Denied feminine subjectivity: Murderous wives in the 19th century Ottoman Empire
This study aims to explore domestic crime, female criminality and feminine subjectivity in the Ottoman Empire during the second half of the 19th century, especially by focusing on “murderous wives” who poisoned their husbands. By investigating the interrogation reports of the secular/regular court records, I will try to show how the subjectivity of these women is denied by the interrogators who repeatedly emphasized the role of the (male) herbalists and the collaborators instead of the perpetrators themselves.
Crime and punishment has special relationship with violence both historically and conceptually. Any action that exceeds the boundaries limited and defined by the law is labeled as “crime” thus deserves to be “punished” by the state authority. Just as Walter Benjamin reminds us, “the law’s interest in a monopoly of violence vis-a-vis individuals is not explained by the intention of preserving legal ends...” but by the possibility of violence’s existence outside the law. However, people do not give up violence for the sake of the state; therefore demolishing the mentality that punishment is a simple and necessary consequence of crime or a means of administrative social control. On the contrary, violence works, for the people, as a mechanism of seeking justice officially or unofficially by deconstructing the sharp lines between the definitions of crime and punishment. What is identified as “crime” by the law can become a way of “punishment” in everyday life just as happened in cases of rural arson, lynchings and poisoning.
This study, then, aims to examine how violence is invoked by ordinary people for whom it, in fact, never signifes a monopoly of the state and especially by women seeking justice and revenge. I will scrutinize some cases of domestic homicide by focusing on the interrogation reports closely through which the feminine subjectivity is denied. This denial creates an interesting case in the history of violence in such a way that the violent crime of the murderer is defined not as an autonomous act but as an act that cannot be carried out by “women”. The interrogator, in all cases investigated, is reluctant to believe that the woman alone killed her husband. He wants to learn who actually encouraged her for this ferocious crime. Here, we see that the interrogator’s/state’s real interest is not with the female criminal since it does not consider her as a subject, thus as a threat to the social and domestic order.
“Murderous wives” show that women are not desperate victims in the face of domestic violence, rather they are historical agents having the means of changing their destiny with strategies that are sometimes peaceful and sometimes brutal. Poison which is identified universally as the female weapon of murder par excellence, as Ann-Louise Shapiro claims, is resorted by these women as a means of coping with domestic violence or feckless husbands. However, the interesting point is that the role of violence in the construction of women’s subjectivity is denied and ignored even when women took matters into their own hands.
Virtuous Bombs: The Mechanical Eye and Friction Embodied in the Gulf
My paper argues that a visual modality that emerged in the United States attack on Iraq during the second Gulf War privileged a particular form of patterning that effaces the foundations of its calculative logic. The point of departure for the piece is Critical International Relations scholar James Der Derian’s notion of virtuous war, a “bloodless” war whose application of force is considered purely ethical. As Der Derian describes it, virtuous war has developed “the technical capacity and ethical imperative to threaten and, if necessary, actualize violence from a distance – with no or minimal casualties” while effacing its numerous victims. I have decided to focus my argumentation on the use of the GPS-sighted smart bomb, which when plugged into a particular collective assemblage of enunciation, becomes the virtuous bomb.
One of the central arguments in the paper is that virtuous war relies on an enlightenment model of ethics and compartmentalized analytic clarity. I will try to make the strong case that when applied to the tactical coordinates of the battlefield, it becomes a visual modality based on a metaphysics of internalized violence. A short genealogical investigation shows that such a modality was developed in order to mobilize a civilian population, turning CNN-watching Americans into armchair bombardiers, helping the good guys win by participating in “surgical strikes” and disassociating them from the army of anonymous victims.
This metaphysics was then twinned with the enunciative field of calculation constructed by war planners and field generals whose penchant for control led them to agree with their own propaganda – that the mechanical eye sees all. To understand the dangerous potential of combing the metaphysics of violence with the enunciative field of calculation, we only need to recall the cavalier pilot Major “King” Kong riding a nuclear bomb to Armageddon in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove who initiates war without contact save a radioed go code.
The paper then treats virtuous bombs as a technique of power which can be expanded in order to problematize virtuous war. The narrative of precision that affectively changes commanders’ perceptions can give us insight into a much larger affective economy of war. Ultimately, what is effaced comes back to haunt the imperial metaphysics of virtuous war. And as this violence increases, The United States reliance on the disciplinary power of smart bombs in virtuous war becomes a liability for nation building. After seeing fellow Iraqis die in bombings, whether due to bad intelligence, to a stray bomb, or to reductive discourse that enframes military understanding, it is no wonder that that Iraqis rarely believe officials’ assertions that “the safest place for an Iraqi civilian is at home in his bed.”
