Violent End Research Articles

Stop Hunting Ishi

This essay follows the history of hunting Indians in California to the hunting of Ishi—the “last wild Indian in North America”—by anthropologists from the University of California through to the present-day hunt for Ishi’s legacy and his physical remains. William Bauer explores why Ishi was hunted, and what he has represented to different constituencies: the savage Indian on the frontier, killing livestock as well as white men, women, and children, and deserving a violent end himself; a symbol of Indian life supposedly uncontaminated by modernity; and tribal sovereignty and self-determination, a renaissance of indigenous politics and culture made possible by the survival of indigenous people and nations, and the economic opportunities of Indian gaming. Bauer argues that people who hunt for deeper meaning in Ishi’s legacy are often looking to understand something about themselves, not about indigenous people.

Trauma and Historical Referentiality in Post-Aum Manga

Cultural treatments of the 1995 Tokyo subway gas attacks perpetrated by Aum Supreme Truth (Aum Shinrikyō) often reference another tumultuous episode that many argue belongs to the same radical impulse in Japanese society: the violent end to the ‘extremist period’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s, punctuated by the United Red Army’s Asama Sansō incident of 1972. Yet while scholarship and the media have sought to contextualize the gas attacks by directly identifying Aum in relation to United Red Army radicalism, the works examined here thematize the unassimilated nature of the extremist period in the Japanese historical imaginary and complicate the construction of referential ties in the narration of these events. Produced in the years following the attacks, two works of manga serialized in the late 1990s and 2000s – Biriibaazu [Believers, 1999] and Nijūseiki Shōnen [Twentieth Century Boys, 1999–2006] – represent Aum as a trace of an event that has not been fully assimilated in the cultural consciousness. These two works demonstrate how the largely unclaimed nature of the radical era highlights the problems of transcribing unprocessed events like the United Red Army incident into narrative imaginings of recent Japanese history

Refugees and global violence: complicity in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach

Since its publication in 2008, Rawi Hage’s Cockroach has generated two forms of criticism, one which focuses on Hage’s unnamed narrator’s experiences in Montreal, and another which pays attention to his diasporic condition and trauma complex. Both critical methodologies face specific conceptual challenges, as neither can reconcile the national and local context of Cockroach with its global and diasporic affiliations. For that reason, this article connects these two methodologies by analysing the function of refugee narratives in Cockroach. This article interprets the narrator as complicit with those he criticizes and reads the novel’s violent ending as a duplication of western modes of intervention through narratives of security and rescue rather than as a tool that allows the protagonist to overcome his guilt complex.

My Father's Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain by Patricio Pron

62 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews we hope to see in Mukherjee’s subsequent writings. Emma Dawson Varughese Institute of English Studies, London Leo Popma. As gong dêr in oar. Ljouwert, Netherlands. Frysk en Frij. 2013. isbn 9789085660279 Leo Popma has written an intriguing story with an intriguing title, As gong dêr in oar (As if another went there), a story that sometimes confuses and often mystifies, for there are secrets within nearly every character. Mare and Johan, the main characters , are spending a week’s vacation in a small, remote village by the sea, where Mare worked as an au pair many years ago. Both have the baggage of personal histories. And it is in this tranquil spot that the turbulence of those histories begins to reverberate as they gradually emerge through constantly shifting, episodic flashbacks . Mare, a professional interpreter with the European Union, bears the scars of a conflicted childhood, the reputation of an out-of-control party girl in her younger years and the weight of responsibility for a sixteen-year-old born out of wedlock. Johan, an architect, continues to be haunted by the violent death of Max, a close childhood friend from Indonesia , and by the heartbreak of losing his first love. Predictably, tensions arise between them from their disparate histories and temperaments as well as from the “necessary” lies and secrets that create distance between them. Conflicted relationships affect nearly every character. At the book’s center is Johan—who witnessed the shoot-out that killed Max in the hijacking of the passenger train—the boy from Malaysia whose extraordinary mind, passion for justice, and violent end left a permanently disturbing imprint. And his heart won’t heal from the broken relationship with Josi, who had to let him go, though there was real love between them. But Mare will not let him go, though there is seemingly no real love between them; Mare who forcefully insists on fidelity to one’s origins—language, culture, place— versus his unsentimental disdain for hanging on to an “illusion, a homesickness ,” a dying past; Mare who expects him to mean something to Nyk, her son (and, as he discovers, who may be his own son, too). And then there is the complicated relationship of Mare to friend and rival Inge, to Nyk and his widely divergent interest and direction from hers, but especially to her own past— her separation from her deeply rooted identity in a unique culture and language that she cannot let go or compromise. In fact, nearly every character in this novel suffers from estrangement and disconnection, from homesickness for the place and the people they left behind but which yet inhabit them. Indeed, the reader sometimes wonders whether the author meant to write an essay on the inextricable bond between language , culture, and identity, for the theme keeps recurring. For Mare, her frantic search for a “true home” proves futile and, finally, fatal. For Johan, the wandering ends when he acts on Mare’s invitation spoken in jest at the beginning: “And if you’ve had enough, go walk into the sea just like René Lung.” The serious reader will appreciate the thought-provoking substance of this novel. Henry J. Baron Calvin College Patricio Pron. My Father’s Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain. Mara Faye Lethem, tr. New York. Knopf. 2013. isbn 9780307700681 To its great credit, this extremely competent novel has prompted uncritical vacuity and petty comments in some American book reviews. The novel’s narrator, never Patricio Pron of course, revisits a historical past Maurice Harmon Loose Connections Salmon Poetry This verse collection by Irish writer Maurice Harmon takes the reader into the “inking depths” of human emotion and endurance through the mutable world of loosening connections. His easy and confident voice guides us on a tour of both satisfying and disturbing experiences that we can all relate to while remaining quietly celebratory. Vasily Grossman An Armenian Sketchbook Robert Chandler & Elizabeth Chandler, tr. MacLehose Press Though perhaps best known for Life and Fate, this lovingly translated memoir by Vasily Grossman—written near the end of his life—gives the reader a rare look into his personal character. His vivid and...

