Visions Of Violence Research Articles

A Vision of Violence in General Orders No. 100

AbstractThis essay analyzes General Orders No. 100, a U.S. Civil War document considered the fırst modern codifıcation of the rules of war. Recent scholarship praises the humanitarian nature of the legal code, especially as it concerns the emancipation of slaves. Without rejecting these features, I argue that the code marks a key shift in the legal framing of war. The author, Francis Lieber, uses new spatial and temporal boundaries to forge a sprawling and timeless fıeld of battle while amplifying the moral mandate of war to grant legitimacy to numerous acts of harsh violence. The only safeguard to Lieber’s broad mandate for military force is a vague notion of self-restraint that I label “humane nationalism.” Given the enormous influence of the Lieber Code, its rhetoric marks a powerful antecedent to how nations conduct warfare and legitimize what we now call “total war.”

Manifest Destiny and American Identity in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

McCarthy scholarship has predominantly tended to stress the writer’s revisionism with regard to his rendering of the myth of the American West in Blood Meridian (1985). McCarthy’s novel has beenmainlyhailed as a critique of the violence of manifest destiny. This study aims to delineate aspects of McCarthy’s narrative which resist the predominant view of him as a revisionist. In this regard, it addresses the writer’s representation of manifest destiny and American identity in this narrative. It is argued that McCarthy’s narrative essentially problematizes historiographic representation of the myth of the West not only by denying a valid access to history, but also by calling into doubt the truth claims of such a representation. Furthermore, the writer’s visions of violence and evil as universal entities undermine the predominant view of him as a revisionist. Finally, a critical reading of McCarthy’s rendering of American identity vis-a-vis Native American identity underscores the marginalization and denigration of Native Americans in the text.

Violence and the Evolving Face of Yao in Taiping Propaganda

This paper explores the interplay between rhetorical and political violence during the Taiping Civil War (1851–1864). Specifically, I examine how yao 妖, a conception bearing many cultural and historical connotations, was profusely employed in Taiping propaganda and in individual testimonies reflecting traditional political and religious beliefs. In extant Taiping placards, the Taiping rebels used xiwen 檄文, the prose of “call to arms,” to persuade people to take up the Taiping cause and to solicit and justify violence. With the compilation and extensive distribution of these xiwen, visions of violence were disseminated among the masses. Drawing inspirations from ancient historical narratives, vernacular literature, and popular religion, the Taiping rebels ingeniously used yao to refer to demonic existences that should be extinguished with the Heavenly vision. In its versatility, the meaning of yao transmuted as the Taiping movement developed. At the beginning of the movement, yao was used broadly to refer to the Taiping’s religious opponents, however, since 1853, it became a core political and religious concept used to refer to the Manchus and their supporters. Nevertheless, the meaning of yao continued to transform as the Taiping rebels sought to convert local Han militias who were fighting for the Qing government. Ironically, the Han literati conversely used yao to describe the war and the Taiping rebels. When yao was associated broadly with the Manchus, Qing loyalists, and the Taiping rebels, its dehumanizing power became a force of destructive violence beyond comprehension.

Huacayñán (1952–1953) and the biopolitics of in(ex)clusion

The foundation of the modern Ecuadorian State in the 1940s and early 1950s coincides with a series of attempts to synchronize and incorporate certain “problematic” sectors of the population that were supposedly resistant to progress and whose forms of life were incompatible with modernity, a capitalist economy, and a cohesive nation. This biopolitical project for the modernization and governance of the population also had repercussions on—and analogous manifestations within—the discourse of national identity, the design of cultural policies, and the production of State-sponsored national art. This article analyzes Huacayñán / El camino del llanto / The Way of Tears (1952–1953), a collection of FIGURE 3 aintings by Oswaldo Guayasamín that was commissioned by the government of Ecuador in 1951. Huacayñán was conceived within the ideology of mestizaje as an instrument of aesthetic cultural modernization and as a visual artistic showcase of the harmonious integration of ‘Ecuadorians.’ Despite, or even because of its governmental overdetermination, however, this article shows how Huacayñán instead materialized the exclusionary logic of the syncretic and biopolitical policies of the State, displaying dystopic visions of violence and exclusion, and of a fractured nation inhabited by monsters and resistant to mestizo-ization.

