Violence and the Contexts of Hostility Conference Session 3

Monday 5th May - Wednesday 7th May 2008
Budapest, Hungary

Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers

Session 3: Narrative Constructions of Violence
Chair: Gabrielle Murray

Representations of Violence in Contemporary South African Fiction
Zuzana Luckay
Slovakia

There are certain social structures, which are inherently violent. Apartheid by definition promoted ‘apart’ness, created disjunctions, affirmed social gaps and as such it fuelled power struggles, which are the breeding ground of antagonism and hostility. After more than a decade the ghosts of apartheid still loom over Southern Africa. But the degree to which they are responsible for the high crime rate with often callous violence, remains a question.
Apartheid, as one of the most recent examples of attempts for social engineering (not new to humanity e.g. Third Reich) was a system, which did not allow for one to keep dignity, in other words a system in which it was impossible to ‘be good’ – to put it bluntly. The reasons for this do vary according to the peoples of particular groups, colours or tongues. There were perceived senses of honour during apartheid but they were rather manifestations of struggles for power on the one hand as opposed to an asymmetric and often futile yearning for recognition by ‘the others’. This created social tensions, mistrust, fear and guilt which have been triggering and perpetuating violations on various levels. The clashes or meetings of various values systems in such a diverse country like South Africa inevitably relativise one another, which further deepens and serves as justification for widening social gaps. So even if it stands to reason that there is no dignity in violence often the opposite is claimed because the perceptions of worth and dignity vary as much as the perceptions of what constitutes violence itself and justifications for it do.
In this paper I examine the various roles violence- as a result a various perceived humiliations and threats - plays in people’s lives in South Africa, as well as in light of the social gaps, and rifts created by apartheid. I study the representations of the different violences in Damon Galgut’s novel, The good doctor with the objective of showing how unjust social circumstances skew ones perceptions in making moral ethical choices

Nostalgic Violence: Neo-Victorian (Re-)Visions of Historical Conflict
Marie-Luise Kohlke
Swansea University, United Kingdom

The exploration of nineteenth century violence and conflict constitutes an important emergent sub-genre of the neo-Victorian novel. Literary re-enactments of historical trauma range from the horrors of slavery, penitentiaries, and imperialist colonisation, through civil and international war, to massacre and genocide. This paper examines contemporary writers’ fascination with violence located in the comparatively distant past and possible motives therefore, including discussions of Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers (2000), Philip Hensher’s The Mulberry Empire (2002), and Julian Rathbone’s The Mutiny (2007), among other novels. Specifically the paper asks why, in the face of much more recent cataclysms and current “real-time” war, terrorism, and counter-terrorist brutality, writers opt to resurrect and interrogate the “ghosts” of hostilities? Can one speak of a nostalgia for violence or nostalgic violence, and if so, what political purposes might nostalgia serve? Does the neo-Victorian novel critique historical violence and its representation, or normalise violence as an unavoidable constituent and by-product of modern civilisation? Can the textual re-enactment of past atrocities impact our understanding of current world conflicts, or does it serve as a strategic displacement/distraction? Should the neo-Victorian recourse to the past be read as a therapeutic attempt to work through/exorcise collective historical traumas, which demand acknowledgement and commemoration? Or is it indicative of a compulsion to obsessively repeat and perpetuate actual and symbolic violence?

The Rhetoric of Violence in African Literature
Oumar Cherif Diop
Department of English, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia, USA

According to Teresa de Lauretis, "The very notion of rhetoric of violence presupposes that some order of language, some kind of discursive representation is at work not only in the concept of violence, but in the social practices of violence as well." That order of language is indicative of the relations of power, the socio-political tensions, and the agendas of different forces interlocked in the fight for the preservation or the subversion of the power structure. As for Foucault the socio-political arena is a field of forces, practices, and discourses that involve relations of power that in turn depend on the multiplicity of points of resistance. Therefore, the power network is an interplay of power and resistance, a field of constant confrontation between individuals, groups, and classes. Foucault’s notion of the rhetoric of violence stems from his analysis of the socio-cultural function of an order of language that is tantamount to that socio-political arena that constructs the objects and subjects of violence. Using Foucault’s and Lauretis’ concepts of rhetorical violence I will show in this presentation how the writings of Alex Laguma, Nawal Al Saada'wi, and Sony Labou Tansi are counter-discourse to violence as a set of political, ideological, cultural, and discursive strategies. I will further argue that Al Sadaawi’s Woman at Point Zero, Laguma’s Time of the Butcherbird and In the Fog of the Season’s End, and Labou Tansi La Vie et Demie go beyond the mimetic representations of violence to deconstruct the discourse of violence in its various forms and substance. In so doing, they unveil the oppressors’ intent and their strategies to block the continuum of history in order to posit themselves as the alpha and omega of the historical processes and the welfare of the community they operate in. Furthermore, the works under consideration expose the artificial nature of such controlling tactics that resound in the absurdities that become paradigmatic of an undertaking to reconstruct history in the oppressors’ image and to reinvent a symbolic order that entertains their fallacies.