17.02.2015
08.02.2015
myth of the white indian
Mystery of the White Indians
A Second Article, Giving the Scientific Explanations That Have Been Suggested to Account for This Tribe of Blond Savages in Eastern Panama [First Article]
By Richard O. Marsh
From The World's Work, April 1925, Vol. XLIX, No. 6. Digitized March 2014 by Doug Frizzle
Golden Yellow Hair and Hazel Eyes
“A canoe came toward us, and in the bow stood a naked savage with a white body, whose yellow hair, falling to his shoulders, was held in order by a gold chaplet two inches wide encircling his head at the brow. He was of medium height, but magnificently developed about the chest and arms; and he stood as erect as a king. Behind him were a girl of ten and a boy of four, and in the stern his wife wielded a steering paddle. Not one of the four gave a start when they came suddenly upon us, and the man and woman did not vary a heart-beat in the rhythm of their strokes as they plied the canoe to pass directly by us. The man eyed us with a truly regal pride and disdain, and passed us by without troubling to turn his head to see whether or not we intended to follow. His whole manner said more plainly than words: ‘I am king here; what are you doing in my domain?’ ”
In his first article, which was published in the World’s Work last month, Mr. Marsh told of the discovery of this tribe of White Indians. His present article provides a more complete account of their physical and mental peculiarities and their significance to the science of human origins.
WHEN I brought my three specimen White Indians to the United States, they interested many scientists in the government service at Washington and leading scientists elsewhere, because they led to offer a hope of solving several kinds of knotty problems.
First is the fascinating mystery of the ancient civilizations of the Western Hemisphere that disappeared under the impact with Europeans following the discovery of America by Columbus. Cortez found Mexico flourishing under Montezuma, with a highly organized political life, well-developed arts in precious stones and metals and in architecture, a literature of historical records as advanced as that of the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians, and an astronomical science comparable with that of the ancient Egyptians. Pizarro found the Incas of Peru enjoying an equally high civilization, with the additional blessing of a science of medicine as highly developed as any in Europe and in many respects superior for the Incas had originated the use of quinine, a drug of more general value than any in the Caucasian pharmacopoeia.
Within a century after Columbus’s arrival, these great civilizations had crumbled into dust. The Spaniards destroyed the political unity of these countries, killed or dispersed the men of art and learning, and enslaved the peoples in a servitude that made education impossible. The palaces and monuments fell into decay, and in modern times it is doubtful if a score of men exist who could, if they would, decipher the hieroglyphics left by the Mayas of Central America, for example, which by their variety and quantity undoubtedly hold the key to much lost history and science.
The White Indians may include some of these surviving repositories of the wisdom of the ancients, for the traditions of most of the brown Indian tribes on both continents contain the story of a miraculous white prophet who visited their ancestors, bringing with him knowledge of the arts and sciences, and who gave their people stable and wise government and all they know about nature’s laws. Cortez found White Indians in Mexico City, worshipped as superior beings. The Incas were doubtless partly of white blood. The Mayas may have been—it seems likely from the evidence. Could my White Indians belong to one of these favored tribes?
NOT OF MONGOLIAN ORIGIN
THE first step toward finding out was, naturally, to study the language. Dr. John P. Harrington, ethnologist of the Smithsonian Institution, and Dr. Paul Vogenitz, translator and language expert of the Post Office Department, undertook this task. The San Blas Indian interpreter, whom I brought also, was the first medium of communication. In a few weeks, the scientists had learned the language themselves. It early appeared that the language was phenomenal, because it was utterly unlike any other Indian tongue in the Western Hemisphere. All other Indians, whatever their dialect, use an agglutinative speech that suggests their Mongolian origin. But the San Blas language—the White Indians and the San Blas use the same—is not Mongolian in structure. On the contrary, it is pure Aryan, and most closely resembles Sanskrit in its syntax.
