Special Topic: Geographies
of Violence and Power
Fall
2001
Amy
Ross
Assistant
Professor
Department
of Geography
138
GG Building
rossamy@uga.edu
It is funny about wars, they ought to be different, but they are not.
Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen, 1945.
This
seminar explores the dialectics of violence through critical readings of
contemporary debates in social theory concerning the relationship between
violence, power and space. What is the
role of violence in the construction of power? Who does violence help, and whom
does it hurt? How does violence (and/or
its absence) shape the place and space of everyday existence? Our central concern will be to interrogate
the phenomena of violence within the theoretical framework of critical legal
geographies. We will explore violence at
various scales; the body, the community, the nation, and the international
arena. How does violence in its various
forms intersect and influence the production of space?
Requirements:
There
are three areas of responsibility for seminar members:
1)
Weekly readings and
discussions: Seminar members should make a sustained
effort to engage in a constructive conversation concerning the assigned
readings. To facilitate this
interaction, students will write brief (one page) responses to that week’s key
readings, unless otherwise instructed.
2)
Oral Presentations: Students will take turns leading discussions on
seminar readings, as well as make a short (20 minute) presentation concerning a
particular research topic.
3)
Final Paper: To Be Negotiated. As class members are at various stages in
their graduate careers/research, each student can make arrangements for
completion of a paper that furthers his/her studies. May I suggest:
a)
A book review (8-10 pages) of a work new, relevant and exciting in your
area of interest;
b)
A research prospectus/funding proposal (10 pages);
c)
An introductory chapter to a thesis in progress.
Final
Papers are due December 7th.
Thank you for your cooperation.
COURSE OUTLINE:
Week
One: Introduction.
Sachs,
Albie. 2000. The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter. University of California Press.
Wattts,
Michael J. 2000. “Geographies of violence and the narcissism
of minor difference,” in Struggles over
geography: Violence, freedom and
development at the millennium. Department
of Geography, University of Heidelberg.
(Course Packet)
Week
Two: The Holocaust (with a capital “H.”)
Levi,
Primo. 1998. The
Drowned and the Saved. Vintage
Books.
Bartov,
Omer. 1996. Murder in Our Midst: The
Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation. Oxford University Press.
Week
Three: Killers at War.
Bourke,
Joanna. 1999. An Intimate History of Killing: face-to-face killing in
twentieth-century warfare. Basic
Books.
Scarry, Elaine. 1999.
“The Difficulty of Imagining Other Persons,” in Human Rights in Political Transitions; Gettysburg to Bosnia. Carla Hesse and Robert Post,
editors. Zone Books; New York. (Course Packet)
Movie: Gallipoli
Week
Four: Identities in Conflict.
Mamdani,
Mahmood. 20 01. When
Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton University Press.
Vistica,
Gregory L. “What Happened in Thanh
Phong,” The New York Times Magazine,
April 29, 2001.
Video: Forsaken Cries
Week
Five: The Traumatized Body and Its Narrative.
Scarry,
Elaine. 1984. The Body in Pain: The Making and
Unmaking of the World. Oxford
University Press.
Feldman, Allen. 1991.
“Artifacts and Instruments of Agency” in Formations of Violence: The
Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. The University of Chicago Press.
Hernan, Judith.
“Introduction,” “Chapter One” and “Chapter Two”
in Trauma and Recovery: the
aftermath of violence --from domestic
abuse to political terror. Basic Books,
1992. Pages 1-50 (Course Packet)
Week
Six: The Power to Punish.
Foucault,
Michel. 1979. Discipline
and Punish: the Birth of the
Prison. Vintage Books.
Week
Seven: Systemized Terror.
Taussig,
Michael. “Terror as Usual: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of History as a
State of Siege,” in The Nervous System Routledge,
New York, 1992. (Course Packet).
Nordstrom,
Carolyn. 1997 “Creativity, Violence and
the Scholar,” in A Different Kind of War
Story, University of Pennsylvania Press.
Coates, Peter. 1999. “” ‘Unusually Cunning, Vicious and
Treacherous’ : The Extermination of the Wolf in United States History” in The
Massacre in History, Mark Levene and Penny Roberts, editors. Berghahn Books, New York.
Week
Eight: Memory and History
Lappen,
Elena. 1999 “The Man with Two Heads” in Granta, Summer 1999 (Course Packet)
Borges, Jorge Luis.
"Funes the Memorious" in Labyrinths, New Directions Publishing
Corporations, 1962. Pages 59-66. (Course
Packet)
Winter,
Jay and Emmanueal Sivan. 1999
“Introduction” and “Setting the Framework” in War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, Winter and Sivan,
editors. Cambridge University
Press. (Course Packet)
Week
Nine: Case Study-- Balkanization.
Mertus,
Julie. 1999 Kosovo: How Myths and Truths
Started a War. (“Notes on Terms and
Concepts” and “Introduction”).
University of California Press.
(Course Packet)
Verdery,
Katherine. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies:
Reburial and Post-Socialist Change.
Columbia University Press.
Okey, Robin. 1999.
“The Legacy of Massacre; The ‘Jasenovac Myth’ and the Breakdown of
Communist Yugoslavia” in The Massacre in
History, Mark Levene and Penny Roberts, editors. Berghahn Books, New York. (Course Packet)
Week
Ten: What’s Gender Got to Do With It?
Lorentzen,
Lois Ann and Jennifer Turpin, editors.
1998. The Women and War Reader. New York University Press, New York.
Excerpts
available in Course Packet:
Enloe,
Cynthia. “All the Men Are in the
Militias, All the Women are Victims”
Copelon,
Rhonda. “Surfacing Gender: Reconceptualizing Crimes against Women in
Time of War.”
Nordstrom,
Carolyn. “Girls Behind the (Front)
Lines.”
Scheper-Hughes,
Nancy. “Maternal Thinking and the
Politics of War.”
Movie: Boys
Don’t Cry
Week
Eleven: Daily News and Extraordinary Violence.
Robbins, Bruce. 1999.
“Sad Stories in the International Public Sphere” in Feeling Global: Internationalism
in Distress. New York University
Press.
Moeller, Susan
D. 2000 “Covering War” in Compassion Fatigue; How the Media Sell
Disease, Famine, War and Death. Routledge, London. (Course Packet)
Week Twelve: The Global
Civil Society.
Guidry,
John A, Micahel D. Kennedy, and Mayer N. Zald editors. 2000. Globalization and Social Movements; Culture,
Power and the Transnational Public Sphere.
Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press.
Excerpts
available in Course Packet:
Guidry,
et. all: “Globalization and Social
Movements.”
Margaret
Keck and Kathryn Sikkink. “Historical
Precursors to Modern Transnational Social Movements and Networks.”
Ball,
Patrick. “State Terror, Constitutional
Traditions, and National Human Rights Movements: A Cross- National Quantitative Comparison.”
Week
Thirteen: The (Imagined) International Community
Goldmann,
Kjell Ulf Hannerz, and Charles Westin, editors.
2000. Nationalism and
Internationalism in the Post- Cold War Era. Routledge, London and New York.
Shami,
Seteney. "The little nation:
minorities and majorities in the context of shifting geographies."
Appadurai,
Arjun. "The grounds of the
nation-state: identity, violence and territory."
Baubock,
Rainer. "Why secession is not like divorce."
Tamir,
Yael. "Who's afraid of a global
state?"
Ford, Richard T. 2001.
“Law’s Territory (A History of Jurisdiction),” in the Legal Geographies Reader; Law, Power and
Space. Blomley, Nicholas, David
Delaney and Richard Ford, editors.
Blackwell Publishers. (Course
Reader)
Movie: The
Seventh Million: The State of Israel and
Holocaust Memory
Weeks Fourteen and Fifteen:
Questions and Conclusions.
Presentations
Catch-Up
Dinner Party: Wednesday, December 5th, 225
Parkway, Athens GA.