newspapers for a lifetime of resistance to both tsarist and Bolshevik tyranny. Although praise for a man who organized the assassination of government ministers and members of the Romanov family may seem perverse to contemporary American readers, especially those who have come of age since 9/11, being reminded that “the past is a foreign country” is always a useful exercise.In fast moving and lively prose, Alexandrov tells the fascinating story of Savinkov's long and complicated journey from a privileged, cultured, and politically progressive upper-middle-class Russian family to the most-wanted list of the Okhrana and the Cheka, the tsarist and Soviet secret police, up to his mysterious death. Because Savinkov was not only a revolutionary but a writer who told and retold his life story in novels and memoirs, his biographer must be equal parts historian, literary critic, and psychologist. It is difficult to imagine a better guide to the multiple complexities of Savinkov's life, times, and works than Alexandrov, B. E. Bensinger Professor Emeritus of Slavic Literatures at Yale. Combining deep historical knowledge, fresh critical insights, and penetrating psychological observations, Alexandrov shows Savinkov's dramatic life story taking shape against the backdrop of a cataclysmic quarter-century of Russian history that included multiple revolutions and wars.Certainly, the most difficult aspect of writing the biography of a terrorist like Savinkov is to imagine how sophisticated people might reasonably conclude that the targeted assassination of political figures could be both politically necessary and ethically acceptable. And while it is inevitable that some will see any attempt to understand political violence in a particular time and place as justifying terrorism always and anywhere, honest biographers have no choice but to try to explain why their subjects made the choices they did. In this context, Alexandrov's judicious treatment of Savinkov's argument that, given the political realities of tsarist Russia, violence could be a moral response to evil is especially valuable. The paradox of Savinkov and the other “moral terrorists” discussed in To Break Russia's Chains is that they justified targeted violence against prominent politicians and influential bureaucrats without rejecting the fifth commandment. According to their reasoning, assassination could be a moral act if the victim was responsible for brutal and unjust policies and if the perpetrator accepted punishment for what was, without question, a sin. Given the reality of tsarist arbitrary rule, the absence of any legal avenues to protest unjust policies, and the terrorists’ belief that inaction meant complicity in a criminal regime, their conclusion that violence and inevitable punishment was the only moral choice is neither incomprehensible nor illogical. Whatever one thinks of Savinkov's personality and methods, and despite his ultimate failure to achieve his goal, there is something undeniably heroic in his devoting his entire adult life to the struggle against the forces of political tyranny in his homeland. Today, when fantasies of redemptive violence have become a staple of the daily news cycle, Savinkov's story is particularly relevant.

History Put in Touch with Itself

In the work of Deleuze and Guattari, the diagram is a concept that maps the power relations inscribed within the regulatory apparatuses of everyday life, such as schools, social norms, the law, etc. The diagram is the map of forces that make these apparatuses run, and cause them to tend to produce certain outcomes, to the exclusion of others. This paper explores performance as a diagrammatic medium, in that performance schematizes and models the world and the forces of power that make it. Building on Rebecca Schneider's work, the example of American Civil War re-enactment is used to think about the slippage between repetition and difference in the acting-out of quintessentially American themes, both in performance, and in contemporary politics. Can historical re-enactment be a form of psychodrama or political education? Or are Civil War re-enactments echoes of a quintessential, enduring American wish for ‘redemptive violence, for domination and a return to a mythic past’ (Robcis 2021: 146) that also resonates, for instance, in the 6 January Capitol attack? If the nation tends toward a (compulsive?) repetition of relations of enslavement, domination and violence (while fixating on rhetoric of freedom, liberty and justice) then it is important to ask how, and if, this diagram might be repeated differently within a performative space of play and fantasy.