A Second Article, Giving the Scientific Explanations That Have Been Suggested to Account for This Tribe of Blond Savages in Eastern Panama [First Article]
By Richard O. Marsh
From The World's Work, April 1925, Vol. XLIX, No. 6. Digitized March 2014 by Doug Frizzle
Golden Yellow Hair and Hazel Eyes
“A canoe came toward us, and in the bow stood a naked savage with a white body, whose yellow hair, falling to his shoulders, was held in order by a gold chaplet two inches wide encircling his head at the brow. He was of medium height, but magnificently developed about the chest and arms; and he stood as erect as a king. Behind him were a girl of ten and a boy of four, and in the stern his wife wielded a steering paddle. Not one of the four gave a start when they came suddenly upon us, and the man and woman did not vary a heart-beat in the rhythm of their strokes as they plied the canoe to pass directly by us. The man eyed us with a truly regal pride and disdain, and passed us by without troubling to turn his head to see whether or not we intended to follow. His whole manner said more plainly than words: ‘I am king here; what are you doing in my domain?’ ”
In his first article, which was published in the World’s Work last month, Mr. Marsh told of the discovery of this tribe of White Indians. His present article provides a more complete account of their physical and mental peculiarities and their significance to the science of human origins.
WHEN I brought my three specimen White Indians to the United States, they interested many scientists in the government service at Washington and leading scientists elsewhere, because they led to offer a hope of solving several kinds of knotty problems.
First is the fascinating mystery of the ancient civilizations of the Western Hemisphere that disappeared under the impact with Europeans following the discovery of America by Columbus. Cortez found Mexico flourishing under Montezuma, with a highly organized political life, well-developed arts in precious stones and metals and in architecture, a literature of historical records as advanced as that of the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians, and an astronomical science comparable with that of the ancient Egyptians. Pizarro found the Incas of Peru enjoying an equally high civilization, with the additional blessing of a science of medicine as highly developed as any in Europe and in many respects superior for the Incas had originated the use of quinine, a drug of more general value than any in the Caucasian pharmacopoeia.
Within a century after Columbus’s arrival, these great civilizations had crumbled into dust. The Spaniards destroyed the political unity of these countries, killed or dispersed the men of art and learning, and enslaved the peoples in a servitude that made education impossible. The palaces and monuments fell into decay, and in modern times it is doubtful if a score of men exist who could, if they would, decipher the hieroglyphics left by the Mayas of Central America, for example, which by their variety and quantity undoubtedly hold the key to much lost history and science.
The White Indians may include some of these surviving repositories of the wisdom of the ancients, for the traditions of most of the brown Indian tribes on both continents contain the story of a miraculous white prophet who visited their ancestors, bringing with him knowledge of the arts and sciences, and who gave their people stable and wise government and all they know about nature’s laws. Cortez found White Indians in Mexico City, worshipped as superior beings. The Incas were doubtless partly of white blood. The Mayas may have been—it seems likely from the evidence. Could my White Indians belong to one of these favored tribes?
NOT OF MONGOLIAN ORIGIN
THE first step toward finding out was, naturally, to study the language. Dr. John P. Harrington, ethnologist of the Smithsonian Institution, and Dr. Paul Vogenitz, translator and language expert of the Post Office Department, undertook this task. The San Blas Indian interpreter, whom I brought also, was the first medium of communication. In a few weeks, the scientists had learned the language themselves. It early appeared that the language was phenomenal, because it was utterly unlike any other Indian tongue in the Western Hemisphere. All other Indians, whatever their dialect, use an agglutinative speech that suggests their Mongolian origin. But the San Blas language—the White Indians and the San Blas use the same—is not Mongolian in structure. On the contrary, it is pure Aryan, and most closely resembles Sanskrit in its syntax.
06.02.2015
Die Afrikanerin
Die Afrikanerin ist eine Grand opéra in fünf Akten von Giacomo Meyerbeer und dem Librettisten Eugène Scribe. Meyerbeer konnte die Komposition der Oper noch vor seinem Tod vollenden, erlebte aber nicht mehr die erfolgreiche Uraufführung am 28. April 1865 in der Pariser Oper. Das Werk kam in einer gekürzten und bearbeiteten Fassung von François-Joseph Fétis zur Aufführung.[1] Auch die deutsche Erstaufführung am 18. November desselben Jahres in Berlin in einer Übersetzung von Ferdinand Gumbert wurde zu einem großen Erfolg.
26.12.2014
20.12.2014
The Allure of Ugliness Is the unattractive female character ascending?