La Poison dir. by Sacha Guitry (review)

Reviewed by: La Poison dir. by Sacha Guitry Melanie Conroy La Poison. Sacha Guitry, dir. Starring Michel Simon, Germaine Reuver, Jean Debucourt, Louis de Funès, Sacha Guitry. Eureka Entertainment Ltd, 2013 (1951). 1 DVD + 24-page booklet. $19.99. Despite the robust revival of Sacha Guitry’s films and plays in France over the past ten years, the prolific dramatist and director remains largely unknown outside of his adopted country. Even in France, Guitry—also one of the most famous actors of his day—is known not as a master director in his own right, but as an early example of the French auteur, a precursor to the filmmakers of the nouvelle vague. His slow decline from the heights of stardom after the Second World War was due to suspicions that he had collaborated with France’s German occupiers, as well as to the fact that theater directors were generally less respected in the film industry. This loss of reputation was undeserved. At their best, Guitry’s films remain brash, funny, and highly personal. Like Charlie Chaplin before him, and Woody Allen thereafter, Sacha Guitry made films that are much more about his own persona than their ostensible subject matter; and that persona remains as witty and charismatic as ever. La Poison (1951) is a gem of a dark comedy. As many have noted, the charm of this film comes mainly from Swiss comedian Michel Simon’s humanizing interpretation of the central role. Simon is a master comedian, for whom Guitry wrote the starring role of Paul Braconnier, a killer who plots the murder of his wife (Germaine Reuver) and orchestrates his own acquittal. Shot in less than eleven days, with only one take for virtually every scene, the film follows Braconnier’s consultations with the inhabitants of Remonville, a typical French village of the 1940s or 1950s. Characters include: the priest (Albert Duvaleix), the florist (Jeanne Fusier-Gir), and denizens of the local bar (including Louis de Funès), all of whom are to some degree aware of Braconnier’s desire to kill his wife. [End Page 397] Click for larger view View full resolution © All rights reserved by Eureka Entertainment There are numerous revelations, including the fact that—as the audience learns at the very beginning—Braconnier’s wife is also trying to poison him. But the real innovation of this film—in both narrative and technical terms—comes not from Guitry’s cynical portrait of a French village, but from the intrusive sounds and ideas surging in from the outside world, which gives rise to various, unexpected moral quandaries. Like Guitry’s masterwork, Le Roman d’un tricheur (1936), La Poison was enormously influential on the experimental post-War generation of filmmakers. It is easy to see why: Guitry was an auteur who wrote and directed over 150 plays and 30 films, often starring in them. He also brought some experimental touches to mass-market cinema. In La Poison, an incongruous soundtrack and jump-cuts are used to achieve a comic, and sometimes satirical, effect. Click for larger view View full resolution © All rights reserved by Eureka Entertainment [End Page 398] For example, singer Lucienne Delache’s cheerful love songs get played during the painful dinner scenes in which Braconnier fantasizes about the violent end of his marriage. The soundtrack thus interrupts the illusory realism dominating the picture and forms a peculiar sense of dramatic tension. Another example of the director’s creative use of sound occurs in a scene where a radio play of a domestic dispute momentarily appears to be a fight between Braconnier and his wife (21:43). Later Jean-Luc Godard and others would exploit these effects so frequently that they would come to be regarded as clichés of French and world cinema. Eureka’s new edition foregrounds the importance of La Poison for filmmakers of the later generations. François Truffaut reflected that in “On Guitry’s Habitual Theme,” a brief note he published in Les Films de ma vie in 1957. Details about the production of the film are provided in a 1981 essay by Bettina Knapp and a one-hour documentary released in 2010, containing numerous interviews with...

