The
reader can find in this book a very complete panorama (twenty-two
contributions) of the numerous faces violence
can take: violence turned to the body, masculine or feminine, violence of the
language, violence of some cultural or ethnic practices, but also a study of
colonial, sexual and racial violence.

The
volume is divided in four parts. In part I, "Global Crossings: Racialized
and Sexualized Conflicts", the essays provide a sum of contemporary modes
and acts of physical and representational violence through a focus on racial,
sexual and neocolonial violence and its reality in Eastern Europe and Pacific
Islander. In part 2, "Coloniality and the Consumption of the Other",
contributions come upon the violence of European colonial expansion. Part 3, "Performing
Race, Gender, and Sexuality", deals with complex identities of ‘marginal
people’, especially transgender and biracial ones. In Part 4, " Understanding
‘Trauma’: The Psychic Effects of Material Violence", the essays focus on
the link between acts of physical violence and their effects on the subject
regarding his social position, race and gender.

Here
is a brief analysis of the book’s main essays.

In "Borders,
Violence and the struggle of Chicana and Chicano", Aldama tries to
understand — through the example of Chicanos –, what it means not only to be
physically colonized and thus considered as marginal or subaltern, but also to
be mentally colonized, namely viewed as savage and inferior.

Through
"Hungarian Poetic Nationalism or National Pornography?", A. Imre
adopts a feminist and potscolonial approach, on the ground of a textual analysis of male Hungarian poets writing in
cross-gender voices (p. 42). The author studies how this literature represents
Hungarian woman as exotic and extremely erotic — an image which will be
achieved in the Hungarian films of the 1990’s. We shift then from a "poetic
eroticism" to a "pornographic eroticism" (p. 47). Imre shows how
this passage could be considered as a translation to an awareness in which
Hungarian women break away from a male culture.

In "Militarizing the feminine body", Y. Sangarasivam
wonders how women engaged in revolutionary
movement against the Sri Lankan government redefine, by their action in a organised
movement of resistance, their roles as women and create for themselves a new
identity in which they finally succeed in controlling their bodies.

In her "Blood and Dirt", Leila Neti provides an
interesting account of what is a gender resistance. She analyses how women
prisoners in Northern Ireland come to use a new symbolic way of protest, their menstrual
blood, which is a part of general strike of no-wash.

In her
"Bodily Metaphors, Material Exclusions", Catherine Raissiguier
analyses the French situation regarding both immigrant and gay politics
nowadays. The essay considers the government’s failure in integrating
diversity, showing how political discourses "represent postcolonial
immigrants and queers as threats to the national body" (p. 105) and create
a popular and irrational logic in which "Islam = AIDS". The trouble
is that readers who know french social and political reality can be surprised
by such an equation; Raissiguier’s essay is, to that extent, quite hazardous.

R. B. Tolentino’s essay, "Mattering
National bodies and Sexualities: Corporeal Contest in Marcos and Brocka",
looks at the representation of presidential body during Marco’s regime. The
author analyses the contrast between this image of excess and the one provided
by the "national bodies" of the mere Filipino citizen, that is to say
extreme poverty.

In "The Time of Violence:
Deconstruction and Value", E. Grosz moves to another expression of
violence, which is the linguistic one, working on Derrida’s theory of
deconstruction. She shows how language can materialize the reality of violence
and create a process in which both physical and social bodies come to be soiled
and finally perverted.

The essays of Part II deal with the
violence of European colonial expansion and the constitution of national
identities in such a violent context. Accordingly, Mikes Hays, in his "Consuming
Cannibalism : the Body in Australia’s Pacific Archive" shows that, in
portraying the "cannibal" as barbaric, savage and inhuman,
colonialism can be considered as anthropophagic because of his metaphorical
consumption of the cannibal body. One can wonder whether such a deconstructive
and dialectical approach is really pertinent here.

Guerrero’s "Global Genocide
and Biocolonialism" works on the same approach of deconstruction in the
field of biomedical industry. He analyses to what extent the Human Genome
Diversity Project is in fact the new face of colonialism in which indigenous
people are sacrificed and consumed on the progress’ altar. The reader may find
here some excess, to say the least.

D.
Childs’ "Angola, Convict Leasing, and the Annulment of Freedom"
studies the case of an ex-slave plantation in Louisiana, "Angola",
which has become a prison. He shows how the main features of colonialism
persist nowadays — insofar as black men constitute the majority of Angola’s
prisoners –, especially in the presence of a "structural terror"
whose victims, slaves or prisoners, are always recognizable by the color of
their skin. Markowitz’s essay (pp. 209-226) comes upon the same conclusion when
looking at the case of Goetz, a white man who shot four black teenagers: the
white man is considered both as a victim and hero and the black one as a
criminal, though the first is the killer of the second.

Two contributions are allowed, in
the third part of the book, to the study of examples of trans-gendered
identities. Whang’s "Double Cross" is devoted to a study of the work
of the video artist Christopher Lee, an FTM (female to male transsexual). In Whang’s
reading, Lee breaks the traditional definition of male and female
subjectivities in order to light on new cultural identities and promote "visually
disjunct, gendered, and racialized sites of embodiments" (p. 305). In her
essay, Ana Mariella Bacigalupo explains that in southern
Chile, Mapuche
shamans assume masculine, feminine and cogender identities with an extraordinary ability to move between them. This
study leads her to the conclusion that "culture is produced dynamically by
individuals who engage in different cultural tropes to support and subvert
power relations" (p. 339).

Rimke’s
"Constituting Transgressive Interiorities" attempts to understand how
nineteenth-century psychiatry celebrated the idea that mad and pathological
interiorities were the product of some physical signs scientific practices
could light on; Rimke gives an interesting account of the dangerous
consequences of such a materialist medicine of the soul though we can regret
the absence of at least a reference to the Foucaldian work on the subject.

Through Rita Hayworth’s case, Nerricio’s
essay analyzes how people can be lead to de-ethnicization to become conformable
to "white" norms of beauty and feminity.

Part IV works specifically on
psychological effects of violence. In her "Re/membering the Body : Latinas
Testimonies of Social and Family Violence", Y. Flores-Ortiz, through an
analysis of the language of Latina’s narratives, tries to show how bodies
encode manifestations of violence they’re submitted to, creating a
post-traumatic stress disorder whose materializations can go from eating
disorders to a lack of trust. Ortiz’s conclusion is that healing from this
social and familial violence must be a community task.

In her "Sita’s War and the
Body Politic", S. Peacock reflects on the
domestic violence among South Asian immigrants — especially in the Indian
communities –in the United States. She tries to show how South Asian immigrant women "can
transcend the barriers placed in their paths by their traditional cultures"
(p. 372).

In his
essay, David Foster analyses Arturo Ripstein’s
movie, El lugar sin límites, which tells the tragic story of "La
Manuela", a transvestite who lives in a brothel run by his
daughter, whom he wants to protect. Through the murder of La Manuela, Foster
explains the link between homophobic violence and contradictions of hypermasculinity
in a patriarchal society whose heterosexuality is the only valid norm.

In "Medicalizing
Human Rights and Domesticating Violence in Postdictatorship Market-States",
Lessie Jo Frazier scrutinizes the Chilean transition to democracy, explaining
that the shift from military to civilian rule doesn’t coincide with the
eradication of violence insofar as entire parts of Chilean population continue
to have their rights flouted.          

In short, this book constitutes a
useful tool for a large readership — in consideration of both the diversity of
the subjects dealt with and the points of view token up by the authors —
though there are some real differences of level between the contributions. This
may lead the reader to question the general approach of the book which is, in
some respects, quite doubtful.

 

© 2004 Soumaya Mestiri

 

Soumaya Mestiri, Ph.D., University
of Louvain, Belgium.

Categories: Philosophical