Will the United States continue to rely on the stubborn imperial logic of virtuous war which guaranteed the dooms the United States to a failure similar to Vietnam? What does the co-emergence of the smart bomb and the enunciative field of calculation tell us about the technologies of violence deployed by the US military?
Thresholds of Modernity: Political Technologies of Life and Death on the Urban-Rural Frontier in India
In this essay I analyze emerging articulations of popular affect in India?s public culture to produce an understanding of how violence directed against the self (in this case mass-suicide by farmers) is legitimized across the rural-urban frontier in India. Contrary to existing analyses that posit a disjuncture between the urban and the rural I look at how crucial technological mobilizations are producing a conjuncture of political and economic forces. While many existing explanations are morally compelling for their urgent call to locate the causes of peasant suicides, my essay seeks to study the conditions of possibility within which farmers? suicides are affected by and affect the broader conjunctural terrain of Indian politics. This emerging conjuncture is articulated to newer regimes of technologies of production, and power. These regimes are in turn articulated to emergent regimes of signs and technologies of the self. Using Foucault?s notion of power, and Deleuze and Guattari?s notion of affect, and assemblage, I seek out an interstitial space between Postcolonial Studies and Cultural Studies to rethink the question of ?violence?.
In 1999, the government of the central Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (AP) and McKinsey and Company (a management consulting firm), unveiled a plan document titled Vision 2020. The plan proposed a compendium of measurable indicators and sets of allied practices and institutional changes in governance structures (underwritten by the World Bank and DFID). It argued that the existing engagement of 70% of AP?s population in agriculture was ?not a successful model for development?. It proposed instead to ?reduce population engaged in agriculture to 40%?. In 2002, guided by the recommendations of Vision 2020, the UK Department for International Development (DFID) budgeted ?65 million to underwrite a plan to enable the ?relocation? of 20 million farmers in Andhra Pradesh. In 2005, the Indian ministry of home affairs reported that 926,000 farmers had committed suicide between 1995 and 2003. In the same time, unprecedented figures of economic growth are fostering a sense of urban euphoria as the Bombay SENSEX becomes an object of national fascination.
In contrast to the gravity of the contemporary crisis of farmers? suicides, consider the dynamism and self-assurance of farmer?s movements as recently as in the late 1980s. Gail Omvedt (1994) describes a prominent farmers rally in March 1988 that saw more than 5 million farmers march to Delhi to declare, ??we are not asking the state to forgive our debts; we are declaring ourselves free of debt.? This contrast where in the space of a decade farmers have turned to suicide as a political judgment of collective futures rather than perform self-assured declarations of economic and political freedom, suggests a radical change in the affective order, and the cultural-political logics that govern the rural-urban frontier. My project is based on the premise that an understanding of this radical shift in the affective order is vital to fashioning strategies to intervene in the crisis.
Proposed Title: Searching for the State: Trauma and Memory around "1983" in Sri Lanka
This paper looks at recollections of a cataclysmic moment of violence, generally referred to as an ethnic riot that occurred in Colombo, Sri Lanka in 1983, from the perspectives of victims. Anthropological accounts of the riots, as well as social scientific explanations of ethnic violence often posit violence as produced in the context of state breakdown/failure or complicity. Such a thesis is of course not invalid as states do either turn a blind eye to mass civilian violence or find themselves unable to cope with it. And in many instances, this is compounded by the instigation and participation of state officials and actors in the organization and perpetration of physical attacks. However, such a perspective is limiting for it reproduces a familiar binary between order and violence, state and violence through which violence is relegated to a pathological or anomalous outcome.
In this essay, I propose looking at the recollections of victims as they relate to the state, in order to find out if these can produce different understandings of the state, and consequently, of violence. The key methodological motivation in this endeavor is not so much to graft an apriorily fashioned critical, theoretical conception of the state but instead to engage in a conversation with the categories of lived experience. Engaging with the testimony of victims produces a challenge, for their understandings of violence are not necessarily driven by the elaboration of facts or explanations concerning what happened. In this specific instance, testimony hovers between a certain listlessness and fear: listlessness about the 'past-ness' of 1983; fear about the reoccurrence of it in the present or future. Taking into account these constitutive features of victim testimony, I ask how and where it is that the state emerges in their narrativization of violence.
The purpose of the paper is to construct an understanding of the state through the analytical rubrics of fear, rumor, uncertainty, and trauma. What does the state look like when approached from a perspective produced through an engagement with these categories? And in turn, what might this tell us about our attempts to know, understand, and mitigate violence?