Fictional Murder and Other Descriptive Deaths: V.S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas and the Problem of Postcolonial Description

Fictional Murder and Other Descriptive Deaths: V.S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas and the Problem of Postcolonial Description Toral Jatin Gajarawala (bio) “The sea smelled of swamp; it barely rippled, had glitter rather than colour; and the heat seemed trapped below the pink haze of bauxite dust…” —V.S. Naipaul, Guerrillas “Nothing that happened here could be important. The place was no more than what it looked” (45). In V.S. Naipaul’s 1975 novel Guerrillas, the bauxite dust of American factories hangs in a haze over the pages, stagnant, heated, prescient. In an atmosphere of anticipation, where real guerillas never materialize, and political revolution is a fictional abstraction, it is descriptions of landscape that hold a charged textual potential: the trapped heat, the smeared slogans, the chain of hills all seem to indicate a violent end. As Naipaul himself points out on the blurb to the 2002 Picador edition, “The violence actually is in the tone. It wasn’t angry. It was just violent.” That violence snakes its way through narrative depictions of a Caribbean landscape, the shantytowns and the sea, until it erupts in the brutal rape and murder of a white woman on the compound of Jimmy Ahmed, the half black, half Chinese, British rabble rouser, the [End Page 289] criminal deported for sexual misdeeds, the new “guerrilla.” The two are mediated by Roche, the former apartheid activist turned liberal corporate do-gooder, and Bryant, Jimmy’s tormented child-slave, member of the commune. Why return to a forgotten novel, even one that is singular in its misogyny as well as its critique of a “misguided socialism”? Guerrillas is, while also conjuring, a suggestive place to begin a discussion of literary description and the question of a “postcolonial narratology.” Based loosely on the political life of Michael X, the British black power leader who organized an agricultural commune in Trinidad and was hanged in 1973 for the murder of Gayle Ann Benson, the novel is claustrophobically organized despite the constant figuration of the outdoors, the hillsides and beaches, the Ridge and the town, the narrow furrow of earth in which Jane’s body is interred.1 In fact, the majority of the text seems to be comprised of non-narrative landscape scenes that punctuate dialogues and the slow unfolding of tragedy. Until that final terrible and, presumably, literarily unprecedented moment, however, it is description that does the work of violence as well as disdain, both of which emerge from the glittering swamp and presage the murder to come. Scene after scene fixes the narrative eye on bauxite dust, the stink of the sea, or the heat of the bush: “The sea, when they came to it, gave no feeling of air and lightness: the fine red powder of bauxite, sheds of corroded corrugated iron, the reek of the burning rubbish dump: everything here, hillside, forest, sea, mangrove, turned to slum” (22). Repetition is, in fact, a constitutive feature of the novel, repetition of the landscape scene and of the language of its construction. The sea is seen many, many times, the bush “smokes” again and again, slogans are “daubed” more than once. Is this a pedagogy? A preparation? An anti-orientalism? What is the work of description in this novel of failed revolt? This article will consider the historical genealogy of literary description and its role in the contemporary postcolonial novel. But it will also probe the relation between literary description and literary murder in the context of a nameless neocolonial state, a liberal intelligentsia, a failed revolution, and the perverse logics of domination constructed by race and gender. Mieke Bal writes, “Like eyes, words can kill. The yellow patch does not exist, but it does kill a character. Killing a character: what better place than fiction—where no [End Page 290] live subjects are endangered—to explore the dangers that cultural habits such as language, voyeurism, and ethnographic othering allow us to incur?” (594) It isn’t entirely clear if Proust’s Bergotte, the ambitious artist, actually dies from the stunning yellow patch of Vermeer’s painting figured in the fifth volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, but it is true that literary deaths have...

Tulkinnallinen horjuvuus ja affektit

Ambiguous Meanings and Affects – Death in Monika Fagerholm’s The American Girl and The Glitter Scene The article focuses on the deaths that take place in Monika Fagerholm’s novels The American Girl (2005) and The Glitter Scene (2009). The viewpoint to the novels is that of affects. The theore¬tical framework derives from the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) who is one of the best-known 20th century philosophers of affect. Firstly, the article discusses the ways in which the deaths affect the characters of the novels. Attention is paid especially to the central character called Doris Flinkenberg. She is strongly affected by the deaths that have taken place in the District where she lives. She herself also meets a violent end. Secondly, the article aims at explaining how the novels affect the reader. The idea of death is constantly present in the novels. Because of the original style of the novels the reader has to encounter the inexplicability of the deaths. This is due to the constant repetition in which the repeated passages and phrases keep on changing. The encounters with the death – conceived as the outside of life – give birth to the so called “death-affects”. It is argued that the recurrent death-affects and their incomprehensibility determine the whole atmosphere or the affective bearing of the novels.

Galaxy formation: The new Milky Way

A fresh look at our Galaxy points to a chaotic past and a violent end.

Presupernova Evolution of Massive Single and Binary Stars

Understanding massive stars is essential for a variety of branches of astronomy including galaxy and star cluster evolution, nucleosynthesis and supernovae, pulsars, and black holes. It has become evident that massive star evolution is very diverse, being sensitive to metallicity, binarity, rotation, and possibly magnetic fields. Although the problem to obtain a good statistical observational database is alleviated by current large spectroscopic surveys, it remains a challenge to model these diverse paths of massive stars toward their violent end stage. I show that the main sequence stage offers the best opportunity to gauge the relevance of the various possible evolutionary scenarios. This also allows sketching the post-main-sequence evolution of massive stars, for which observations of Wolf-Rayet stars give essential clues. Recent supernova discoveries owing to the current boost in transient searches allow tentative mappings of progenitor models with supernova types, including pair-instability supernovae and gamma-ray bursts.

Excavations at Fin Cop, Derbyshire: An Iron Age Hillfort in Conflict?

A programme of archaeological investigation took place on Fin Cop hillfort, in the Derbyshire Peak District, during the summers of 2009 and 2010. In total fifty test-pits and eight trenches were excavated, revealing evidence for a Mesolithic quarry site, and sporadic evidence for Neolithic and Beaker period activity. An assemblage of Late Bronze Age-Early Iron Age ceramics was recovered from the interior of the fort in association with rock-cut pits testifying to occupation of the hilltop prior to the construction of the hillfort rampart. The hillfort rampart construction took place in the period 435–390 cal. BC (68% probability) and was destroyed before its completion, probably by the mid-fourth century cal. BC, when large numbers of women and children were disposed of in the ditch together with the demolition material from the fort's wall. The defensive character of the monument and the evidence for a violent end to the site appear to indicate, on current evidence, that the fort was sacked.

Dark Souls (review)

Reviewed by: Dark Souls Kate Quealy-Gainer Morris, Paula. Dark Souls. Point/Scholastic, 2011. 292p. ISBN 978-0-545-25132-7 $17.99 Ad Gr. 7–10. The English city of York is reputedly one of the most haunted places on earth, and, unfortunately for sixteen-year-old Miranda, she is able to immediately confirm that fact upon her arrival. After coming close to death and losing her best friend in a car accident earlier in the year, Miranda can now see dead people, and York has plenty of them, often victims of terrible, violent ends. In just the first few days of her trip, Miranda meets the ghost of St. Margaret Clitherow, a Catholic martyr who was crushed to death in 1586, and the tortured spirits of several hundred Jews killed at York Castle in the twelfth century. Fortunately for her sanity, Miranda also meets Nick, a dark and brooding (and living) boy who shares her gift and offers his assistance in navigating this new reality. Soon, however, it becomes clear that Nick is the one in need of help: an evil spirit convinces him to commit a heinous act, and it seems that Miranda is the only one that can stop him. The cobblestone streets and shadowed alleys of York are vividly brought to life here, and the nods to actual historical events as fodder for ghostly happenings make for an atmospheric tale. Indeed, the city itself is the book’s best-drawn character, largely outshining Miranda as the bland but necessary protagonist. While the setting is deliciously absorbing, the descriptive language never quite translates to the more emotional aspects of Miranda’s life (e.g., her grief, uncertainty, etc.) and the scenes in which she is actually interacting with anyone come off as stiff and ineffective. Still, the sense of place is impressive, and Anglophiles who like their literary travel on the spooky side may very well seek to wander the streets of York with Miranda. Copyright © 2011 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

A Hebrew “sodomite” tale from thirteenth-century Toledo: Jacob Ben El‘azar's story of Sapir, Shapir, and Birsha

The purpose of this article is to provide a close reading of a thirteenth-century Hebrew narrative by Jacob Ben El‘azar of Toledo that recounts the tale of a “sodomite” who meets a violent end. The story focuses on the amorous affair of Sapir, an adult male, his beloved Shapir, a male youth around the age of puberty, and Birsha, a nefarious old man who lures Shapir away from Sapir, though Sapir ultimately seeks out Shapir and is reunited with him. Sapir and Birsha dispute over the boy and ultimately submit their case before a judge. The judge declares that Birsha deserves the death penalty, though he is spared this sentence and ordered only to forfeit the boy. Nevertheless, Sapir and Shapir take the law into their own hands and brutally murder Birsha. At the heart of the narrative is the tension between two models of eroticism between males, epitomized by the relationships of Sapir–Shapir and Birsha–Shapir, one sanctioned and the other condemned. The question that will be dealt with here is to determine what exactly distinguished the two relationships. Was Birsha considered a “sodomite” as opposed to Sapir, despite the fact that they both loved the male youth Shapir? Were they distinguished by their age, the nature of their desire, their sexual “identities,” their sexual acts, or other behaviors? (Foucault, The History of Sexuality, argued that the notion of sexual “identity” did not emerge until the modern era and that pre-modern societies thought only in terms of sexual acts. I largely agree with this evaluation though I will maintain that the categorization in the narrative under discussion distinguished between individuals who desired males and females versus those who desired males only.) In order to unravel this complicated narrative, we must delve deeply into the construction of sexuality within medieval Hebrew literature and more broadly within medieval Jewish culture—so enmeshed within its Islamic and Christian environments. I will argue that the identification of Birsha as a “sodomite” resided in his obsessive, mendacious, and violent qualities and not in his choice of love object, much less his sexual “identity.” Before presenting the narrative and my reading, I review some of the history of scholarship on homoeroticism in medieval Hebrew literature in order to provide a counterpoint to the methodological underpinnings of the present study. Throughout the study, I engage a variety of source types—Arabic homoerotic poems and narratives, Andalusi Hebrew poems, Christian reports of Muslim sexuality, exegetic and legal sources—in order to convey the highly specific and culturally circumscribed forms of homoeroticism assumed in Ben El‘azar's story.

Jerusalem's Traitor: Josephus, Masada and the Fall of Judea (review)

Jerusalem's Traitor: Josephus, Masada and the Fall of Judea, by Desmond Seward. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2009. 314 pp. $28.00. Perhaps the title of this book is a lure to readers that have heard Josephus was a traitor and want to see Seward's take on the lurid details. If that be the case, such a reader will be disappointed. Instead, if she stay till the end, the reader will realize that Josephus lived in a moment when events seemed to be on the threshold of the apocalypse if not indeed in the thick of it. He was a survivor, not by any means passive, at a time when his people living in Judea were torn with internal strife largely prompted by different responses to revulsion at Rome's heavy, often brutal hand. In the ferocious war that was the result, Josephus somehow emerged from personal defeat to become its historian. Such histories are usually written by the victors, spelling out the glories of the winners and the faults of the losers. Though Josephus writes scathingly of the most vehement of the zealots that insisted on pursuing their path to destruction, and though he had as patrons the generals that were raised to the purple in the course of the war, his chiding of the zealots was tinted with praise where it was due, and with obvious personal sorrow at their violent end. He does not write the kind of history a conqueror writes because he was a captive, a victim too of this war. He wanted to be other than this. In the last days of the war he hoped to salvage something for his people. It was because of this, as he tried to make something less than total destruction come about for his people, that he came to look like a traitor. After all, how does a person escape from such a desperate struggle to live in the emperor's former villa unless one is a traitor? Desmond Seward tells this story remarkably. Yet he is not a member of thejosephus-guild. He has also published books on Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Hundred Years War, and the involvement of monastic orders in the Crusades. Of these I have only become acquainted with The Monks of War. There, in an entirely different quarry, he digs out detail and brings to fight a vivid picture of another immensely tragic epoch in human history. Whereas Seward draws on a few of the eminent Josephus scholars of our day, he did his own spade work. It is no slur to say that here is a book that may not be quoted in the research of Josephus scholars because it does not unearth new facts. …

The Colonial Testing Ground: The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Violent End of Empire

The Colonial Testing Ground: The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Violent End of Empire Fabian Klose (bio) Introduction In a memorandum issued in October 1962, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) expressed its great concern that torture and other excessive acts of violence were becoming more prevalent worldwide despite the expanded application of international humanitarian law to internal conflicts by way of Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions.1 Authorities in Geneva were particularly troubled by the trend that, due to a new “fight against terrorism,” torture was depicted as being in the best interest of society and in accord with the law. Under the guise of special laws on combating terrorism, methods of “interrogation under torture,” which had been universally outlawed by civilized society, were now being reinstated more or less secretly. In the opinion of the ICRC, the widespread strategy of fighting terrorism by its own means was not only an unequivocal violation of international law but also a “devastating abdication of humanity.”2 The main reason for this alarming evaluation of the situation lay in the numerous incidents that the ICRC had experienced during its missions in the wars of decolonization. Following the end of World War II, many violent uprisings shook European colonial empires. Because these conflicts between a European colonial power and an anticolonial rebellion movement were not considered international conflicts according to the definition of international law, the ICRC attempted, especially in the Mau Mau War in Kenya (1952–56) and the Algerian War (1954–62), to push through minimum humanitarian norms on the basis of the new provisions of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The “wars of national liberation” in the 1950s and 1960s posed new challenges to the International Committee in Geneva, because the humanitarian objective was repeatedly overlaid and endangered by realpolitik. On one side, the colonial powers feared unwelcome intervention in their colonial interests and therefore fought any expansion of international humanitarian law and the ICRC work in this area. On the other, liberation movements like the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) instrumentalized the revised international humanitarian law for purposes of propaganda in their struggle to win public opinion. The Geneva Conventions were increasingly bounced back and forth in the tough political confrontations of decolonization, so that the original issue of securing minimum humanitarian protections in wartime threatened to pale or even perish in the skirmishes. [End Page 107] It is against this backdrop that this essay uses the case studies of Kenya and Algeria to examine the role of the International Red Cross in the process of violent decolonization. In the course of its attempt to develop an international humanitarian regime, two key questions arose for the ICRC. First, to what degree could the norms of the 1949 Geneva Conventions withstand the realities of colonial war? Second, how much influence could international organizations like the ICRC exert in these violent scenarios? Appealing to evidence mostly made available only recently by the archives of the International Red Cross in Geneva, I argue that the wars of decolonization became the first serious testing grounds for the revisions to international humanitarian law and had an impact on its future development.3 The New Geneva Conventions of 1949 World War II and the immediate postwar period represented a major turning point for the protection of international human rights. The massive violations of humanitarian norms during the war had shown the world community in an all too drastic way just how great the need was for codified universal basic rights. Thus, human rights were to be institutionalized as a legacy of the war within the postwar order. With the founding of the United Nations in 1945 and the passage of both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the European Convention on Human Rights in 1950, the cornerstones were laid for the international human rights regime, a topic that began to assert its permanent place on the political agenda for the entire world.4 In conjunction with these precedent-setting documents, the Geneva Conventions of 1949 are also a good example of this brief dawn in the history of international human rights protection.5 As...

