Bokus
Rosemary Jolly - Cultured Violence, Häftad

Häftad, Engelska, 2013

Cultured Violence

Narrative, Social Suffering, and Engendering Human Rights in Contemporary South Africa

Av Rosemary Jolly

Del 7 i serien Postcolonialism Across the Disciplines

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Beskrivning
Cultured Violence explores contemporary South African culture as a test case for the achievement of democracy by constitutional means in the wake of prolonged and violent conflict.  The book addresses key ethical issues, normally addressed from within the discourses of law, the social sciences, and health sciences, through narrative analysis. The book draws from and juxtaposes narratives of profoundly different kinds to make its point: fictional narratives, such as the work of Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee; public testimony, such as that of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and Jacob Zuma’s (the former Deputy President’s) 2006 trial on charges of rape; and personal testimony, drawn from interviews undertaken by the author over the past ten years in South Africa.  These narratives are analysed in order to demonstrate the different ways in which they illuminate the cultural “state of the nation”: ways that elude descriptions of South African subjects undertaken from within discourses that have a historical tendency to ignore cultural dimensions of lived experience and their material particularity. The implications of these lived experiences of culture are underlined by the book’s focus on the violation of human rights as comprising practices that are simultaneously discursive and material. Cases of such violations, all drawn from the South African context, include humans’ use of non-human animals as instruments of violence against other humans; the constructed marginalization and vulnerability of women and children; and the practice of stigma in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
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Professor Rosemary Jolly holds appointments in the Department of English; Southern African Research Centre and Institute for Population and Public Health at Queen’s University, Canada. Her previous books include Colonization, Violence and Narration in White South African Writing: Breyten Breytenbach, André Brink and J. M. Coetzee (Ohio UP and University of the Witwatersrand P, 1996) and co-editor, with Derek Attridge, of Writing South Africa (Cambridge UP, 1997).

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Whereas Jolly's Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing (CH, Oct '96, 34-0749) decontextualizes the fiction under investigation, removing it from the historical and sociopolitical conditions that gave rise to it so as not to "spectacularize" violence, here Jolly (English and postcolonial studies, Queens Univ., Ontario, Canada) studies fictional and factual narratives, paying attention to how writers conceive of entrenched violence against children, women, men, and animals within particular social, political, and historical circumstances--in short, how violence is "cultured." Jolly's carefully argued introduction maps out an interdisciplinary approach and links Njabula Ndebele's notion of spectacular violence with Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and symbolic violence. She goes on to place selected works of South African fiction--for example, J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace and The Lives of Animals, Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples, Siphiwo Mahala's When a Man Cries, Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Futhi Ntshingila's Shameless--alongside other narratives, such as Truth and Reconciliation Commission testimony by victim-survivors and perpetrators of violence, and discourses by politicians such as Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. Of primary importance is Jolly's call for and practice of an ethics of reading that unmasks the reader's complicity in symbolic violence and subsequent task of "unculturing violence." Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. Choice, vol. 48 No 9 Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. Choice, vol. 48 No 9

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