Post-Conflict
Cultures: Rituals of Representation
Edited
by Cristina Demaria and Colin Wright
Year of Publication: 2006
Recent military interventions in Rwanda, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, amongst others, have placed conflict again at the forefront of international debate. Yet the theoretical analysis of conflicts and of their social and psychological impacts has predictably lagged behind such tumultuous events. Moreover, while scholarship in the areas of strategic studies, international relations and peace studies has addressed the issues in terms of "conflict resolution" and "post-conflict reconstruction", little or no attention has been given to crucial interrelations between conflict and culture.
Bringing together international experts from disciplines as diverse as Political Science, History, International Law, Media Studies, Visual Culture, Critical Theory and Semiotics, Post-Conflict Cultures: Rituals of Representation therefore employs an avowedly interdisciplinary approach in order to address what the editors perceive to be a significant omission. In five themed sections, this ambitious volume tackles many questions often excluded from discourses on conflict. How does a past conflict inform a community's vision for its future? How are conflicts represented in the media, in literature, in journalism, in all forms of cultural expression? How do representations of conflict compound but also confuse, and even reconfigure, cultural identities? What role do histories of conflicts play in the construction of national identities?
Post-Conflict Cultures: Rituals of Representation will be of direct interest to scholars and practitioners working in media and communications, international relations and international law, peace studies, human rights, cultural studies and cultural memory, psychoanalysis and gender studies, and comparative literature and literary theory.
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360 pages)
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It is
a pleasure to witness the outcome of high-quality research conducted
in an ambience of extremely positive international collaboration.
These essays are sure to generate vigorous debates on media, law,
cultural memory and justice, history, literature, and all the urgent
issues of conflict and war. Roberto Grandi,
Vice-Rector for International Relations, University of Bologna
There where conflict was - and is - will media cultures be.
Inseparably… and illuminated as here by the critical insights of the
specialists that Demaria and Wright have brought together in this
indispensable anthology. A gem. Samir Shah,
former Head of Political Programmes, BBC TV and Radio; Trustee of
the Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture
Cristina Demaria teaches at the University of Bologna, Dipartimento di Discipline della Comunicazione. Leverhulme Fellow and Special Professor at the University of Nottingham, in the Department of Critical Theory and Cultural Studies, she leads a Socrates project on Post-Conflict Cultures. She has worked on media and television and has published Teorie di genere. Femminismo, critica post-coloniale e semiotica (Bompiani, 2003). Her latest book is Semiotica e Memoria: Analisi del post-conflitto (Carocci, 2006).
Colin Wright is currently Director of MA Programmes in the Department of Critical Theory and Cultural Studies, University of Nottingham, where he has convened the research seminars of the Centre for the Study of Post-Conflict Cultures. He is also founding editor of the journal, Situation Analysis: A Forum for Critical Thought and International Current Affairs, and the author of Philosophy, Rhetoric and Ideology: Towards a Sophistic Democracy (Magnolia Press, 2006).