ISBN:
9780816680931
,
9780816680948
Language:
English
Pages:
260 S.
,
Ill.
Series Statement:
Difference incorporated
DDC:
327.73
Keywords:
Imperialism Social aspects
;
Humanitarianism
;
War and society
;
United States Foreign relations
;
United States Military policy
;
Social aspects
;
USA
;
Außenpolitik
;
Militärpolitik
;
Imperialismus
;
Humanitarismus
Abstract:
" When is a war not a war? When it is undertaken in the name of democracy, against the forces of racism, sexism, and religious and political persecution? This is the new world of warfare that Neda Atanasoski observes in Humanitarian Violence, different in name from the old imperialism but not so different in kind. In particular, she considers U.S. militarism--humanitarian militarism--during the Vietnam War, the Soviet-Afghan War, and the 1990s wars of secession in the former Yugoslavia. What this book brings to light--through novels, travel narratives, photojournalism, films, news media, and political rhetoric--is in fact a system of postsocialist imperialism based on humanitarian ethics. In the fiction of the United States as a multicultural haven, which morally underwrites the nation's equally brutal waging of war and making of peace, parts of the world are subject to the violence of U.S. power because they are portrayed to be homogeneous and racially, religiously, and sexually intolerant--and thus permanently in need of reform. The entangled notions of humanity and atrocity that follow from such mediations of war and crisis have refigured conceptions of racial and religious freedom in the post-Cold War era. The resulting cultural narratives, Atanasoski suggests, tend to racialize ideological differences--whereas previous forms of imperialism racialized bodies. In place of the European racial imperialism, U.S. settler colonialism, and pre-civil rights racial constructions that associated racial difference with a devaluing of nonwhite bodies, Humanitarian Violence identifies an emerging discourse of race that focuses on ideological and cultural differences and makes postsocialist and Islamic nations the potential targets of U.S. disciplining violence."--
Abstract:
" When is a war not a war? When it is undertaken in the name of democracy, against the forces of racism, sexism, and religious and political persecution? This is the new world of warfare that Neda Atanasoski observes in Humanitarian Violence, different in name from the old imperialism but not so different in kind. In particular, she considers U.S. militarism--humanitarian militarism--during the Vietnam War, the Soviet-Afghan War, and the 1990s wars of secession in the former Yugoslavia. What this book brings to light--through novels, travel narratives, photojournalism, films, news media, and political rhetoric--is in fact a system of postsocialist imperialism based on humanitarian ethics. In the fiction of the United States as a multicultural haven, which morally underwrites the nation's equally brutal waging of war and making of peace, parts of the world are subject to the violence of U.S. power because they are portrayed to be homogeneous and racially, religiously, and sexually intolerant--and thus permanently in need of reform. The entangled notions of humanity and atrocity that follow from such mediations of war and crisis have refigured conceptions of racial and religious freedom in the post-Cold War era. The resulting cultural narratives, Atanasoski suggests, tend to racialize ideological differences--whereas previous forms of imperialism racialized bodies. In place of the European racial imperialism, U.S. settler colonialism, and pre-civil rights racial constructions that associated racial difference with a devaluing of nonwhite bodies, Humanitarian Violence identifies an emerging discourse of race that focuses on ideological and cultural differences and makes postsocialist and Islamic nations the potential targets of U.S. disciplining violence."--
Description / Table of Contents:
Machine generated contents note:Contents -- Introduction: The Racial Reorientations of U.S. Humanitarian Imperalism -- 1. Racial Time and the Other: Mapping the Postsocialist Transition -- 2. The Vietnam War and the Ethics of Failure: Heart of Darkness and the Emergence of Humanitarian Feeling at the Limits of Imperial Critique -- 3. Restoring National Faith: The Soviet-Afghan War in U.S. Media and Politics -- 4. Dracula as Ethnic Conflict: The Technologies of Humanitarian Militarism in Serbia and Kosovo -- 5. The Feminist Politics of Secular Redemption at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia -- Epilogue. Beyond Spectacle: The Hidden Geographies of the War at Home -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index.
Note:
Includes bibliographical references and index
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