El. knyga: In the Jaws of the Leviathan: Genocide Fiction and Film

'Joya Uiraizee's In the Jaws of the Leviathan: Genocide Fiction and Film raises one of the hot issues for our times: how we deal with the representation of violence, and specifically with traumatic violence. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, and longterm conflict have made familiar the distressing features of child soldiers, rape, and massive population displacements. How are we not only to understand the Rwandan genocide, India's partition, and Chile's repressive state under Pinochet? How do we relate these events entailing massive destruction and brutality, often employed so as to control valuable resources or territory, to historical events like the Biafran Civil war of 1967-70 in Nigeria. Most importantly, how do we confront these conflicts in their various mediations? Joya Uraizee poses the central question of mediation by examining a range of key texts that serve to present the genocides and violent traumas endemic to conflict that have marked many postcolonial societies. Those texts range over well-known novels, like Isabelle Allende's The House of the Spirits, films like Terry George's Hotel Rwanda, Mehta's Earth, and a number of other works that have given us some of the best-known representations of violent conflict. Additionally, she explore some lesser known novels or testimonies, like Sidwa's Cracking India, Enonchong's documentary video films on the Biafran war, and Alfredeo Jaar's book of photographs, that serve to elucidate her principal thesis. Uraizee claims that we can best assess the representations of violence by asking whether we are given images, in the forms of metaphors and gazes, that permit us to engage and work through the violence, or that fetishize and avoid the direct physical realities of the violence. She analyzes a range of stratagems that serve to absolve our consciences without bringing home the truths we need to experience and engage the traumas. Part of the truth we must face rests on the fact that we cannot help but be witness or observer. But there are many ways to look, and some leave us with insight and motivation while others merely satisfied, and with the structures of power undisturbed. The teaching about global violence today requires that we assess clearly how our positioning with relation to the texts of violence responds to this basic ethical imperative: though we cannot resolve the conflict, we are obliged to confront it unflinchingly if meaningful praxis is to follow. At that point, as Uraizee claims, our looking will become a "process" involving a "circle of gazes" in which the goals of oppositionality can become possible.'Kenneth W. Harrow, Professor of EnglishMichigan State University'As the merciless flow of digital reality turns us all into numb spectators, Uraizee sets out here to re-imagine the role of the "observer" in a century of genocide. A skeptical, and often emotional, testament to the ability of novels and films to make history's literary bystanders more than voyeurs and less than the victims themselves.Its subtitle might well read 'the purifying power of empathy,' and its analysis of the different ways of seeing mass murder (interactive, circular, blinding) is wide-ranging, placing literature itself back in the world where it belongs.' Professor Timothy Brennan, Department of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature and EnglishUniversity of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA