This study charts relationships between moral claims and audience response in medieval exemplary works by such poets as Chaucer, Gower, Robert Henryson, and several anonymous scribes. In late medieval England, exemplary works make one of the strongest possible claims for the social value of poetic fiction. Studying this debate reveals a set of local literary histories, based on both canonical and non-canonical texts, that complicate received notions of the didactic Middle Ages, the sophisticated Renaissance, and the fallow fifteenth century in between.

Exploring the connection between tourism and violence, this book draws on a range of disciplinary approaches, including social anthropology, cultural geography, sociology, and tourism studies. Ideas and concepts of violence have long been explored in the social sciences literature but in relation to tourism studies specifically the concept has rarely been problematised. Drawing on a range of case studies this book demonstrates the relationship between tourism and violence both in its overt physical form and in the social structures and symbolic landscapes that underpin touristic activity. Tourism and Violence offers a timely intervention in this field by bringing together, for the first time, work by scholars who, in their different ways, are engaging with the concept of violence within touristic settings and practices. This unique book paves the way for future research that will probe further the intersections between violence and tourism.

Table of contents

Since the 1980s the study of genocide has exploded, both historically and geographically, to encompass earlier epochs, other continents, and new cases. The concept of genocide has proved its worth, but that expansion has also compounded the tensions between a rigid legal concept and the manifold realities researchers have discovered. The legal and political benefits that accompany genocide status have also reduced complex discussions of historical events to a simplistic binary – is it genocide or not? – a situation often influenced by powerful political pressures. Genocide addresses these tensions and tests the limits of the concept in cases ranging from the role of sexual violence during the Holocaust to state-induced mass starvation in Kazakh and Ukrainian history, while considering what the Armenian, Rwandan, and Burundi experiences reveal about the uses and pitfalls of reading history and conducting politics through the lens of genocide. Contributors examine the pressures that great powers have exerted in shaping the concept; the reaction Raphaël Lemkin, originator of the word “genocide,” had to the United Nations’ final resolution on the subject; France’s long-held choice not to use the concept of genocide in its courtrooms; the role of transformative social projects and use of genocide memory in politics; and the relation of genocide to mass violence targeting specific groups. Throughout, this comprehensive text offers innovative solutions to address the limitations of the genocide concept, while preserving its usefulness as an analytical framework.

The world was watching when footage of the "tank man" -- the lone Chinese citizen blocking the passage of a column of tanks during the brutal 1989 crackdown on protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square -- first appeared in the media. The furtive video is now regarded as an iconic depiction of a government's violence against its own people. Throughout the twentieth century, states across East Asia committed many relatively undocumented atrocities, with victims numbering in the millions. The contributors to this insightful volume analyze many of the most notorious cases, including the Japanese army's Okinawan killings in 1945, Indonesia's anticommunist purge in 1965--1968, Thailand's Red Drum incinerations in 1972--1975, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge massacre in 1975--1978, Korea's Kwangju crackdown in 1980, the Philippines' Mendiola incident in 1987, Myanmar's suppression of the democratic movement in 1988, and China's Tiananmen incident. With in-depth investigation of events that have long been misunderstood or kept hidden from public scrutiny, State Violence in East Asia provides critical insights into the political and cultural dynamics of state-sanctioned violence and discusses ways to prevent it in the future.

This volume encompasses an array of material exploring the millennium phenomenon and the violent excitement it provokes. Consisting of three core parts, the book combines pertinent documents with insightful commentary and discussion.

Is politics necessarily violent? Does the justifiability of violence depend on whether it is perpetrated to defend or upend the existing order – or perhaps on the way in which it is conducted? Is violence simply direct physical harm, or can it also be structural, symbolic, or epistemic? In this book, Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberley Hutchings explore how political theorists, from Niccolo Machiavelli to Elaine Scarry, have addressed these issues. They engage with both defenders and critics of violence in politics, analysing their diverse justificatory and rhetorical strategies in order to draw out the enduring themes of these debates. They show how political theorists have tended to evade the central difficulties raised by violence by either reducing it to a neutral tool or identifying it with something quite distinct, such as justice or virtue. They argue that, because violence is necessarily wrapped up with hierarchical and exclusive structures and imaginaries, legitimising it in terms of the ends that it serves, or how it is perpetrated, no longer makes sense. This book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars in areas ranging from the ethics of terror and war to radical and revolutionary political thought.

Violent Neoliberalism explores the complex unfolding relationship between neoliberalism and violence. Employing a series of theoretical dialogues on development, discourse and dispossession Cambodia, this study sheds significant empirical light on the vicious implications of free market ideology and practice.

Offering a wide-ranging study of contemporary literature, film, visual art, and performance by writers and artists who live and work in the United Kingdom but also maintain strong ties to postcolonial Africa and the Caribbean, Living Cargo explores how contemporary black British culture makers have engaged with the institutional archives of colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade in order to reimagine blackness in British history and to make claims for social and political redress. Steven Blevins calls this reimagining “unhousing history”—an aesthetic and political practice that animates and improvises on the institutional archive, repurposing it toward different ends and new possibilities. He discusses the work of novelists, including Caryl Phillips, Fred D’Aguiar, David Dabydeen, and Bernardine Evaristo; filmmakers Isaac Julien and Inge Blackman; performance poet Dorothea Smartt; fashion designer Ozwald Boateng; artists Hew Locke and Yinka Shonibare; and the urban redevelopment of Bristol, England, which unfolded alongside the public demand to remember the city’s slave-trading past. Living Cargo argues that the colonial archive is neither static nor residual but emergent. By reassembling historical fragments and traces consolidated in the archive, these artists not only perform a kind of counter-historiography, they also imagine future worlds that might offer amends for the atrocities of the past.

This Palgrave Pivot argues that if we are to understand civil conflict we need to grasp how everyday life is shaped by local conflict imaginaries. In order to examine this claim the book sets out to explore the contours of conflict imaginaries from two very different sites of conflict. Both Colombia and Indonesia have suffered from the collective trauma of political violence but in very different social, cultural and political contexts. Sketching out what they mean by a conflict imaginary, and explaining the relationship of this key concept to social imaginaries more broadly, the authors provide a historical overview of how political violence has been represented in both countries. They go on to outline the original qualitative research methods used to provide empirical evidence for the importance of conflict imaginaries, methods which allow them to explore the images and metaphors that underpin the spatial, chronological and emotional cartographies through which people make sense of political violence. With an emphasis on the construction of place-based knowledge, they consider the role of the local, the national and the global in the imagining of civil conflict, and show how film can be used to explore the imaginative worlds of social actors living alongside violence, revealing in the process the need to take seriously their hopes, fears, dreams and fantasies.