Visions of violence in the Haitian Revolution

ABSTRACTThe images of the Haitian Revolution attributed to French painter Jean-Louis Boquet and British soldier Marcus Rainsford have been widely used by museums and historians as eyewitness depictions of key atrocities. Exploring the images and texts produced by these two artists reveals that it is highly unlikely that either was produced in situ in Saint Domingue. Both Boquet and Rainsford drew heavily on a pre-revolutionary visual corpus of landscapes and adventurer's narratives as they experimented with differing visions of slave rebellion and military invasion. This article emphasises the extent to which their finished works were commercial objects, produced at specific political conjunctures in France and Britain, and in response to public opinion and market calculation. Recognising the dynamics of reproduction and omission that shaped their representations of inter-racial violence in Haiti reveals how knowledge of the revolution was constructed as legitimate. Their evasion of slave violence was not simply because black agency was unthinkable, but rather that visual evidence was not seen as necessary to authenticate the savagery of the enslaved.

Visions of Violence: Christianity and Anti-Humanism in Patricia Highsmith's Ripliad

Though it may seem godlessly immoral, the celebration of violence in Patricia Highsmith's Ripliad is rooted in a Calvinistic sense of sin and the vision of human freedom Highsmith discovered in Christian writers. Throughout the five novels composing her Ripliad, Tom Ripley ironically embodies the talents of Christ's primary antagonist—the Father of Lies—as Highsmith's embittered censure against the disappearance of evil as a meaningful psychological category in postwar culture.

The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti‐Jacobinism to Antislavery

The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti‐Jacobinism to Antislavery

Integrating American Violence

Integrating American Violence David Grimsted (bio) Rachel Hope Cleves. The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xvi + 296 pp. Figures, notes and index. $82.00. Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel. Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre-Civil War Kansas. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. xi + 198 pp. Figures, map, notes, bibliography, and index. $32.50. The Reign of Terror in America and Bleeding Borders suggest how studies of American social violence have moved from counting and analyzing incidents of murder, mayhem, and mobbing as aberrant forms of human action to seeing turbulence as an ordinary tactic of personal and social jockeying. Neither book deals deeply with incidents of social violence. Borders brings to the 1850s Kansas conflict a focus on several current scholarly concerns: Native Americans, gender roles, Southern honor, and “whiteness” studies. Reign explores how Federalists’ reactions to French Jacobin violence after 1792 developed into political, peace, and antislavery positions. Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel and Rachel Hope Cleves also share personal experiences that influenced their accounts, quick and acceptable confessionals that suggest some of their books’ strengths and limitations. Oertel’s epilogue talks of her pilgrimage from Kansas-born naiveté to deeper South wisdom. She “grew up hating the state of Missouri,” Oertel writes, and was taught that Northerners “were wholly different from those prejudiced backward southerners.” Through her studies and project, she found Kansas racism “a rude awakening,” though it was “liberating and enlightening” to learn that “the seeds of racism planted themselves throughout the country” (p.143). Oertel’s truths about the faults of Kansas and the country are self-evident, but her conviction of equal guilt blurs a bit the Kansas conflict she discusses. Oertel integrates her reasonably rich materials with much of today’s conventional academic wisdom. To remind people that Native Americans and women lived in “bleeding Kansas” is worthwhile, but little deepens the contours of the conflict. To add Indians to the hungry maw of “whiteness” scholarship, [End Page 617] where ethnics and poor whites have already been digested, is reasonable; at least they were commonly considered a racial group. Yet the general attitudes toward the two groups, Oertel suggests, were antithetical. For most white Kansans, equality or amalgamation with blacks was the epitome of social horror; for most concerned about Indians, sexual-social integration was the praised solution. Oertel points out the tidy irony that, by the time war-freed blacks came to Kansas in some numbers, the better regarded Indians were being pushed out. Women were more involved with the conflict, overwhelmingly in support of the same positions as their menfolk. Oertel claims proslavery women were contented with “the comfort of traditional patriarchal relations” (p.74). Her evidence comes from proslavery men; one Southern woman enters, to complain of having to work and comb her own hair when slavery ended. Oertel pays more useful attention to abolitionist women, a half a dozen of them wives who wrote and spoke to Northern audiences about proslavery and Democratic dishonesty and brutalism. She also chronicles uniform- and munitions-making and acts of family protection by Free State women. Oertel repeats some tales of “secret” female military units and heavy traffic on the underground railroad that one suspects were fables designed to sell books or remembrances much enhanced over time. We learn of one Mrs. Mandell, prepared to defend Lawrence with a pitchfork, standing with John Brown (who wasn’t there), and an armed Charles Robinson (who devised the nonresistance policy). By accepting extreme versions of docile “true womanhood” and “Victorian notions of feminine delicacy,” Oertel argues that abolitionist women “bled” or changed their gender roles in Kansas (pp. 58–60). Certainly this conflict-ridden frontier gave women new duties—and a few new opportunities. Yet there’s no evidence of a shift in gender roles; the activists already had been strongly in support of their moral/social causes before they came. Oertel’s discussion of masculinity centers on an alleged victory for the South in “the rhetorical battle over the meaning of manliness.” Southern manhood, she claims, glorified “aggression and violence,” while Northerners championed “self-restraint and moral rectitude”—until...

