You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Classifying people as 'victims' is a historical phenomenon with remarkable growth since the second half of the 20th century. The term victim is widely used to refer both to those who have died in wars and to people who have experienced some form of physical or psychological violence. Moreover, victimhood has become a shorthand for any injustice suffered. This can be seen in many contexts: in debates on social justice, when claims for compensation are made, human rights are defended, past crimes are publicly commemorated, or humanitarian intervention is called for. By adopting a history of knowledge approach, Victims takes a fresh look at the phenomenon of classifying people as victims. It go...
This book examines the many ways in which anger and indignation shape authorial intentions and determine the products of contemporary Italian artists.
How porous is the border between life and death? How do the dead influence the living and in what way? What can Heaven, Hell, Purgatory and the two Limbos tell us of our contemporary world today? In The Mirror of Death, Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte explores the hermeneutical potential of the regions in the hereafter. After an exciting voyage through the emergence of the afterlife and of the constancy of death’s presence in the history of humanity, Vanhoutte shows, through the study of the nature and genealogy of the various realms in the beyond, how an invigoratingly new and critical perspective of a wide variety of contemporary phenomena is unveiled when reading them through the interpretative lens of these regions where the dead dwell. Modern politics, our fellow human beings, the times of our lives, the capitalistic economic system, medicalization, wokism, and living in crisis will never look the same.
This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the Italian experience of transitional justice examining how the crimes of Fascism and World War II have been dealt with from a comparative perspective. Applying an interdisciplinary and comparative methodology, the book offers a detailed reconstruction of the prosecution of the crimes of Fascism and the Italian Social Republic as well as crimes committed by Nazi soldiers against Italian civilians and those of the Italian army against foreign populations. It also explores the legal qualification and prosecution of the actions of the Resistance. Particular focus is given to the Togliatti Amnesty, the major turning point, through comparisons to th...
Rethinking the concepts of "witnessing" and "witness" is highly relevant to the study of war crimes, mass murder and genocide. Through multiple readings, the volume shows the meanings and functions of witnessing in a political and historical context marked by the emergence of multiculturalism. The ultimate goal is the exploration of divergent and intersectional positions of the witness and witnessing as both concrete and hermeneutical categories. As a result, the mechanisms of social, political, and psychological oppression, murder and genocide will become tangible and understandable with greater precision and finesse.
This volume explores the Italian contribution to the current global phenomenon of a “return to reality” by examining the country’s rich cultural production in literature and cinema. The focus is particularly on works from the period spanning the Nineties to the present day which offer alternatives to notions of reality as manufactured by the collusion between the neo-liberal state and the media. The book also discusses Italy’s relationship with its own cultural past by investigating how Italian authors deal with the return of the specter of Neorealism as it haunts the modern artistic imagination in this new epoch of crisis. Furthermore, the volume engages in dialogue with previous works of criticism on contemporary Italian realism, while going beyond them in devoting equal attention to cinema and literature. The resulting interactions will aid the reader in understanding how the critical arts respond to the triumph of hyperrealism in the current era of the virtual spectacle as they seek new ways to promote cognitive transformations and foster ethical interventions.
The Sexual/Political engages with contemporary political issues in sexuality through a survey of modern philosophy, psychoanalytic thought, 20th-century political theory, and more recent queer philosophies. The book investigates how the sexual has perturbed philosophical, political, and psychoanalytic thought and how this has fed into discrimination against the LGBTQI community. It analyses the social stigmas applied to public and private sexual acts and the psychopolitical processes leading to the prevalence of neo-fascist populism in Italy and the world. Tracing the history of sexuality through Freud, Marx, Fanon, and Foucault, among many others, Bernini considers why the sexual has always...
The past decades have seen a growing “philosophical” interest in a number of authors, but strangely enough Saramago’s oeuvre has been left somewhat aside. This volume aims at filling this gap by providing a diverse range of philosophical perspectives and expositions on Saramago’s work. The chapters explore some possible issues arising from his works: from his use of Plato’s allegory of the cave to his re-readings of Biblical stories; from his critique and “reinvention” of philosophy of history to his allegorical exploration of alternative histories; from his humorous approach to our being-towards-death to the revolutionary political charge of his fiction. The essays here confront Saramago’s fiction with concepts, theories, and suggestions belonging to various philosophical traditions and philosophers including Plato, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Freud, Benjamin, Heidegger, Lacan, Foucault, Patočka, Derrida, Agamben, and Žižek.
Illuminating the relevance of literature as a catalyst for rethinking Brazil, this book offers a resistance to the official discourses that have worked to conceal social tensions, injustices, and secular inequities in Brazilian society.
This edited collection explores memories and experiences of genocide, civilian casualties, and other atrocities that occurred after the Second World War.