Reimagining the Social Bond: Review of Kevin Duong's The Virtues of Violence

Reimagining the Social Bond:Review of Kevin Duong's The Virtues of Violence Marieke Mueller (bio) and Robert P. Jackson (bio) Kevin Duong. The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France. Oxford Oxford University Press, 2020. 256 pp. £36.45 (hc). ISBN: 9780190058418. Social contract theory has tended to associate violence with chaos, disorder, and irrationality. In The Virtues of Violence, Kevin Duong directs us towards an alternative lineage of "redemptive violence" that is inherently neither illiberal, nihilistic, nor anti-democratic. It responds rather to a problem identified with (nineteenth-century French) modernity: "democratization as an experience of social disintegration" (128). In various guises, thinkers have diagnosed the dissolution of inherited social bonds as having the potential for social atomization and moral fragmentation. Redemptive violence derives its appeal from its attempt to regenerate or redeem a "thick" social bond, i.e., a form of fraternity [End Page 716] or solidarity, enabling a multitude to achieve popular self-government through unifying collective self-transformation. In the French Revolution, the imperial conquest of Algeria and the 1871 Paris Commune, images of redemptive violence are marshalled to constitute and redefine the boundaries of a sovereign "People." For Duong, the French republican tradition is paradigmatic, because of the clarity and self-consciousness of its theorists, who made explicit these problems of democratization. This type of violence is of particular interest because it appears across the spectrum of political thought and therefore, he argues, speaks to the character of the modern democratic experience. To comprehend the pervasiveness of this form of violence in "France's long nineteenth century" (168), Duong undertakes four impressively researched and thoroughly readable studies. In each, Duong examines an episode of redemptive violence: Jacobin interventions in debates about the regicide of Louis XVI, Tocqueville's justification of "total war" in colonial Algeria, the Communards' conception of the "people in arms," and appeals for moral regeneration among diverse critics of the Third Republic in the years preceding the First World War. Duong suggests that the idiom in which the problem of social disintegration is expressed in these moments can be linked to contemporaneous developments in scientific discourse. Thus, the Jacobins employ metaphors of natural catastrophe to describe the action of the people, Tocqueville interweaves new theories of psychological fragmentation with those of social disintegration, and Bergson's vitalist critique of positivism is politically weaponized by thinkers like Sorel. Chapter one analyzes the relationship between social bonds and violence that emerged during the French Revolution. Duong establishes the wider intellectual landscape: in the eighteenth century, he argues, the disappearance of the corporate system and the questioning of the ideology of the "king's two bodies" as guarantor of social cohesion (36), raised the question what new social bonds could look like. Events such as the storming of the Bastille and the women's march on Versailles, according to Duong, "cemented the link between popular agency and violence" (28). This link was crystallized in debates about the prosecution of Louis XVI. Duong contrasts the Girondins' legalistic approach with the Jacobins' concern that the king's trial further the Revolution's task of "reconstructing the moral foundations of the social" (37). In short, a violent attack on the king's body was needed for a new social body to emerge. Duong's nuanced depiction of the Jacobins and their arguments for regicide might surprise some readers: interested in concrete social bonds and not abstract ideals as is conventionally assumed (38-9), the Jacobins mobilized a religious vocabulary sacralizing regicidal violence while adopting naturalistic images such as lightning to portray democratic agency. The second chapter examines Tocqueville's concern that individualism reduces social bonds to a "société en poussière." Duong understands Tocqueville's solution, the creation of social bonds through "modern national glory," in the context of Cousin and Guizot's rejection of Lockean "sensationalism" (55, 62). Instead of viewing humans as fragmented bundles of sense perceptions, these thinkers respectively stress the subject as "unified volitional power" and the interdependence of social and inner life. Tocqueville concluded that the people had to relearn to exert a collective will, which could best be achieved through pursuing national glory. On Duong's reading, Tocqueville...

The myth of redemptive interpersonal violence: Implications for theory development.

The myth of redemptive interpersonal violence: Implications for theory development.

Martyrs, Fanatics, and Pious Militants: Religious Violence and the Secular State in 1930s Mexico

AbstractThis article examines the cultural and political repertoire that contributed to Catholics’ understanding of violence as a legitimate means to resist the secular state in 1930s Mexico. Following the end of the Cristero War (1926-29), the Church officially and overtly rejected the use of violence by Catholics as a means to defend religious freedom. However, many Catholic militants and organizations continued to support violence as a last but necessary recourse to resist the country's so-called tyrannical government and to build a Catholic nation that would recognize the kingship of Christ on earth. Informed by noncanonical understandings of martyrdom, sacrifice, and redemptive violence, as well as by an intransigent view of politics, these Catholics regarded violence as a moral response against the injustices and dangers posed by what they considered an oppressive and blasphemous state. The article is based on the examination of a series of violent events perpetrated by Catholic militants during the 1930s, as well as on the analysis of several newspapers, official documents, and Catholic publications. Contrary to government portrayals of Catholicism as a top-down, monolithic, and unchanging set of institutions and practices that promoted recalcitrant forms of religious militancy, Catholics were in fact deeply divided regarding the legitimacy of violence along theological, moral, and practical grounds.