The expectation of this exploration is that by interrogating taken-for-granted understandings of state and order through the perspective of trauma and victimhood, we can gain some insight into the limitations of our social scientific understandings of violence that are prevalent today.
Documenting the Material Affects and Human Cost of Urban Warfare in Jonathan Holmes' Falluja
Michel de Certeau distinguishes the "concept city," the disciplining of urban space into rational units of mapability, from the urban fact, the anarchic, mobile and operational actuality of existence in urban space. Strategists impose order onto urban space by creating structures of transportation, zoning ordinances, sidewalks, bridges, parks, buildings and so on. Tacticians, the people who actually live in the city, constantly resist and undo this imposed order. As these pedestrians maneuver the city, the motion of their bodies map new cities, transforming, displacing and improvisationally connecting the signifiers of ordered space into migrational patterns of use.
The discourse of warfare seeks to conceptualize cities as military targets to be (re)ordered. Urban warfare, however, presents specific challenges to the strategies of organization that military operatives seek to enforce. The very geography of urban space, constructed in the tension between its strategists and tacticians, is a complex environment, requiring bodily negotiations, as opposed to the vehicular or technological management employed in open spaces of conflict. Consequently, soldiers are obligated to engage in close, body to body combat. In essence, the strategists, those who would impose order, are transformed into tacticians--spatial practitioners--who move through a city/battlefield shaped by non-combatants, de Certeau's pedestrians.
Jonathan Holmes' Falluja, a documentary theatre piece constructed from first person testimony concerning the U.S. siege of the Iraqi city, attempts to re-materialize war by using live bodies to signify the shifting, tactical reality of the city and of urban warfare. The play requires a free-form, open performance space, bare except for a large projection screen and two small mobile television sets, and utilizes a sophisticated soundscape to create an auditory iconography of war. The staging area remains mobile; spectators stand and the action takes place among and all around them. Using the live bodies of actors and spectators as indexes of the city, the play mimetically makes and un-makes Falluja. Concurrently, dead and injured bodies are perpetually referenced and described, documenting the corporeal reality of urban military operations. Rather than presenting the siege as a political or diplomatic action, the staging of the play involves and implicates its audience in the material affects, and costs, of war.
Current U.S. rhetoric claims Falluja is now one of the safest places in Iraq. Falluja exposes this "safety" as a voyeuristic conceptualization that does not reflect, nor make up for, the daily life of the decimated population of the city. "Safety" has been purchased not by a libratory war, but by genocide. Documentary theatre usually focuses on the "mind and heart," an ironic echo of U.S. foreign and military policy, where the spectator visually receives a presentation. Falluja obligates the spectators to somatically experience and participate in the presentation. The body, in its encounter with the world and with sensations, remembers that which the mind will not or can not. In considering Falluja, where the bodies of spectators are implicated in the action, as a potentially activist script, I remain cautiously optimistic.
Sovereign Hospitality: Negotiating Violence at the Border
This paper takes as its central concern the role of violence in the relationship between 'sovereignty' and 'hospitality'. Is there an inescapable violence in the way that state sovereignty deals with or negotiates its borders? Is hospitality toward the 'other' at the border consigned to and restricted by violent sovereignty? If so, what is invested in this violence? What is at stake? Finally, is there a way to destabilise the relationship between sovereignty and violence in order to rethink our practices of hospitality? These questions will be explored in a preliminary manner in this paper via the works of Giorgio Agamben.
In recent times there has been an explosion of literature engaging theorist Giorgio Agamben's work on sovereignty to understand the contemporary operation of violence as integral to sovereign power. According to Agamben, sovereignty, whether dressed up in a totalitarian or a liberal democratic uniform, structurally requires the condition of the 'exception', those who will be included by sovereignty for the sole purpose of exclusion. Given no rights, and conferred no protections, the 'object' of the exception is what Agamben calls "bare life", life that can be killed but not sacrificed (not made to matter). Agamben's theory is interesting as it demands an attention to the historical and ongoing violence of 'liberal democratic' paradigms of government in the production of "bare life". That is, Agamben's theory forces us to recognise the centrality of violence in the construction and reproduction of liberal democracy, thus contesting the idea that liberal democracy is the best system for minimising violence.
In an Australian context, sovereign violence arose initially with colonialism, resulting in the dispossession and destruction of Indigenous lands, cultures and lives. The imposition of liberal democracy required the profoundly undemocratic act of dispossession. Moreover, as this paper will discuss, the current debates around asylum seekers and refugees in Australia highlights the racialised and economic attributes of liberal democracy's violence and its implications for hospitality. For Agamben, this violence is the logical outcome of older philosophical theories informing contemporary practice. For some critical race scholars, this violence is bound up with ensuring a structure which privileges political, economic and cultural whiteness. In other words, the practices of hospitality permitted under Australia's liberal democracy illuminate the priority of neo-liberalism in conjunction with a cultural agenda focused on consolidating whiteness at a national level.