The Horror, The Horror: What Kind of (Horror) Movie is the Apocalypse?

The Apocalypse, its interpreters, and apocalyptic films make much of monstrous evils and violent ends. Apocalyptic does so in order to prevent community members’ failure/apostasy. The fear of such failure is Apocalypse’s first horror feature. Because its final fantasy is of an absolute Empire, the Apocalypse is also inseparable from cinematic horror. This end—or its seductive preview in text/vision—is the horror of possession/absorption, a common trope of religious horror and the Apocalypse’s second horror feature. The first horror feature so terrifies that one easily succumbs to the second; however, some films raise salutary questions about such scripted lives.

What Change?: Spanish Gender Ideology and Marital Rape in La malcasada (1923) and Sólo mía (2001)

What Change?Spanish Gender Ideology and Marital Rape in La malcasada (1923) and Sólo mía (2001) Leslie Maxwell Kaiura (bio) Carmen de Burgos's novel La malcasada, published in 1923, and Javier Balaguer's film Sólo mía, released in 2001, share striking similarities in their treatment of domestic violence and marital rape despite the nearly eighty years of history and the differences in form that separate them. The two works explicitly reveal the connection between gender expectations and domestic violence as well as the inadequacy of the legal system to protect its victims. Both works demonstrate that even when women technically stand to benefit from the protection of the legal system, the centuries-old gender ideology that is deeply ingrained in Spanish society (and western culture in general) can render that protection ineffectual and practically meaningless. Even though they are women from two different centuries, the protagonists of these works confront many of the same obstacles in the battle to reclaim their right to safety and dignity, a fact demonstrating that despite changes in the law and in the conception of domestic violence as a serious issue, the problem cannot be remedied without a greater change in the gender ideology that underlies Spanish culture. Carmen de Burgos (1867-1932), author of La malcasada, was one of Spain's first radical feminist figures, with her prolific journalistic and literary career spanning the first three decades of the twentieth century. Ana Martínez Marín [End Page 67] writes that Burgos "representó para algunos espíritus progresistas la encarnación viva de la 'Nueva Mujer'" (13). She was indeed an exceptional woman for her time—after leaving her unfaithful and abusive husband, Burgos supported herself and her daughter by teaching and writing. Her first articles in defense of women's rights appeared in 1903, and she published her first novel in 1907 (Davies 120). Over the next twenty-five years she published over one hundred stories and novellas as well as twelve full-length novels. Burgos used the mass-produced popular novel to critique patriarchal society's treatment of women, particularly the social and legal standards that left women nearly defenseless against a myriad of abuses. The disposable nature of these publications documenting her commitment to social and political reform allowed Burgos' work to be largely dismissed by critics until the 1970s, when feminist scholars began to reevaluate the merit of her texts and her contributions to early twentieth-century Spanish culture.1 Burgos's straightforward, sensationalist fictions can easily be compared to some of today's popular films that treat topical social issues in the same melodramatic fashion. In La malcasada, the aptly named Dolores faces the scorn of society and the inequity of the Spanish legal system as she tries to escape from her abusive marriage. In Balaguer's Sólo mía, another young wife, with the equally fitting name of Ángela, confronts a similar situation when her marriage becomes a nightmare of abuse and humiliation as her husband tries to force her into the traditional feminine role of the angel of the house. Due to inadequate legal resources and other obstacles, both Dolores and Ángela are left to rescue themselves with tragic results—Dolores murders her husband in self-defense, and Ángela's final confrontation with her husband leaves him physically and mentally incapacitated. Sólo mía, released in November 2001, is Balaguer's directorial debut, and although the film received mixed reviews it did win him three award nominations, including a Best New Director nomination at the 2002 Goya Awards ("Javier Balaguer"). In addition to directing Sólo mía, Balaguer also co-wrote its screenplay with Álvaro García Mohedano. In the "Making of Sólo mía" featurette included on the DVD, Balaguer describes how they were inspired by real life events (in particular by a newspaper article about a woman who was killed by her husband) to investigate the reasons why a marriage that must have begun with love, could come to such a violent end. Balaguer also stresses their desire to make a realistic film that would avoid common stereotypes: Sólo mía refleja muy directamente y...