Violence in the Bible and the Apocalypse of John: A critical reading of J.D. Crossan’s How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian

This critical reading/dialogue follows a straightforward structure. Firstly, it presents some of the major insights in J.D. Crossan’s book, attending to its inner logic on his critique on the violence which little by little creeps into the biblical texts. Secondly, it engages in a critique of his reading of Revelation, which is Crossan’s starting point for his discussion on violence. He observes here a direct contradiction with the Jesus of history, centre of interpretation for Scripture. This article points to certain lacunae in his reading of Revelation and, finally, moves to a conclusion offering new ways to interpret and question Revelation’s violent imagery within its own literary context.Contribution: This article is a critical dialogue with one of J.D. Crossan’s latest books: How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Struggling with Divine Violence From Genesis Through Revelation. This is a vibrant and insightful book about how violence ultimately crept into the canonical texts, tainting even its ‘good news’. Crossan’s concern with this crude violence surfaces as he teaches different groups and he is asked why the Bible ends in Revelation on such a violent note, essentially with ‘a war to end all wars’, somehow buttressing the ‘myth of redemptive violence’. The special focus of this article resides thus on a nuanced reading of Revelation which tries to understand, in context, the function of such violent images.

Poetry and the Camp: Epiphanic Witness and Ecstatic Cry in the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1895–98

Poetry and the Camp: Epiphanic Witness and Ecstatic Cry in the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1895–98

Cashless welfare transfers and Australia’s First Nations: redemptive or repressive violence?

ABSTRACT The Australian Federal Government claims that the Cashless Debit Card (CDC) is a necessary ‘support’ that generates positive outcomes. Despite contrary evidence revealed through independent research and problems with the scheme also apparent in government-commissioned research, the dominant political narrative accompanying the CDC remains intractable. The CDC has been characterised by elites as helpful ‘practical love’ for those in need of government income support. However, many of those with lived experience of the CDC report that the scheme imposes difficulties with basic bill payment, undermines sound financial management, and stigmatises cardholders. The majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations who have gone on the public record strongly condemn the scheme in its compulsory iteration, as do prominent First Nations Senators. Taking these issues into consideration, this article examines whether the CDC is best characterised as ‘redemptive’ or ‘repressive violence’. In doing so, it reflects on colonial conceptions of ‘care’, which are deeply paternalistic, and contrasts this with an approach that promotes self-determination and autonomy. This analysis is situated in the context of neoliberal marketisation of welfare state practices, where heavy handed regulatory frameworks have proven lucrative for industry interests.

The Phenomenology of Redemptive Violence

When we occupy the spaces of war memorials, we respond with certain bodily comportments that relay the “truth” of those killed by war violence. Through a phenomenological examination of embodied responses to two war memorials, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, I argue that social institutions employ bodies as a means of legitimizing a violence that is seen as redemptive. More specifically, I demonstrate how the redemptive quality of certain types of violence is an assumption replicated in social practices where individuals have learned the particular bodily skills of discourses surrounding redemptive violence.

The political psychology of extremism; “naturalness” of the phenomenon in the Western Balkans

In a symbolic sense, this region may be burdened with a kind of negative ontology that is very difficult to change. Extremist ideologies are, in fact, just a continuation of the war by other means. They have entered education, and beginning to metastasize and affect the entire social tissue, becoming "naturalness", supported by different mythopoetic narratives of a particular nation. In an environment where politics is extreme, many avoid concerns the very nature of extremism and the process of radicalization within the discourse of „peacetime“ extremism. Extremism stems from finding two basic human needs: the need for cognitive closure and personal significance. Subordination of the individual to the national community, i.e., the leader, is a psychological form of political behavior marked by an obsessive preoccupation with the decline of the community; sacrificing the process of compensatory, the cult of unification while abandoning democratic freedoms with redemptive violence and, regardless of moral and legal constraints, seeks to achieve ethnoreligious threatening collectivity (tribal identity). Extremism uses the properties of consciousness: ethnicity, religiousness, and thinking in absolute categories (in a destructive aspect to add naturalness to its ideas) to justify activities with a sacred or „patriotic“ will. Although the violent potential of nationalism in the Balkans should be overlooked by no means, the inflammatory rhetoric is just a method used by political elites to manipulate the public.