By Will Boast
Literature—unlike TV and film, essentially free of visual images—should offer a forum in which we can examine the lives of women without immediate appraisals of appearance. Yet the women who appear in our fiction are also unrealistically, disproportionately beautiful. From Pamela to Emma, Daisy Miller to Daisy Buchanan—the likes of poor Jane Eyre are wildly outnumbered. As Adelle Waldman has argued on the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, our most perceptive, fair-minded novelists recognize beauty as construct and contrivance, “a subject with profound repercussions for both men and women,” but most writers still casually create female characters who are near-perfect specimens anyway. Lionel Shriver, writing in New York magazine, talks about the temptation fiction writers face to “describe primary characters (especially women) as physically striking—on the assumption that […] being eye-catching will make them more likable.” In genre fiction, market pressures can be explicit. The fantasy writer Erika Johansen says that, while her novel The Tearling was in submission, several editors asked if she might revise her ordinary-looking heroine to “make her pretty.” More than 150 years after Brontë, sympathy for a female character is still yoked to physical beauty.
A critical study of literary and popular fiction, however, argues that the less-than-beautiful heroine has lately been ascendant. In Plain & Ugly Janes: The Rise of the Ugly Woman in Contemporary American Fiction, editor and scholar Charlotte M. Wright plucks out a “thin but discernible thread of plain, at times even homely, heroines” and traces it to contemporary works by Alison Lurie, Russell Banks, Lorie Moore, Katherine Dunn, and others. The less-than-beautiful woman has been allowed to step out of her supporting roles as spinster and old maid and into stories of her own, Wright argues. For Wright, this movement represents a critique of our beauty-mad culture—one made most sharply when writers create female characters who aren’t just plain but explicitly ugly.
One such writer—not included in Wright’s survey but in many ways an exemplar of her argument—is the Swiss-German novelist, Peter Stamm, who with his recently published seventh work of fiction, All Days Are Night, has now produced two novels in a row centered on the complex, often subversive figure that is the ugly woman. Stamm is well established in Europe, where his methodical storytelling and precise, ultra-spare prose have garnered him several important literary prizes. He finally gained wider recognition in the U.S. with his last novel, Seven Years (2010). Its narrator, Alex, a handsome student of architecture, begins dating his colleague Sonia. She is intelligent, cultured, and so stunning that when she walks into a café, “the whole place turned to stare.” Simultaneously, Alex begins an affair with Ivona, an illegal Polish immigrant and Sonia’s opposite in nearly every way. Alex and Sonia marry and start an architectural firm together. But Sonia is sexually reserved—“like one of those dolls whose clothes are sewn onto their bodies”—and Alex can’t keep himself from continuing to visit Ivona.
Literature—unlike TV and film, essentially free of visual images—should offer a forum in which we can examine the lives of women without immediate appraisals of appearance. Yet the women who appear in our fiction are also unrealistically, disproportionately beautiful. From Pamela to Emma, Daisy Miller to Daisy Buchanan—the likes of poor Jane Eyre are wildly outnumbered. As Adelle Waldman has argued on the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, our most perceptive, fair-minded novelists recognize beauty as construct and contrivance, “a subject with profound repercussions for both men and women,” but most writers still casually create female characters who are near-perfect specimens anyway. Lionel Shriver, writing in New York magazine, talks about the temptation fiction writers face to “describe primary characters (especially women) as physically striking—on the assumption that […] being eye-catching will make them more likable.” In genre fiction, market pressures can be explicit. The fantasy writer Erika Johansen says that, while her novel The Tearling was in submission, several editors asked if she might revise her ordinary-looking heroine to “make her pretty.” More than 150 years after Brontë, sympathy for a female character is still yoked to physical beauty.
A critical study of literary and popular fiction, however, argues that the less-than-beautiful heroine has lately been ascendant. In Plain & Ugly Janes: The Rise of the Ugly Woman in Contemporary American Fiction, editor and scholar Charlotte M. Wright plucks out a “thin but discernible thread of plain, at times even homely, heroines” and traces it to contemporary works by Alison Lurie, Russell Banks, Lorie Moore, Katherine Dunn, and others. The less-than-beautiful woman has been allowed to step out of her supporting roles as spinster and old maid and into stories of her own, Wright argues. For Wright, this movement represents a critique of our beauty-mad culture—one made most sharply when writers create female characters who aren’t just plain but explicitly ugly.
One such writer—not included in Wright’s survey but in many ways an exemplar of her argument—is the Swiss-German novelist, Peter Stamm, who with his recently published seventh work of fiction, All Days Are Night, has now produced two novels in a row centered on the complex, often subversive figure that is the ugly woman. Stamm is well established in Europe, where his methodical storytelling and precise, ultra-spare prose have garnered him several important literary prizes. He finally gained wider recognition in the U.S. with his last novel, Seven Years (2010). Its narrator, Alex, a handsome student of architecture, begins dating his colleague Sonia. She is intelligent, cultured, and so stunning that when she walks into a café, “the whole place turned to stare.” Simultaneously, Alex begins an affair with Ivona, an illegal Polish immigrant and Sonia’s opposite in nearly every way. Alex and Sonia marry and start an architectural firm together. But Sonia is sexually reserved—“like one of those dolls whose clothes are sewn onto their bodies”—and Alex can’t keep himself from continuing to visit Ivona.
