Violence and Redemption

Studying the relationship between liberalism and globalization, this special issue of Public Culture examines discourses and practices of violence and redemption. How do we conceptualize violence and redemption outside the terms that liberalism presents? How have social movements throughout the world responded to or engaged liberal assumptions about what constitutes a violent act? Focusing on the relationship between redemptive promises and the organization, experience, and effects of violence, these essays study the ways in which political desire, both liberal and non-liberal, sometimes organizes violence and sometimes attempts to heal the breach that comes in its wake.The essays examine topics such as an account of the Mexican crisis of the 1980s; continuities between plantation slavery, colonization, and the emergence of independent states as war machines in Africa; an ethnography of a Palestinian suicide bomber; and Herman Melville's "Shiloh" in which the author suggests that the experience of suffering may expose the futility of the wish to overcome violence through violence. The contributors include: Tim Blackmore, John Borneman, Gillian Cowlishaw, Richard Falk, Ken Graves, Ghassan Hage, Abidin Kusno, Eva Lipman, Claudio Lomnitz, Patchen Markell, Achille Mbembe, Laura Nader, Steven Sampson, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Candance Vogler, Michael Warner, Margaret Werry, and, Richard Ashby Wilson.