Guns and human suffering: A pastoral theological perspective

This article considers the immensity of human suffering caused by gun violence. In an attempt to understand why the United States has not been able to enact reasonable gun control measures, I explore the origins and influence of gun culture and its shaping by the National Rifle Association (NRA). This situation is discussed from theological perspectives and concepts of idolatry, redemptive violence, the spiraling effects of violence as sin, and the nonviolence of Jesus. Finally, I consider pastoral responses in caring for individuals, the faith tradition, the congregation, and the larger sociocultural context.

A New Metaphysics: Eternal Recurrence and the Univocity of Difference

ABSTRACT Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence has confounded generations of thinkers. This article enters the fray by treating recurrence as an invitation to develop a radically new approach to metaphysics itself. I develop the argument by analyzing the place of recurrence in the work of Heidegger and Deleuze. By framing recurrence as an illustration of Nietzsche's core metaphysical commitment, Heidegger provides the crucial point of entry for this argument. However, while Heidegger regards that return to metaphysics as a weakness, the Deleuzean reading makes clear that it should instead be seen as the final creative possibility. The element of recurrence that makes it the ‘highest formula of affirmation’ is its metaphysics, understood now to be a metaphysics of difference. This reading is essential if we hope to respond to the nihilism of modernity without descending into chaotic despair or defaulting to redemptive violence.

Queering the war dead: gold star families and the politics of estrangement

ABSTRACTContemporary practices of mourning individuals lost to war violence assert correct and incorrect practices of grieving. Successful practices will emphasize the heroism and the sacrifice of the war dead, centralizing the role of American values in the act of dying for one’s country. To not honor the war dead successfully is seen as a betrayal of their sacrifice and an ethical failure. Through a critical reading of Gold Star Families and the identity politics surrounding acts of mourning, I argue that the social norms acting as guideposts for processes of mourning over-determine relationships and identities in ways that perpetuate a violence that is seen as redemptive. Working towards alternatives to these practices, I argue that a queer relationality can disrupt the idealized constructions of redemptive violence constitutive to notions of successful mourning. A queering of the war dead refuses to allow mourning to be dismissed as unsuccessful if grieving is anything other than the assignment of war hero, patriot, or the solidification of an American identity for those killed by war violence. Ultimately, I argue that acts of queering the war dead have potential to challenge the proliferation of dominant practices that tie a militarized redemptive violence to normalized identities.

Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence by Boyd CothranThe Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America's Gilded Age by Robert Aquinas McNally

Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence by Boyd CothranThe Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America's Gilded Age by Robert Aquinas McNally

The People as a Natural Disaster: Redemptive Violence in Jacobin Political Thought

The trial and execution of Louis XVI served as a founding act of French republican democracy. It was also a scene of irregular justice: no legal warrants or procedural precedents existed for bringing a king to justice before the law. This essay describes how Jacobins crafted a new language of popular agency to overcome that obstacle—the language of redemptive violence. Although redemptive violence had roots in prerevolutionary notions of penal justice and social cohesion, its philosophical ambitions were revolutionary and modern. Analyzing that language illuminates how republican democracy weaponized a distinctive ideology of extralegal violence at its origins. It also helps explain redemptive violence's enduring appeal during and after the French Revolution.

Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence

Book Review| April 01 2017 Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence. By Boyd Cothran. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 247 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95 (paper). Larry Cebula Larry Cebula Eastern Washington University Larry Cebula is the Assistant Digital Archivist for the State of Washington and Professor of History at Eastern Washington University. His current project is SpokaneHistorical.org, a collaboratively produced smartphone app and website for regional history. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2017) 36 (3): 93–94. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.36.3.0093 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Larry Cebula; Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2017; 36 (3): 93–94. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.36.3.0093 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Rewriting Mortality: Gift and Atonement in Cur Deus Homo