19.12.2014
12.12.2014
De Federatieve Textiel Grossiers' Beurs in de RAI Tropenmuseum, Fotobureau
Op deze foto is de Federatieve Textiel Grossiers' Beurs te zien, die in januari 1955 gehouden werd in de RAI. Bezoekers van de RAI kregen onder meer een glimp te zien van de tentoonstelling "Kleur op Doek", die van 1 december 1954 t/m 20 februari 1955 te zien was in het Tropenmuseum. Ook werden door het KIT demonstraties gegeven van het vervaardigen, het versieren en het dragen van weefsels in tropische landen. Links is een pop voorstellende een geisha met een Japanse kimono te zien, daarachter een pop voorstellende een Creoolse vrouw uit Suriname, gekleed als kotomisi.
05.12.2014
01.12.2014
30.11.2014
gumbo
Initially, I focus on how the film* engages performativity, focusing as it does on
problematizing notions of essential blackness. One of the ways in which the film
engages this critique is by pointing out how, at the very least, gender, class, sexuality
and region all impact the construction of blackness. Indeed, the title of the film
points to the ways in which race defines, as well as confines, African Americans. The
recurrent trope used by Riggs to illuminate the multiplicity of blackness is gumbo, a
dish that consists of whatever the cook wishes. It has, Riggs remarks, ‘‘everything
you can imagine in it.’’ This trope also underscores the multiplicity of blackness
insofar as gumbo is a dish associated with New Orleans, a city confounded by its
mixed race progeny and the identity politics that mixing creates. The gumbo trope is
apropos because, like ‘‘blackness,’’ gumbo is a site of possibilities. The film argues
that when African Americans attempt to define what it means to be black, they
delimit the possibilities of what blackness can be. But Riggs’ film does more than just
stir things up. In many ways it reduces the heat of the pot, allowing everything in the
gumbo to mix and mesh, yet maintain its own distinct flavor. Chicken is distinct
from andouille, rice from peas, bay leaves from thyme, cayenne from paprika. Thus,
Riggs’ film suggests that African Americans cannot begin to ask dominant culture to
accept their difference as ‘‘others’’ until African Americans accept the differences
that exist among themselves.
...
Ultimately, Black Is . . . Black Ain’t performs what its title announces: the simultaneity
of bodily presence and absence, being and becoming. Although Riggs offers his
own gumbo recipe that stands in for blackness, he does so only to demonstrate that,
like blackness, the recipe can be altered, expanded, reduced, watered down. At the
same time, Riggs also asks that we not forget that the gumbo (blackness) is contained
within a sturdy pot (the body) that has weathered abuse, that has been scorched,
scoured, and scraped, a pot/body that is in the process of becoming but nonetheless
is.
Unlike queer theory, quare theory fixes our attention on the discursive constitution
of the recipe even as it celebrates the improvisational aspects of the gumbo and
the materiality of the pot. While queer theory has opened up new possibilities for
theorizing gender and sexuality, like a pot of gumbo cooked too quickly, it has failed
to live up to its full critical potential by refusing to accommodate all the queer
ingredients contained inside its theoretical pot. Quare theory, on the other hand,
promises to reduce the spillage, allowing the various and multiple flavors to
co-exist—those different flavors that make it spicy, hot, unique and sumptuously
brown.
* marlon riggs, black is ... black ain't, usa 1995
aus: Patrick Johnson. "Quare" studies, or (almost) everything I know about
queer studies I learned from my grandmother
Gumbo
Shrimp-Gumbo mit Reis
Gumbo ist ein würziges, mit dunkler Mehlschwitze (Roux) angedicktes Eintopfgericht der US-amerikanischen Südstaatenküche.