The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery (review)

The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery. By Rachel Hope Cleves. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. 296. Cloth $82.00.)Reviewed by Todd EstesSeveral years ago, Rachel Hope Cleves wrote eloquently in these pages about how violence had affected her life personally and shaped her as a scholar intellectually (On Writing History of Violence, JER 24 [Winter 2004]). In some ways, this book is a fuller, more developed rumination on those same themes. But it is also much more: a provocative, resonant first book about significant topics both timely and timeless.While scholars have long noted impact of French Revolution on U.S. politics in 1790s, Cleves argues that, from first decade of new government through end of Civil War, a French Revolutionary discourse dominated American politics and religion and was reflected in newspapers, letters, periodicals, poetry, fiction, drama, and pedagogical materials. Propounded mainly by New England Federalists and Calviniste, this strain produced numerous denunciations of Jacobinism (2), an imprecise, catch-all term of opprobrium that provided basis for a deep and long-lasting anti-Jacobin persuasion that lingered long after French Revolution played itself out. In short, she tracks growth of the anti-Jacobin sensibility (234) and its surprising but powerful effect on antebellum American life and culture. Her book traces the vital role that fear of democratic violence played in genesis of abolitionism, antiwar movement, and support for public education (9). As a fascinating subtheme, work also interrogates power of words, specifically links between violent language and violent acts. Indeed, Cleves writes that the power of violent words as an instrument of battle is what drives her book (13).While some welcomed democratizing potential of French Revolution in 1790s, American conservatives reacted with horror. From Federalist podiums and Calvinist pulpits across New England came potent, visceral counterattacks on destabilizing democratic excesses in France. Cleves argues that to anti-Jacobins violence and bloodshed of French Revolution suggested how quickly a republic could devolve into anarchy, and it galvanized them into action. Anti-Jacobinism arose as a warning that violence by individual citizens and by state could destabilize social order in United States.Calvinists and Federalists tended toward pessimism about future and believed in man's fundamental depravity; hence, their skepticism about democracy and their support for strong institutions and use of force to check democratic passions and violence. When news of horrific violence reached United States, anti-Jacobins emphasized bloodthirsty and grisly in their denunciations of French excesses, connecting them to democracy run amok. They turned their animosity toward American democrats who they believed spoke same French democratic language of bloodshed. In process, they decoupled American and French Revolutions but then linked American and French democrats, attacking them through language of bloodshed and displacing anti-Jacobinism from external to internal enemies. Federalists, Alien and Sedition Acts of 1 798 seemed vital national security measures when viewed through these lenses.But even as they denounced violence, Federalists and their Calvinist supporters did so in an expressive language of violence that curiously, for a movement decrying riotousness, was dripping in blood. Anti-Jacobins developed a vocabulary and rhetoric of sensationalism to shock readers emotionally, emphasizing most horrific, depraved, and bloody scenes they could. Early American literature reflected this Gothic strain also, as Cleves shows in a close reading of Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland. And she reminds us, To pick up pen and write in lines of blood is a violent act (103). …

The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Anti-Slavery, by Rachel Hope Cleves.

"The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Anti-Slavery, by Rachel Hope Cleves.." Canadian Journal of History, 45(2), pp. 402–403

The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery. By Rachel Hope Cleves (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2009) 312 pp. $80.00

June 01 2010 The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery. By Rachel Hope Cleves (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2009) 312 pp. $80.00 Paul A. Gilje Paul A. Gilje Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Paul A. Gilje Online ISSN: 1530-9169 Print ISSN: 0022-1953 © 2010 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc.2010 The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2010) 41 (1): 156–157. https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh.2010.41.1.156 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Paul A. Gilje; The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery. By Rachel Hope Cleves (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2009) 312 pp. $80.00. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2010; 41 (1): 156–157. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh.2010.41.1.156 Download citation file: Ris (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 ContentAll JournalsThe Journal of Interdisciplinary History Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2010 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc.2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

RACHEL HOPE CLEVES. The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2009. Pp. xvi, 296. $80.00

RACHEL HOPE CLEVES. The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2009. Pp. xvi, 296. $80.00

Visions of violence: German avant-gardes after fascism

Visions of violence: German avant-gardes after fascism

Publishing in the Republic of Letters: The Ménage-Grcevius—Wetstein Correspondence 1679–1692 ed. by Richard G. Maber

232 Reviews tryobsessively to exercise power over each other by controlling each other's thoughts through themanipulation and restriction of language. Chapter I demonstrates the frequencywith which characters dwell on the difficultyof knowing theOther. Chap ter 2 argues thatmoments of confession turn out not tobe sincerely confessional at all. Chapter 3 claims that characters evoke images of violence and death in order to practise mental tortureon their interlocutors. Chapter 4 argues thatRacine's presen tation of death and the afterlife is unusually bleak and rejects Christian notions by dwelling on a lack of redemption. Chapter 5 reads Racine in the lightofGeorge Or well's Nineteen Eighty-Four and suggests thatRacinian characters' manipulation of language and inparticular the restriction of linguistic choice that they seek to impose on their interlocutors (for instance,Antiochus says ofBerenice, 'Ellem'imposa meme un eternel silence') anticipate the tactics of thosewho inOrwell's Ministry ofTruth create new words while destroying hundreds of others as they compile their dictio nary ofNewspeak. Reilly is attempting to define a specifically Racinian thematics of communication which lies at theheart of the bleak picture of humanity thathis plays paint. She sometimes makes helpful distinctions between Racine and Pierre Corneille tosupport her point, though not, interestingly,in thecase ofChapter 4with her claims about Racine's unchristian account of death and the afterlife.She isat pains todistin guish her own work from the large amount ofwriting on Racine's language, stylistic or rhetorical,which she presents as being more technical than thematic.Her own ap proach, however, is far more rhetorical than she acknowledges, since she is interested precisely in the communicative strategies that characters deploy in order to prevail over their interlocutors, and this isprecisely what rhetoric isabout. When Agrippine makes her so-called 'sincere aveu' toNeron, it is,as Reilly says, 'intended not to re lievepain, but to increase it' (p. 53). She intends tobrowbeat her son into submission. And when characters conjure up visions of violence, even the thought of a bloody end, asReilly says, 'can be sufficienttobully characters into submission' (p. 65). This book is also, therefore,a useful contribution to rhetorical studies ofRacine. KEBLE COLLEGE, OXFORD MICHAEL HAWCROFT Publishing in theRepublic ofLetters: The Menage-Grcevius-Wetstein Correspondence I679-I692. Ed. by RICHARD G. MABER. (Studies in theHistory of Ideas in the Low Countries, 6)Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2005. vii + 174 pp. ?40. ISBN 978-90-420-i685-9. Whether considered as an abstract idea or a practical means of communication, the republic of letters in seventeenth-century Europe can be an elusive thing.Yet in Richard G. Maber's new study it isbrought vividly to life,thanks both to the seventy engagingly informal letters that are printed here for the first time and to the sym pathetic and scholarly essay with which Maber introduces them.The protagonist of thebook is theFrench polymath Gilles Menage, famous during his lifetime asmuch for his good looks and social charm as for the extraordinary range of his learning and literary activity.A widely respected etymologist, classical scholar, authority on civil law,historian, and biographer, he was also an untiring controversialist, editor of theworks of poets such as Tasso and Malherbe, and author of amorous verses of his own in four languages. No wonder that Moliere immortalized him as Vadius, the intellectual ladies' man of Les Femmes savants, nor thatBayle praised his ability to combine somuch Greek and grammar with an enviable talent for 'conversation polie et galante aupres des femmes de qualite' (p. 6). The 'liaisons deMr Menage' were evidently well known. But here it is his more scholarly and international contacts thatare the focus of attention.Wishing topromote MLR, 102.I, 2007 233 his work outside France, hewrote in the spring of I679 to a fellow classicist, Johann Georg Grafe, orGraevius, of theUniversity ofUtrecht, with a plea forhelp ingetting a revised edition of his treatise on civil law published inLeipzig. Graevius obliged and thus began a convivial correspondence which was to last until Menage's death almost thirteenyears later.By I68o the twowere planning a new edition ofMenage's commentary on theLives ofEminent Philosophers byDiogenes Laertius, amuch more ambitious project which required the involvement not only of a colleague...

Visions of Violence a Cartoon Study of America and War

There is a prominent school of thought including a number of foreign scholars who have argued that the United States was born in blood and continues to exact a heavy price from its enemies both internal and external. Accept or reject the concept, one must come to grips with the fact that the United States was in a virtual state of war throughout the late eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century. This study will examine how political cartoonists of the age, both internally and externally, viewed American militarism. While on one hand, there was general support for American military adventures, US citizens and their commentators often treated warfare waged by others as a form of immorality. Hence, the name Visions of Violence.

Results of the Reformation: Ritual, Doctrine and Religious Conversion

In contrast to traditional visions of violence, war, and oppression, accounts of religious toleration and accommodation, although perhaps grudging and on the local level, are beginning to be brought to the fore of European histories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These studies usually examine areas with significant religious minorities, and reveal that common people were cognizant of different religious beliefs and practices, and actively engaged in religious debate within the community.1 Despite the cooperation and relations between faiths, lines drawn between religious communities still existed, if blurred or often crossed. And in this milieu of competing religious identities and communities, there were still those who deliberately chose the path of conversion; consciously giving up one spiritual identity for another.Inquisition trials of reconverts to Catholicism in the seventeenth century, found in Italy, demonstrate that the majority of converts conceived of themselves as exchanging religious identities.2 In the seventeenth century, from the Catholic Church's perspective, being a Protestant constituted a crime that was solely within the Inquisition's jurisdiction to prosecute. Therefore, any Protestant wishing to become a Catholic would have to be tried, sentenced, and given a penance by the Inquisition. Only after making a full abjuration of their criminal errors and performing the assigned penance could converts become Catholics in good standing. The documents that form the basis of this paper, then, are the inquisitorial records generated by this official conversion process.The surviving records I examine in this paper, found in Florence and Rome, described conversion experiences that occurred over the course of the seventeenth century; the records found in Florence begin as early as 1638 and end as late as the 1690s, while those from Rome begin in the 1680s and continue until 1709.3 The records are incomplete, therefore making it difficult to calculate definitively the total number of converts the Holy Office dealt with every year, or over the course of the seventy years discussed here. The records that do survive, however, indicate very small numbers of converts.Furthermore, the converts themselves were atypical in seventeenth-century European society, since they were non-Italians who migrated to Italy and then converted to Catholicism. As a part of the trial procedure, inquisitors were required to record each defendant's name, place of origin, previous heretical beliefs and errors, and motive for conversion; only then could the defendant made a complete abjuration and be assigned a penance. Inquisitors often included additional important information, such as the defendant's age, family background, and travel experiences, especially as these factors pertained to the defendant's motive for conversion. This information reveals that, not surprisingly considering the precondition of mobility, most of these converts were male, and relatively young; under ten percent of the trials examined here involved women, and the vast majority of defendants were under the age of thirty-five.The records of these trials, therefore, describe the circumstances in which an individual, usually young, male, and definitely mobile, born and raised in a Protestant religious tradition, chose to convert to Catholicism. This paper, then, will discuss a confluence of several religious interstices; I intend to discuss the specific concepts defendants formulated to explain the attraction of Catholicism in several broad categories, most of which express the ritualistic, and therefore social, aspects of post-Tridentine Catholicism as it was practised. The motivations behind conversion also highlight the performative nature of religious identity in early modern Europe. These converts conceived of religion, and religious identity, as a series of actions they performed in a ritualistic setting.4 The doctrinal discussions and the converts' own contributions to the conversion narrative will be discussed concurrently, along with their ritualistic concerns, in order to display the intellectual interplay between inquisitors and converts, for both of whom ritual possessed powerful connotations and stimuli. …

Japanese Deconstructions of the Female Body

H Art Chaos stands out from other Japanese performance troupes as it performs against traditions. The troupe is a all-woman ensemble directed by a woman whose aim is to wage war on the culturally constructed Japanese female body. Oshima Sakiko, the director, and Shirakawa Naoko, the main solo performer, combine their visions of violence to extract the most precise gesture, exact timing, flawless shape, and perfect prop to project those images to rigorous excess. They focus on a kind of distortion and extreme manipulation of the female body which evokes painful kinaesthetic sensations. Their choreography produces discomfort, strain, and anguish through frantic, wrenching movement which aims at stressing the performer's body to the point of explosion or dismemberment. While their movement is based in modern, jazz, and ballet dance idioms, they push the stereotyped and classic vocabulary beyond pretty lines and feel-good sensations. They take technique to the point of excess in order to undo its forms They play with the overt meanings of props and costumes and destabilize those readings, like metaphors in a waking dream where their daily meaning drops out.

Resisting Visions of Violence with a Pedagogy of Peace

Resisting Visions of Violence with a Pedagogy of Peace