Session 11: Otherness and Enmity
Session 11: Otherness and Enmity
Chair: Mel Kohlke
Creating the Enemy: Violence in Conrad’s The Secret Agent
Mashael Al-Sudeary
Riyadh Girls’ Colleges, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Living in an age of terror and violence, it has become essential to come to an understanding of the impetus behind all the hatred and evil in the world. One way to do this is to look at our lives objectively, and at the same time evaluate the literary records of the ambiance of violence which was currently felt by prominent literary figures. Studying the problem in tandem will help us in trying to comprehend where we have gone wrong or what injustices we have committed. This paper aims to identify and understand violence in contemporary life.
The novelist Joseph Conrad, though from nearly a century ago, has been proclaimed to be one of the greatest writers of the twenty-first century because he gives some very powerful and objective insight as to what might be at the root of hostility in the world. In The Secret Agent, though Conrad allows the political drama to take up most of the action of the story, it is in the resolution of the domestic front wherein lies his most valuable lesson: that secrecy, oppression and abuse are behind all the ills in society. Winnie, the heroine, is exploited both on physical and emotional levels by her husband, Verloc; she is marginalized and made to feel worthless, only to retaliate with violence. Just as the anarchists in the story target the ‘heart’ of English society by bombing the Greenwich observatory, Winnie stabs Verloc in the ‘heart’ in retaliation for his abuse. Hence, the paper will also focus on uncovering the motives, dynamics and functions that violence has for individuals, groups which culminates in domestic violence directed toward families, women, men and children. The use of violence to achieve peace and to generate, anti-violence on a global basis, anti-vivisection violence is viewed with censure in the paper.
As we figure out the political events of this story, we cannot help but associate them with those that have been happening since 9/11 and that is where Conrad’s novel becomes useful. Its objectivity and universality teaches us a lesson that can be valuable to us today; it teaches us that secrecy, marginalization and injury can only end in tragedy. Those who feel themselves slighted or exploited resort to evil acts out of desperation. Exploring the methodologies available for uncovering the underlying factors which contribute to violence, this paper will take a descriptive rather than prescriptive approach in an attempt to find some common denominator that might help in achieving universal and widespread peace in the world, including dichotomies that confront people: friend and foe, neighbor and stranger, as well as dichotomies that divide minds: love and hate, empathy and disdain, trust and fear.
Beast, Vermin, Insect: ‘Hate’ Media and the construction of the enemy – the case of Rwanda, 1990-1994
Roger Bromley
Department of Cultural Studies, Nottingham University, United Kingdom
This paper was prompted by a poem by Sam Keen, ‘To Create an Enemy’, in which the ‘other’ is metamorphosed and reified into ‘beast, vermin, insect’ (in Rwanda the term inkenyi – cockroaches – was used) to form an icon of the enemy. The purpose of the paper will be to show how moral disengagement – the readiness to slaughter with impunity – can be produced by a discourse of ideological justification. Radio and print media in Rwanda helped to construct verbal and visual caricatures of the minority Tutsi by a process of cultural and social exclusion and, what has been called, ‘emotional disidentification with its accompanying affect: hate’. It will not be argued that the media caused the genocide but that both broadcast and print communications helped to facilitate it by creating symbolic forms and ethnic absolutes to mobilise Hutu militias, and others, by means of repeated invective, fantasies, and de-humanized stereotypes to rape and massacre hundreds of thousands of Tutsi men, women and children, and their Hutu supporters, in a period of three months from April to July, 1994: ‘Know that the person whose throat you do not cut now will be the one who will cut yours’ (Dr. Leon Mugesera, Radio Rwanda, 1992). Examples of ‘hate’ media will be analysed from Radio Television Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM) and the newspaper, Kangura, but also there will be some consideration of documentaries and newsreels produced since 1994 with the intention of restoring identification and reconciliation between the Hutu, Tutsi and Twa overlapping ethnic groups.
The Ideological Model of War: Mediated Constructions of the Self and the Enemy
Nico Carpentier
Centre for Studies on Media and Culture (CeMeSO), Vrije Universiteit Brussel – Free University of Brussels, Brussels, Belgium
When a nation goes to war, powerful mechanisms come into play, in order to turn an adversary into the enemy. Where the existence of an adversary is considered legitimate and the right to defend their – distinct – ideas is not questioned, an enemy is excluded from the political community and has to be destroyed (Mouffe 1997: 4). In this paper Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory (1985) is put to work to build a model that describes the role that ideology, and its mediation in the Western mainstream media, plays in constructing the identities of the Enemy, the Self and of violence itself.
The theoretical starting point of this paper is that these identities are structured by a set of discourses, articulating the identities of all parties involved. These discourses on the Enemy are based on a series of binary oppositions, such as good/evil, just/unjust, guilty/innocent, rational/irrational and civilised/uncivilised, which can be defined as floating signifiers (Laclau 1985: 112-113; Žižek 1989: 97). As floating signifiers, these dichotomies have no fixed meaning, but they are (re)articulated before, during and after the conflict. Moreover, the construction of the Enemy is accompanied by the construction of the identity of the Self, clearly in an antagonistic relationship to the Enemy’s identity. In this fashion the Enemy’s identity becomes a constitutive outside (Laclau 1990: 17), supporting the identity construction of the Self.
The construction of the ideological model of war is based on a series of genealogies of the constructions of the Enemy and the Self in the Vietnam War, the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the Kosovo/a War, and the 2003 Iraqi War. These genealogies will illustrates the pervasiveness, rigidity and stability of the ideological model of war, despite the always changing context.
Challenges of Traditional Violence in Peacebuilding
Dmitry Pozhidaev
Municipal Coordination & Support Unit, Department of Civil Administration, United Naitions Mission in Kosovo, Pristina, Kosovo
The paper, based on an empirical study of reintegration of ex-combatants in Kosovo, approaches the problem of violence in post-conflict settlement managed by the international community from the point of view of the modernization theory. The paper suggests that this analysis enables a better understanding of differences between traditional and modern violence and therefore makes it possible to develop more efficient policies to prevent situations when violence may interfere with, and in the worst case scenario undermine, peacebuilding efforts. The author argues that in Kosovo, the failure to prevent recurrent violence appears to be due to the lack of consideration by the international community to local conditions, including social and cultural norms and psychological impact in its peacebuilding program. Arguing that the violence encountered by the international community in Kosovo is traditional, the paper suggests some violence management mechanisms
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