Herkunft
Der Begriff gumbo ist wahrscheinlich abgeleitet von dem angolanischen Wort kingombo für Okra, häufig eine Zutat des Gerichts. In der Literatur wird oft angeführt, bei Gumbo handele es sich um eine Variante der Bouillabaisse, aber diese Theorie wird von mehreren Autoren bezweifelt. Wesentliche Unterschiede bestehen darin, dass die französische Fischsuppe nur kurz gekocht wird, während Gumbo lange Zeit köcheln muss und eine gebundene Suppe ist. Außerdem enthält eine Bouillabaisse ausschließlich Fisch und Meeresfrüchte, nie zusätzlich Fleisch. Alte Kochbücher aus New Orleans unterscheiden klar zwischen Gumbo und Bouillabaisse. Anzunehmen ist dagegen ein Einfluss durch Rezepte der Choctaws, die ebenfalls Meeresfrüchte verwendeten. Die Zubereitung erinnert außerdem an afrikanische Suppen, die Okra enthalten.
Gumbo ist in der gesamten Südstaatenküche zu finden, ist jedoch typisch für die kreolische und die Cajun-Küche.
Zutaten
Gumbo wird häufig mit Meeresfrüchten (oft Krabben oder Shrimps aus dem Golf von Mexiko) oder Geflügel (Ente, Huhn, Wachteln), geräucherten Würsten wie der Andouille und Tasso, eine Art Schinken, aber auch mit anderem, gerade verfügbaren Fleisch und der „Heiligen Dreifaltigkeit“ (Holy Trinity) der Cajun-Küche (Staudensellerie, milde grüne Gemüsepaprika und Zwiebeln) zubereitet.
Als Grundlage wird eine braune Roux (Mehlschwitze) zur Bindung verwendet, sie gibt dem Gumbo auch den typischen nussigen Geschmack. Sie ist in kreolischen Gumbos, die zusätzlich auch Tomaten enthalten können, eher hellbraun, während die Cajun-Variante mit einer dunkelbraunen Roux hergestellt wird.
Klassisch verwendet man zur weiteren Bindung des Gumbos entweder Okraschoten (meist im Meeresfrüchte-Gumbo) oder Filé-Pulver (gemahlene Blätter des Sassafrasbaums), das ursprünglich als Ersatz benutzt wurde, wenn keine Okraschoten verfügbar waren. Gumbo wird relativ stark gewürzt und mit frisch gekochtem Reis serviert.
problematizing notions of essential blackness. One of the ways in which the film
engages this critique is by pointing out how, at the very least, gender, class, sexuality
and region all impact the construction of blackness. Indeed, the title of the film
points to the ways in which race defines, as well as confines, African Americans. The
recurrent trope used by Riggs to illuminate the multiplicity of blackness is gumbo, a
dish that consists of whatever the cook wishes. It has, Riggs remarks, ‘‘everything
you can imagine in it.’’ This trope also underscores the multiplicity of blackness
insofar as gumbo is a dish associated with New Orleans, a city confounded by its
mixed race progeny and the identity politics that mixing creates. The gumbo trope is
apropos because, like ‘‘blackness,’’ gumbo is a site of possibilities. The film argues
that when African Americans attempt to define what it means to be black, they
delimit the possibilities of what blackness can be. But Riggs’ film does more than just
stir things up. In many ways it reduces the heat of the pot, allowing everything in the
gumbo to mix and mesh, yet maintain its own distinct flavor. Chicken is distinct
from andouille, rice from peas, bay leaves from thyme, cayenne from paprika. Thus,
Riggs’ film suggests that African Americans cannot begin to ask dominant culture to
accept their difference as ‘‘others’’ until African Americans accept the differences
that exist among themselves.
...
Ultimately, Black Is . . . Black Ain’t performs what its title announces: the simultaneity
of bodily presence and absence, being and becoming. Although Riggs offers his
own gumbo recipe that stands in for blackness, he does so only to demonstrate that,
like blackness, the recipe can be altered, expanded, reduced, watered down. At the
same time, Riggs also asks that we not forget that the gumbo (blackness) is contained
within a sturdy pot (the body) that has weathered abuse, that has been scorched,
scoured, and scraped, a pot/body that is in the process of becoming but nonetheless
is.
Unlike queer theory, quare theory fixes our attention on the discursive constitution
of the recipe even as it celebrates the improvisational aspects of the gumbo and
the materiality of the pot. While queer theory has opened up new possibilities for
theorizing gender and sexuality, like a pot of gumbo cooked too quickly, it has failed
to live up to its full critical potential by refusing to accommodate all the queer
ingredients contained inside its theoretical pot. Quare theory, on the other hand,
promises to reduce the spillage, allowing the various and multiple flavors to
co-exist—those different flavors that make it spicy, hot, unique and sumptuously
brown.