In attempting to engage with the questions posed at the beginning of this abstract, I will tease out Agamben's theory of sovereignty, its connection with violence, and analyse its implications for immigration (as a site for hospitality), focusing specifically on refugees and asylum seekers. If sovereignty presumes the demarcation of borders, which is fundamentally violent and unethical, can Agamben's theory offer us any hope of prying open the coupling of sovereignty and violence? Or must we turn elsewhere for this? Are 'liberal democratic' practices of hospitality toward the disadvantaged destined to repeat the sovereign exception?
Abstract: "The Noose That Built the Nation: Recovering the History of Mexican Lynching in the Southwest"
In North from Mexico: the Spanish Speaking People of the United States Carey McWilliams asserts that "more Mexicans were lynched in the Southwest between 1865 and 1920 than blacks in other parts of the south." The hundreds of unrestrained murders of Mexican/Mexican Americans in throughout the southwest have gone largely unrecognized in U.S. and Chicano/a histories. Yet, the racialized mob murders were well documented: indeed, lynchings of Mexican/ Mexican Americans in the southwest were regularly reported by the national media. For instance, in a travel article of the New York Times in 1854, "A Tour of the Southwest: Number Nine," the unidentified special correspondent writes:
"Last summer it was formally resolved that no Mexican should be allowed to remain in the county after a certain date.. But our treaty with Mexico provides that every Mexican residing in our newly acquired territory shall be entitled to all the rights and immunities of a native citizen of the United States, and the laws of Texas must be made in accordance with this stipulation. Must these poor and doubtfully honest dark-colored people then remain? Absurd! Is there not a higher law than that of Texas or the United States-the great and glorious law of selfish, passionate power-Lynch Law?"
After 1900, U.S. media increasingly acknowledged violence against Mexican/Mexican Americans in the southwest. In 1922, the New York Times editorial of November 18 read: "The killing of Mexicans without provocation is so common as to pass almost unnoticed." Previous work on lynching has focused on the murders of African Americans in the south. Those works that have discussed violence against Mexican/Mexican Americans in the southwest in this period conflate lynching murders with generalized stories on "frontier violence" and "vigilantism." In addition, no work has been published that considers "modern" southwestern lynchings of Mexican/Mexican Americans. Why has the lynching of Mexican/Mexican Americans been largely unwritten and the losses of these lynching victims unvalued?
Brutal murders of Mexican/Mexican Americans have been replicated for over a century in the southwest-today by vigilante groups in San Diego County, at the Arizona state border, and throughout the southwest. I examine how nation building and the consolidation of national belonging have been constructed through ritualized, performative violence. I suggest a larger look at the lynching of Mexican/Mexican Americans in the southwest as coupled with expansionism and colonialism-historically and in the present. My goal is to repopulate the southwest historical landscape with the Mexican/Mexican American and to recover the history of race terror against Mexican/Mexican Americans in the southwest.
The Disastrous Sublime: Photography and the Figure of Globalization
In the present moment the forces of globalization furrow and distort the historically sacrosanct borders between nations, cultures, and temporal orders. For some the resulting changes produce contexts for new political configurations, as in Hardt and Negri’s Empire, or, on the other end of the ideological spectrum, Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat renders a world where the benevolent shifts of capital enable increased global equity. For others, like Samuel Huntington, these primarily Western forces set off a range of confrontations fomented from deep-seated cultural antimonies. In either perspective there resides an implicit sense in which globalization presents a set of universal imperatives, or a universalizing logic. For sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this universalism, incurred by the forces of neo-liberalism in particular, has dire implications for the autonomy of cultural fields.
Photographic production, a field already compromised by heterogeneous forces from the fields of other art forms, commercialism, as well as mass culture, stands as the representational set of practices best suited to address the leveling, violent forces of neo-liberalist globalization. In the face of these new absolutes, the magnitudes of neo-liberal expansion, ecological disaster, the ghostly violence American imperial apparatuses, a new form of the “sublime” has emerged in contemporary photographic practice. Contemporary photographers Andreas Gursky, Edward Burtynsky, and Trevor Paglen, invoke the “sublime” as a gestural mode in order to figure the immensity of disastrous change and warfare that operate outside of everyday existence. This essay will attempt to delineate three moments of the sublime as it has developed as a cultural phenomenon from Immanuel Kant through modernism, into the reprieve of post-modernity, and its resurgence in the global or disastrous sublime of the present.