The model of atonement presented in Anselm of Canterbury's Cur Deus Homo has aroused a host of worries from theologians. The gist of their criticism is that Anselm inscribes redemptive violence into theology and thus encourages passive acquiescence to abusive power structures or even licenses the violence of abusers. Some suggest that the way forward would be to jettison Anselm's account and develop alternatives that are not liable to the same abuses. This paper argues that while alternatives may be desirable, Cur Deus Homo looms so large in theological imaginations as to defy jettisoning. We should instead try to perform better readings. This paper presents a close reading of this text as a monastic meditation on mortality oriented less toward resolving a problem of systematic theology than drawing readers into a renewed experience of devotion to God. To do that, Anselm works to rewrite the meaning of human mortality, making it less about the necessity of losing one's life and more about the possibility of a gift of death. The ethical paradigm that emerges is far from a complete moral vision, but is still more alluring than the one about which Anselm's contemporary critics worry.

Indigenous Studies

Indigenous Studies K. Tsianina Lomawaima (bio) Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations. By Mishuana Goeman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 260 pages. $75.00 (cloth). $25.00 (paper). Mohawk Interruptus (Political Life across the Borders of Nation States). By Audra Simpson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 280 pages. $84.95 (cloth). $23.95 (paper). Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity. By Joanne Barker. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 296 pages. $84.95 (cloth). $23.95 (paper). Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania. By Alice Te Punga Somerville. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 288 pages. $67.50 (cloth). $22.50 (paper). Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. By Glen Sean Coulthard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 256 pages. $67.50 (cloth). $22.50 (paper). Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence. By Boyd Cothran. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 264 pages. $34.95 (cloth). “We are all relatives” when taken as a methodological tool for obtaining knowledge means that we observe the natural world by looking for relationships between various things in it. … This concept is simply the relativity concept as applied to a universe that people experience as alive and not as dead or inert. —Vine Deloria, “Relativity, Relatedness, and Reality,” in Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader Searching for relationships across recent scholarship in Indigenous studies is productive and intellectually satisfying. The limited slice of this review includes [End Page 149] scholars writing from and about the United States, Canada, and Aotearoa / New Zealand. The varied stitches of their interdisciplinary, geographic, cultural, familial, and personal vantage points bite like feather quills, basketry splints, and fishing lines into a fabric of shared Indigenous experiences that are rooted in places, landscapes, seas, and movements of ancient time-depth; that have been and are being substantially shaped by the ongoing structures of settler colonialism; and that express unfolding contemporary dynamism. As Audra Simpson writes in Mohawk Interruptus, “Concepts have teeth, and teeth that bite through time” (100). The Indigeneity explored and articulated in these works interrogates the past, battles for the present, and demands a visionary future. International Indigenous studies is florescent in the twenty-first century: not unchallenged, of course, but vital and exuberant. It reminds me of an O’odham squash plant I once knew, called “ha:l,” rioting down the furrows, over the fence, and across the countryside. The books reviewed here are not “representative”; they constitute a sample picked from a big, rich garden. I believe that they share some key intellectual mooring points, perspectives, and inquiries, and they also display a splendid variety. Intellectual Roots, Goals, and Contributions These authors share a striking brand of intellectual agility: well-trained in their respective disciplines, well-versed in traversing interdisciplinary boundaries, familiar with the classics and “great men” of Western academe, and self-confidently assertive of theories, methods, analyses, and perspectives rooted in Indigenous epistemologies and experiences. The stance of settler colonial studies is pervasive, building on Patrick Wolfe’s insights: the path-breaking characterization of settler conquest as an ongoing structure rather than a “oneoff” event of the past, the pervasive territorial imperative to claim land, and the logic of elimination of the Native. In Remembering the Modoc War, the historian Boyd Cothran relates more than dates and events of the Modoc War of 1872–73 in the Klamath Basin straddling the California–Oregon border. His narrative relates remembrances and movements, how traces of brutal violence have been transformed from horrific and gruesome physical trophies to suitable souvenirs to cabinet displays to “valuable” historic artifacts, and transformed from material or discursive objects to commodity goods in “marketplaces of remembering” (14). The transformative process has manufactured a “redemptive narrative of American [End Page 150] innocence” (15) out of the corrosive violence of frontier (and ongoing) settler colonialism. In an evocative, eloquent narrative style, Cothran correlates the “conflagration of state-sponsored Indian killing” (18) in Oregon and California from 1854 through the 1870s with the violences of writing and circulating history. Cothran’s innovative examination of memory and American innocence as influenced by capitalism in processes...