* marlon riggs, black is ... black ain't, usa 1995
aus: Patrick Johnson. "Quare" studies, or (almost) everything I know about
queer studies I learned from my grandmother
Gumbo
Shrimp-Gumbo mit Reis
Gumbo ist ein würziges, mit dunkler Mehlschwitze (Roux) angedicktes Eintopfgericht der US-amerikanischen Südstaatenküche.
Herkunft
Der Begriff gumbo ist wahrscheinlich abgeleitet von dem angolanischen Wort kingombo für Okra, häufig eine Zutat des Gerichts. In der Literatur wird oft angeführt, bei Gumbo handele es sich um eine Variante der Bouillabaisse, aber diese Theorie wird von mehreren Autoren bezweifelt. Wesentliche Unterschiede bestehen darin, dass die französische Fischsuppe nur kurz gekocht wird, während Gumbo lange Zeit köcheln muss und eine gebundene Suppe ist. Außerdem enthält eine Bouillabaisse ausschließlich Fisch und Meeresfrüchte, nie zusätzlich Fleisch. Alte Kochbücher aus New Orleans unterscheiden klar zwischen Gumbo und Bouillabaisse. Anzunehmen ist dagegen ein Einfluss durch Rezepte der Choctaws, die ebenfalls Meeresfrüchte verwendeten. Die Zubereitung erinnert außerdem an afrikanische Suppen, die Okra enthalten.
Gumbo ist in der gesamten Südstaatenküche zu finden, ist jedoch typisch für die kreolische und die Cajun-Küche.
Zutaten
Gumbo wird häufig mit Meeresfrüchten (oft Krabben oder Shrimps aus dem Golf von Mexiko) oder Geflügel (Ente, Huhn, Wachteln), geräucherten Würsten wie der Andouille und Tasso, eine Art Schinken, aber auch mit anderem, gerade verfügbaren Fleisch und der „Heiligen Dreifaltigkeit“ (Holy Trinity) der Cajun-Küche (Staudensellerie, milde grüne Gemüsepaprika und Zwiebeln) zubereitet.
Als Grundlage wird eine braune Roux (Mehlschwitze) zur Bindung verwendet, sie gibt dem Gumbo auch den typischen nussigen Geschmack. Sie ist in kreolischen Gumbos, die zusätzlich auch Tomaten enthalten können, eher hellbraun, während die Cajun-Variante mit einer dunkelbraunen Roux hergestellt wird.
Klassisch verwendet man zur weiteren Bindung des Gumbos entweder Okraschoten (meist im Meeresfrüchte-Gumbo) oder Filé-Pulver (gemahlene Blätter des Sassafrasbaums), das ursprünglich als Ersatz benutzt wurde, wenn keine Okraschoten verfügbar waren. Gumbo wird relativ stark gewürzt und mit frisch gekochtem Reis serviert.
28.11.2014
GITTE VILLESEN: Even now to explain everything would be difficult
GITTE VILLESEN:
Even now to explain everything would be difficult
23.11.2014
Spectacular Rhetorics
Spectacular Rhetorics is a rigorous analysis of the rhetorical frameworks and narratives that underlie human rights law, shape the process of cultural and legal recognition, and delimit public responses to violence and injustice. Integrating visual and textual criticism, Wendy S. Hesford scrutinizes “spectacular rhetoric,” the use of visual images and rhetoric to construct certain bodies, populations, and nations as victims and incorporate them into human rights discourses geared toward Westerners, chiefly Americans. Hesford presents a series of case studies critiquing the visual representations of human suffering in documentary films, photography, and theater. In each study, she analyzes works addressing a prominent contemporary human rights cause, such as torture and unlawful detention, ethnic genocide and rape as a means of warfare, migration and the trafficking of women and children, the global sex trade, and child labor. Through these studies, she demonstrates how spectacular rhetoric activates certain cultural and national narratives and social and political relations, consolidates identities through the politics of recognition, and configures material relations of power and difference to produce and, ultimately, to govern human rights subjects.
About The Author(s)
Wendy S. Hesford is Professor of English at the Ohio State University. She is the author of Framing Identities: Autobiography and the Politics of Pedagogy, a co-author of Rhetorical Visions: Writing and Reading in a Visual Culture, and a co-editor of Just Advocacy? Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation and Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the “Real.”
11.10.2014
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