Icarian Romanticism – The Motif of Soaring and Falling in British Romantic Poetry

Man’s aspirations to grandeur, his dreams of soaring to god-like heights and his concomitant tendency to fall have caught the attention of artists and writers since time immemorial. As pointed out in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Icarus – like Phaeton in ancient mythology or Lucifer in the Judeo-Christian tradition – is, in contrast to the circumspect and prudent Daedalus, the reification of man’s inherent propensity for transgressive ambition and immoderation. Particularly at the beginning of the 17th century, when early modern man becomes more and more dissatisfied with his humble position and – as John Donne complains – strives to be ‘a Phoenix’, Icarus conjures up the image of a new way of life in which excess replaces the old Renaissance virtue of mediocritas. Not only does Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet call for the strict adherence to this virtue when he reminds the restless protagonists of the fact that ‘violent delights have violent ends;’ numerous emblems showing Icarus’s fall are meant to admonish the reader to stick to the golden mean. Even women, the most notorious of whom is the titular heroine of John Marston’s The Insatiable Countess (1613), are suddenly aware of being ‘mewed up like Cretan Daedalus’ and dream of being endowed with ‘waxen wings to fly to pleasure’. Giving expression to early modern man’s longing for excessive hedonism, but also classified as ‘easie and familiar’ by Francis Bacon, the parable of Icarus nevertheless served to illustrate a newly arisen contradiction in which individuals, at the threshold of modernity, saw themselves locked. On the one hand, Icarus’s trespass proved to be the matrix for countless phoenix-like ‘overreachers’, who, like Doctor Faustus, Don Juan, Tamburlane or Macbeth, aptly epitomized the time-honoured idea that man’s inclination to soar beyond the human condition, to break with the idea of life as an imitation of Christ was a severe and blasphemous attack on God’s chain of being; on the other hand, in spite of his self-inflicted failure, Icarus tended to be regarded as the personification of the ingenious individual who ought to be differentiated carefully from the anonymous masses. Thus, the 17th -century poet and translator George Sandys got to the very heart of the ambivalent image of Icarus when he, in the wake of Bacon, wrote: ‘Icarus falls aspiring. Yet more commendable then those who creepe on the earth like contemptible wormes’.

Hostage taking: Understanding terrorism event dynamics

This paper employs advanced time series methods to identify the dynamic properties of three hostage taking series. The immediate and long run multipliers of three covariates—successful past negotiations, violent ends, and deaths—are identified. Each hostage series responds differently to the covariates. Past concessions have the strongest impact on generating future kidnapping events, supporting the conventional wisdom to abide by a stated no-concession policy. Each hostage series has different changepoints caused by a variety of circumstances. Skyjackings and kidnappings are negatively correlated, while skyjackings and other hostage events are positively correlated. Policy recommendations are offered.

Deadly Dozen: Forgotten Gunfighters of the Old West, Volume 2 by Robert K. DeArment (review)

Deadly Dozen: Forgotten Gunfighters of the Old West, Volume 2. By Robert K. DeArment. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007. Pp. 362. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-0-80613-863-3. $29.95, cloth.) There have been books written about the Old West, some before it was “old.” There continue to be authors who share their insight and fascination with this genre today. Many of these books concern themselves with just one, or in some cases, a few individuals. Most of the characters the reader likely already knows or thinks he or she knows due to their long-lived and sometimes long-contrived celebrity status. Robert K. DeArment has chosen a different path with Deadly Dozen: Forgotten Gunfighters of the Old West, Volume 2. DeArment boldly leads the reader down a trail less known, following men none but a few have ever heard of but whose stories seem to have been culled from the best of fiction. He tells each story with intensity and fast-paced writing, depicting each of these forgotten deadly dozen in well-deserved, balanced proportions when compared to men such as Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and John Wesley Hardin. DeArment has the boldness to take the reader outside the conventional Old West: Texas saloons, Kansas brothels, and Oklahoma Whiskey towns. Although these and similar locales have a place that is certainly necessary in the history of the Old West, Deadly Dozen introduces the reader to locations and their inhabitants that had an equally long-lived effect on that era’s hardscrabble reputation. Skagway, Alaska, probably does not stick in the minds of many Old West fans as a place of shootouts, lynchings, brothels, and many of the other activities typical of an Old West town. But it was in Skagway that a fierce street gunfight killed “Soapy” Smith, a well-known and detested Colorado con man. Soapy’s real name was Jefferson Randolph Smith, and according to DeArment he met his violent end after he and a gang of cronies ventured to the Klondike following gold prospectors in the late 1890s. DeArment writes, “Soapy Smith . . . did take over the Alaskan town of Skagway and, with his gang, preyed on miners until vigilantes took action against him. On July 8, 1898, Smith and vigilante Frank Reid exchanged gunfire, and both were killed” (p. 200). Another man who was feared and loathed throughout the Old West but whose reputation is among the Forgotten, is James Daniel Sherman. Sherman used the alias James Daniels but made his reputation as a gunfighter under another alias, James Talbot. Talbot was on a tear to avenge the killing of a cousin several years earlier by Mike Meagher in 1877, when Meagher was the town’s marshal. Now the owner of a hotel and saloon, Meagher was not prone to wear a pistol. DeArment writes: “Talbot led his followers in a slow retreat toward his home. By this time the entire town was aroused, and citizens were arming themselves. Stopping in the middle of the street, Talbot loudly announced that the ball was open and that the dancing had begun. ‘Hide the little ones!’ he shouted as he opened fire on the officers and other citizens” (p. 170). In a firestorm of gun2009 Book Reviews 329 *jan 09 11/26/08 12:00 PM Page 329 play that rivaled the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, two men and at least four horses were killed. This tirelessly researched book is a must read for history aficionados and neophytes alike. Deadly Dozen: Forgotten Gunfighters of the Old West, Volume 2, accomplishes its task of filling the empty saddles of the long overlooked “grassroots” shooters who were just as formative in the shaping the Old West’s reputation as Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Belle Starr. Katy, Texas Dan Anderson Tascosa: Its Life and Gaudy Times. By Frederick Nolan. (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007. Pp. 384. Illustrations, map, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-0-89672-604-8. $39.95, cloth.) Today, Tascosa, Texas, is probably best known as the home of Cal Farley’s Boys Ranch, a Christian organization supporting family and youth. However, in its heyday during the last quarter of...

Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Ruthless Flowers of Friendship

Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Ruthless Flowers of Friendship Barbara Will (bio) "In friendship, power always has its downward curve," Gertrude Stein writes in Three Lives, underscoring her particular sense of human relationships as sites of struggle, competition, and hierarchy.1 In the wake of a now-dominant tradition of feminist scholarship on Stein, which has tended to emphasize her texts' "dialogic form, in which difference may enter without being relegated to a secondary position or subsumed under an authoritarian identity,"2 we have lost sight of the degree to which Stein in her texts and in her life understood relationships as difficult at best, deadly at worst. Although Stein's work has often been associated with a form of idealized engagement called "talking and listening," she herself was an expert observer (and practitioner) of hierarchical power relations. And of all relationships, friendship was the most fraught for Stein, the dynamic most likely to result in the suppression rather than celebration of difference: the dynamic most drenched in power. Writing about friendship in Three Lives, Stein described its erotic blossoming, its fading, its shifts, and its lulls as degrees on a subtle spectrum of mutual influence and manipulation, more complex than familial relationships and certainly less predictable, supportive, or lasting. While families required accommodation, friendship for Stein was in the end about what she called "winning"—or losing. In her own life, not surprisingly, Stein's friendships were often experienced as struggles for domination and control, as competitions between victor and loser in a game of power. This essay will focus on one such friendship, with the person described by Alice Toklas as Stein's "dearest friend during her life"3: the writer, scholar, and leading French expert on American culture, [End Page 647] Bernard Faÿ. Faÿ is best known as the person who protected Stein from persecution during World War II, and is credited with saving her art collection from seizure by the Nazis. In most accounts of Stein's life, he is a benevolent if compromised friend, a Vichyite who collaborated with the Nazis but whom Stein supported publicly to the end, even working to secure his release from prison.4 Yet the story of Faÿ's "protection" of Stein and Stein's "support" of Faÿ during the Vichy years is more complex than it at first appears, occurring as it did within a context of desperation and uncertainty, marked by the needs and pressures of an extraordinary situation. If life under Vichy's profascist regime strained human relationships to their breaking point, it was especially destructive to the casually selfless and altruistic dimensions of friendship in normal times. Under Vichy, Stein's idea of a friendship defined through power and "winning" or "losing" seemed suddenly to describe the norm. Yet in fact Vichy represents for Stein and Faÿ only the final manifestation of a long and involved relationship characterized by desire, greed, ambition, egoism, mutual flattery, as well as genuine affection and shared vulnerability. Tracing the arc of this friendship over the course of some twenty years reveals the dynamic of relational power at the heart of Stein's aesthetic and social imagination. Completing the arc in the aftermath of World War II throws into relief the complex and violent end of both this friendship and the larger unsettled world out of which it emerged. I. 1924–1930 Faÿ and Stein were first introduced in 1924, in what Faÿ described as "the small, queer, and cosmopolitan, literary Paris where she [Stein] has her home."5 Although Stein claimed that initially she and Faÿ "had nothing in particular to say to each other,"6 Faÿ soon became a member of Stein's postwar queer entourage, composed of fellow writers, painters and musicians, students, sycophants, and hangers-on, most if not all of them bisexual or homosexual men. By 1926, the frequent, sometimes daily visitors to Stein's apartment included Carl Van Vechten, Sherwood Anderson, Virgil Thomson, René Crevel, Hart Crane, Paul Bowles, Aaron Copeland, Georges Hugnet, Francis Rose, the artist Pavel Tchelitchew and his partner Charles Henri Ford. And of course, Bernard Faÿ: notable for his erudition, his ambition, and his love of all things American, particularly...