New Book Announcement - Figuring Violence: Affective Investments in Perpetual War

Dear colleagues,

I'm pleased to announce the publication of my new book *Figuring Violence:
Affective Investments in Perpetual War *(Fordham University Press, 2019).

https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823281671/figuring-violence/

In the United States, the early years of the war on terror were marked by
the primacy of affects like fear and insecurity. These aligned neatly with
the state’s drive toward intensive securitization and an aggressive foreign
policy. But for the broader citizenry, such affects were tolerable at best
and unbearable at worst; they were not sustainable. Figuring Violence
catalogs the affects that define the latter stages of this war and the
imaginative work that underpins them. These affects—apprehension,
affection, admiration, gratitude, pity, and righteous anger—are far more
subtle and durable than their predecessors, rendering them deeply
compatible with the ambitions of a state embroiling itself in a perpetual
and unwinnable war.

Surveying the cultural landscape of this sprawling conflict, *Figuring
Violence* reveals the varied mechanisms by which these affects have been
militarized. Rebecca Adelman tracks their convergences around six types of
beings: civilian children, military children, military spouses, veterans
with PTSD and TBI, Guantánamo detainees, and military dogs. All of these
groups have become preferred objects of sentiment in wartime public
culture, but they also have in common their status as political subjects
who are partially or fully unknowable. They become visible to outsiders
through a range of mediated and imaginative practices that are ostensibly
motivated by concern or compassion. However, these practices actually
function to reduce these beings to abstracted figures, silencing their
political subjectivities and obscuring their suffering. As a result, they
are erased and rendered hypervisible at once. Figuring Violence
demonstrates that this dynamic ultimately propagates the very militarism
that begets their victimization.

The book may be of interest to scholars working on cultural studies of
militarism, affect studies, media studies, and gender studies.


-- 
Rebecca A. Adelman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
UMBC Department of Media and Communication Studies

* Figuring Violence: Affective Investments in Perpetual War
<https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823281671/figuring-violence/> (Fordham
UP, 2019)

* "When it comes to helping our soldiers, talk is cheap"
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/12/11/when-it-comes-helping-our-soldiers-talk-is-cheap/?utm_term=.93afdae7036c>
*Washington
Post *(December 11, 2018)

* www.rebeccaaadelman.com

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