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ID:
165061
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| Summary/Abstract |
Modern colonialism carries many names. But ‘horror’ is not one of them. How and why is this? Why does the slaughter of the ‘native’, the ‘Indian’ and the ‘slave’ not register as crime or horror? This essay explores these questions though a close reading of philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence. Horrorism has become an increasingly influential source for critical international scholarship concerned with broadening the frames of violence beyond those offered by strategic and legalistic lenses. Its focus on the dismemberment of the body and discovery of a new form of ontological violence offer a fruitful avenue of inquiry for theorising the wounding and violation wrought by practices of terror and counter-terror. This essay cautions against such a supposition. A close reading of the key claims and conditions of possibility of horrorism reveals it to be constituted through the erasure of colonial violence. Tracing the lineaments of this erasure shows that horrorism functions not as a sign of newness but of Western revanchism in a time of crisis. However, this does not make horrorism redundant, for it offers valuable insights for understanding the pervasive failure to consider the horrors perpetrated by the West against non-Western others.
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| 2 |
ID:
172551
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| Summary/Abstract |
World politics generates a long list of anxiety-inspiring scenarios that threaten to unravel everyday life with sudden and violent destruction. From total war and the concentration camps, through nuclear firestorms, global pandemics and climate disaster, the diabolical violence of the recent past and conceivable future is the stuff of nightmares. Yet International Relations scholars and practitioners are often criticized for being disconnected from the human realities of international calamity. The challenge for both is to engage world politics in a way that foregrounds the human consequences of extreme violence and depravation. In this article, we explore these difficult experiences through popular culture representations of the apocalypse, a subject of intense interest for researchers in a discipline where global destruction is a distinct possibility. However, we take a different route by engaging the apocalypse through the horror genre, the one place where human suffering is explicitly accentuated. We argue that the horror genre is at once an access point for ethical engagement with the human consequences of extreme violence and a complex terrain where dark imaginings can be politically loaded, culturally specific and ethically ambiguous.
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