TY - JOUR
AU - Ritholtz, Samuel
AB - In this book, Lee Ann Fujii explores what she calls the ‘logic of violence on display’. She defines the concept as ‘a collective effort to stage violence for people to see, notice, and take in’ (p. 2). To solve the puzzle of violence on display and to explain why people engage in it, Fujii focuses on its staging, or ‘the meaning-making power of embodied action’ (p. 8). Fujii argues that ‘such displays can do “things” that undisplayed violence cannot’ (p. 5): they produce new identities for the participants; they make participation in violence a requirement for in-group inclusion; and they can establish a new political order. Show time is the brilliant work of a scholar in her prime that almost never came to be published—a bittersweet accomplishment that appeared posthumously, after Fujii's death in 2018. The manuscript for the text had been considered lost until a near-final draft was discovered in a colleague's inbox. It was then edited to completion by Martha Finnemore, with an epilogue provided by Elisabeth Jean Wood. Finnemore brings a light touch to the text: her voice is present only in an excellent preface that tells the origins of the text while also recognizing Fujii's unique genius. In line with Fujii's renown as a leader on interviewing and ethical qualitative research methods, Finnemore remarks on how Fujii used such a strict system to protect the data of her interviewees that no one has been able to verify the identities of her research participants: her coding system was legible only to her, her computer password never unlocked. In Show time, Fujii pursues an interpretative, comparative case-study analysis in considering acts of violent display in Bosnia, Rwanda and the United States. The elements of this comparison differ in both geography and time, as well as in types of collective violence. While they could all be ‘coded’ as episodes of ethnic violence, they differ in their form, and Fujii uses this variation to reinforce the analytical utility of centring violence on display. In this text, Fujii continues her adaptation of performance theory to topics of political violence. The book itself follows the progression of a performance. Its first three chapters present its main arguments, centred on acts of violence displayed in the case-studies: a lynching of a black man in Maryland in 1933, a death-march of Muslim male prisoners in Bosnia in 1992, and a succession of massacres, involving children, in Rwanda in 1994. In chapter one, ‘Fixations’, Fujii introduces the book's starting premise and picks up where she left off in her first book, Killing neighbors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). While presenting the three case-studies, Fujii argues that group-deterministic analyses of ethnic violence are incomplete because of their limited capacity to explain counterfactuals. In chapter two, ‘Rehearsal’, Fujii explores the beforehand of spectacle and identifies the process of enactment through which political actors attempt to bring about a new political order. In chapter three, ‘Main attraction’, Fujii provides a theory of casting, which argues that spectacular violence facilitates widespread participation, including unwilling people as participant-witnesses. Participation in such events is transformative in that it destroys norms relating to others, produces new habits and allows key actors to adopt new roles. With the main logics of violent display presented, Fujii then turns to more subtle considerations. In chapter four, ‘Intermission’, she explores the role of silencing narratives that pervaded her attempts to understand acts of violent display in all three sites. In seeking to understand why people attempted to distance an act of violence from a given locality, Fujii reasserts the importance of understanding local history in analysing the dynamics of violence. In chapter five, ‘Sideshow’, Fujii argues that side-events of violent display, such as more private scenes of brutality, can still provide transformational pathways, particularly for perpetrators. In chapter six, ‘Encore’, Fujii extends the logic of violent display to death, by showing how the treatment of the dead in all three sites was used to structure new political orders. And in chapter seven, ‘Fictions’, Fujii considers those who resist the display of violence, particularly through small acts of care that save people or prevent violent display, to define violent category-making as highly contingent and not always plannable. To Fujii, the book makes two main contributions. First, it presents violence as a process of group-making; and second, it identifies violence as a form of meaning-making through its embodied nature. In this respect, physical bodies can stand in for social bodies. Elisabeth Jean Wood builds on these perceived contributions in her epilogue. After providing an effective summary of the argument, she details further contributions made by the book, as well as questions she would have liked to ask Fujii. The epilogue's thought-provoking structure provides the reader with some space for reflection at the end of a forceful book. Overall, Show time is an extraordinary text that is as profound as it is provocative. In typical Fujii fashion, by focusing on counterfactuals and moments that resist grand narrative, the author forces readers to take a second look at concepts often taken for granted in studies of political violence. The text also serves as a masterclass in using the hyper-local to explain micro-dynamics. Both ‘Intermission’, the method chapter on silencing narratives, and ‘Fictions’, the chapter on small acts of care as counterfactual to group-selective violence, reveal a deeply human portrait of violence that scholars too often ignore. Still, some chapters are more effective than others. ‘Encore’, the chapter on the dead, though interesting, felt disconnected from the rest of the book, as the site remains but the perpetrator of violent display changes from the Hutu-aligned genocidaires to the current Rwandan government. This change presents unaddressed questions related to the role of intent, context and wartime sequence in comparing variant dynamics of violent display. That said, for Fujii to take on a repressive autocratic regime in this capacity is nothing short of brave. In addition, I identify two additional potential contributions. First, Fujii shows the power of violence as a process of group-making for perpetrators, and further research could consider how the productive potential of violence can change the identities of victims. Second, Fujii details how bearing witness to violent display brings the witness in on the act; but given the scholarship that has argued that witnesses of violence may also be victims, further research could consider variation in the socially transformative potential of witnessing violence to further improve our understanding of spectacular violence and its effects. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of International Affairs. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Show time: the logic and power of violent display
JF - International Affairs
DO - 10.1093/ia/iiac036
DA - 2022-03-07
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/show-time-the-logic-and-power-of-violent-display-y7oVy55Rjb
SP - 767
EP - 769
VL - 98
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -