Walter A. Davis – författare

A profound, challenging, wide-ranging book, back in print for a new generation

Why is fear a dominant emotion in contemporary society? Why are politicians using words like 'terror', 'evil' and 'fundamentalism', and what effect is it having on public consciousness?This book taps into the cultural psyche to explore the link between ideology and emotional and psychological manipulation. It shows that the Bush administration has been hugely successful in controlling and developing a new political climate through the creation of an almost hypnotic mass consciousness. From the sado-masochist hysteria of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ‚ to the atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison; and from the genocidal use of depleted uranium in Iraq to the apocalyptic language driving the Christian Right's assault on basic human rights.Davis's findings take us to the heart of the ideological paralysis of the Left, while offering an innovative approach to understanding contemporary history.

This book explores the complex relationship between art and politics. Walter Davis uses his extensive knowledge of psychoanalysis to develop a philosophical critique of the impact that the current political climate is having on all artistic endeavour. He uses examples from a wide variety of fields including the theatre and popular culture, to show how true artistic freedom of expression is under threat from the ideological constraints imposed by contemporary capitalism. Starting with an analysis of the censorship of the play 'My Name is Rachel Corrie', which was withdrawn from production by a major New York theatre due to political pressure, Davis shows how all art that challenges the mainstream is suppressed or distorted to suit the politics of our time - one that will not recognise the truth of human experience and the disorder at the heart of all civilization.

Attempts to comprehend the traumatic significance of Hiroshima in order to construct a new theory of history.Through a critique of history-as a reality, a discipline, and a way of writing-Deracination challenges the basic theoretical tenets of both humanism and postmodernism. As a discipline, history is currently undergoing what Heidegger would call a productive "crisis," and a number of thinkers, including Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Paul Ricoeur, and Stephen Greenblatt, have begun to reexamine the cognitive assumptions and narrative paradigms that inform the discipline. This book radicalizes such developments in order to construct both a new theory of history as well as a new concept of how histories should be written. To make the interrogation concrete, the book focuses on Hiroshima and the ways in which the trauma of that event has been repressed by the discourses that historians have fashioned in order to "explain" what happened on August 6, 1945.