Betraying the Event

"Bloody the spectacle; tamed its society. Yet, even if atrocity is our contemporary, rather than curating a gallery of token victims, Fatima FestiÄ++ offers a collection that attempts to give victims the right to not speak on the stage that the lobbyists of pity keep unfolding. From Singapore's minorities to the Romanian communist Holocaust, from the rape trials in South Africa to the crushing theatricality of the Bosnian war, and from the Turkish coup d'ètat narratives to the heavily...
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"Bloody the spectacle; tamed its society. Yet, even if atrocity is our contemporary, rather than curating a gallery of token victims, Fatima FestiÄ++ offers a collection that attempts to give victims the right to not speak on the stage that the lobbyists of pity keep unfolding. From Singapore's minorities to the Romanian communist Holocaust, from the rape trials in South Africa to the crushing theatricality of the Bosnian war, and from the Turkish coup d'ètat narratives to the heavily biased Western broadcasting of the horrors of the war in Iraq, banalized victimhood comes undone. Against white guilt's self-mirroring display, if you think you are a victim, read this book and think again." - CÄflin-Andrei MihÄfilescu, Professor of Critical Theory, University of Western Ontario" "'In Betraying the Event', Fatima FestiÄ++ brings together a significant collection on the construction of victimisation in contemporary cultures that takes a comparative approach. This volume is a reconsideration of a vital topic. Rhetoric, imagery and political manipulation are all part of the representation and reception of victims. FestiÄ++ and her contributors examine key questions of power and authority in legal, political, literary and other forms of communication, such as the media. What event occurred in the world and how and the way that events are represented become central to the task at hand. Otherness and genocide are also at the core of the collection. The very victims and their representations and narratives of victimisation come to be challenged, misused and exploited and can be displaced into political metaphor. This impressively wide-ranging collection reconfigures a pressing question about victims and genocide, the nature of texts and the world, the place of literature between actual and possible worlds and in the context of social and political stresses." - Jonathan Hart, Professor of English, Comparative Literature and History, University of Alberta