In the soft graphite images of Ayakoh Furukawa, an adorable hamster is hung, steamed, burned, chopped, and otherwise mutilated in one hundred drawings entitled 100 Ways to Torture the Innocent. In another series entitled Girl's Psyche, Furukawa incorporates images of Sanrio's Hello Kitty in vivid pinks and turquoises with images of faceless girls asking, "She lives in a world where everything is cool, cute and kind of sexy. Is she dreaming? Is the false world her reality? Who gave her that reality?" Furukawa and her contemporaries, Takashi Murakami, Nobuho Nagasawa, Hiroki Otsuka, and Momoyo Torimitsu, all Japanese artists living or invested in the United States, utilize both cute and not-so-innocent elements of manga and anime to expose and negotiate the dark possession implicit in the Western obsession with Japanese cute.
The presumptuous coupling of Japan with a culture of cuteness is subversively problematic. For Nobuyoshi Kurita, sociology professor at Musashi University in Tokyo, cute is a "magic term" encompassing everything that is acceptable and pleasing - Japan's response to the West. While this relationship invariably posits the West as the consumer and Japan as the producer, this seemingly symbiotic relationship is anything but. Explosive attention on the Museum of Contemporary Art's recent retrospective of Takashi Murakami, complete with a fully functioning Louis Vuitton boutique, spoke to the ease of Western consumption of Japanese cute: Murakami merely constitutes a high-end extension of a long-standing preoccupation with such characters as Hello Kitty and Pokemon.
The relationship of Western companies with Japanese superficial iconic elements has often been a visual marker of Japan's relationship with the United States and Europe. Although Japan's own obsession with cuteness has inevitably smoothed the path for the West's cooptation of its icons, artists such as Murakami, the current champion of Japanese cuteness in the West, utilize the fundamentally flat and in-your-face icons of anime- and manga-cute to expose this troubling history: most prominently, the United States' decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1949. The connection of Western businesses with Japanese cute icons overlooks a relationship fraught with an unsettling history of atomic bombs, colonialism, and contemporary tourism, a relationship more defined by possession than by consumption.
The human rights literature, predominantly focuses on the violations of human rights and abuses. Mainly represented by human rights activists, this literature oversees the deeper political ground on which the human rights discourse is founded. The critical corpus of works that enhance these discussions, mainly represented by academics, on the other hand produces a liberal democratic politics of the human rights problem. These critical works, even though they distance themselves from the language of activism, take human rights problems as a problem of absences and presences, hypocrisy and double standards. Both approaches formulate the violence as a pathology that has to be restricted or emancipated from to preserve 'human dignity.' My approach, as different from both of them, will try to place human rights discussions into the context of nation-state, through a political reading of violence not seeing it as pathology or an accidental act, but as a founding element of politics.
The first group of critiques, taking the UN standards at the center of its politics, organizes protests, aid campaigns or supports humanitarian interventions to stop the violence. The second type of criticism, still as integral and internal part of human rights debate, gives a way to different approaches such as anthropological, epistemological and sociological criticisms. While anthropological criticism questions the universality of human rights through the issues cultural differences (Asian Values, Islamic Culture etc.)[1], epistemological criticism brings the issues of essentialism and foundationalism to the table[2]. The sociological criticism, carrying the rights discussion to the realm of citizenship, multiculturalism, welfare state and social rights, problematize the legitimacy of individual rights vs. groups rights etc[3]. using the arguments and findings of these approaches but mainly influenced by the contemporary critical theory, prefers to focus on the political aspects of the problem. my aim is to draw attention to the condition of possibility of rights discussion in reference to violence and sovereignty to appreciate the inclusionary and exclusionary strategies of human rights. Our focus will be more on political and discursive use of the discourse and limitations of the argument outside the liberal democratic legacy. Our debate will take the issue of violence in the center rather than taking the rights at the center.
This is the liberal illusion if you start to take the rights in the center of the debate we will be entrapped. We will rather focus on what are the rights, possibilities of alternative definitions and more inclusive mechanisms to protect the rights. If we turn the debate to the discussion of the violence it will be a more dynamic and meaningful debate. Rather than discussing the limitations of the institutions and controversy of the norms we will start to focus on the means and mechanisms that reproduce violence. We will argue that institutionalization and reproduction of violence and rights violations have been reproduced with the same instruments that have been used by liberal theorists.
To think about human rights is to start from its philosophico-historial critique. This attempt should start from its philosophical heritage, its premises, its relations to other formulations of justice and its politico-social claims. If we start from the canonical question of cultural studies, it is to ask "who benefits from human rights?"
