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Received a 2016 Stonewall Book Award – Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award Honor Book from the American Library Association

Selected as one of “The Best of the Best from the University Presses: Books You Should Know About” at the 2016 ALA Annual Conference

Violence against lesbians and gay men has increasingly captured media and scholarly attention. But these reports tend to focus on one segment of the LGBT community—white, middle class men—and largely ignore that part of the community that arguably suffers a larger share of the violence—racial minorities, the poor, and women. In Violence against Queer People, sociologist Doug Meyer offers the first investigation of anti-queer violence that focuses on the role played by race, class, and gender.
 
Drawing on interviews with forty-seven victims of violence, Meyer shows that LGBT people encounter significantly different forms of violence—and perceive that violence quite differently—based on their race, class, and gender.  His research highlights the extent to which other forms of discrimination—including racism and sexism—shape LGBT people’s experience of abuse. He reports, for instance, that lesbian and transgender women often described violent incidents in which a sexual or a misogynistic component was introduced, and that LGBT people of color sometimes weren’t sure if anti-queer violence was based solely on their sexuality or whether racism or sexism had also played a role. Meyer observes that given the many differences in how anti-queer violence is experienced, the present media focus on white, middle-class victims greatly oversimplifies and distorts the nature of anti-queer violence. In fact, attempts to reduce anti-queer violence that ignore race, class, and gender run the risk of helping only the most privileged gay subjects.

Many feel that the struggle for gay rights has largely been accomplished and the tide of history has swung in favor of LGBT equality. Violence against Queer People, on the contrary, argues that the lives of many LGBT people—particularly the most vulnerable—have improved very little, if at all, over the past thirty years.
 

Studying the relationship between liberalism and globalization, this special issue examines discourses and practices of violence and redemption. How do we conceptualize violence and redemption outside the terms that liberalism presents? How have social movements throughout the world responded to or engaged liberal assumptions about what constitutes a violent act? How does the experience of suffering expose the futility of the wish to redeem violence through violence? Focusing on the relationship between redemptive promises and the organization, experience, and effects of violence, these essays study the ways in which ethically charged political ambition, both liberal and nonliberal, sometimes organizes violence and sometimes attempts to heal the breach that comes in its wake.

The essays examine topics such as the socioeconomic crisis in Mexico in the 1980s; continuities between plantation slavery, colonization, and the emergence of independent states as war machines in Africa; the culture of a Palestinian suicide bomber; the architecture of mass rioting and rape in Indonesia; the experience of unredeemed suffering in Herman Melville’s “Shiloh;” and the aggression of Aborigines in Australia.

Contributors. Tim Blackmore, John Borneman, Gillian Cowlishaw, Richard Falk, Ken Graves, Ghassan Hage, Abidin Kusno, Eva Lipman, Claudio Lomnitz, Patchen Markell, Achille Mbembe, Laura Nader, Steven Sampson, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Candace Vogler, Michael Warner, Margaret Werry, Richard Ashby Wilson

Violence and the Dream People is an account of a little-known struggle by the Malayan government and the communist guerrillas, during the 1948-1960 Malayan Emergency, to win the allegiance of the Orang Asli, the indigenous people of the peninsular Malaya. The author argues that the use of force by both sides in their attempts to woo or coerce the jungle dwellers to support one side or the other in the conflict, caused tensions among the Orang Asli that resulted in counter violence against the interlopers and internecine killings in the tribal groups.

This study challenges the depiction of the Orang Asli as naïve innocents, unwittingly manipulated by outsiders for their own purposes. Heavily outnumbered, they looked to their own resources to survive, in the face of relocation, conscription, random bombings, and haphazard killing. Leary argues that they were shrewd enough to recognize the winning side and backed their judgment with force where necessary.

Violence and the Dream People is an important study of a much neglected facet of the Malayan Emergency and of the history of the indigenous peoples of the Malay Peninsula.

Violence, the Body, and “The South” is a boldly innovative contribution to a new Southern Studies, which provides a model of collaborative, intergenerational, interracial, interdisciplinary scholarship. This special issue of American Literature challenges the traditional division of the United States between “North” and “South,” revealing that the complexities of violence and pleasure, representation and illusion, innocence and guilt, gender and race exist in infinitely inflected combination in the Americas, not simply in the “South.”
This collection represents first-rate examples of gender, critical race, genre, and material culture studies. Topics ranging from epistemological and authorial rebellions marking Frederick Douglass’s Narrative and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition to the twentieth-century labors of writers, such as Francisco Goldman and Helena María Viramontes, who work to make visible the complexities of “North” and “South” with respect to subordinated Latino/a bodies. William Faulkner is revisited in an essay on the internalization of “race” in Light in August. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night are analyzed in a framework of homopolitical desire. Genre and regional studies combine in an energetic essay resituating Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl with respect to “Northern” fiction.

Contributors. Houston A. Baker Jr., Jeannine DeLombard, Laura Doyle, Jennifer Rae Greeson, Andrea Levine, Dana D. Nelson, Ana Patricia Rodríguez, Bryan Wagner

In a world desperate to comprehend and address what appears to be an ever-enlarging explosion of violence, this book provides important insights into crucial contemporary issues, with violence providing the lens. Violence: Analysis, Intervention, and Prevention provides a multidisciplinary approachto the analysis and resolution of violent conflicts. In particular, the book discusses ecologies of violence, and micro-macro linkages at the local, national, and international levels as well as intervention and prevention processes critical to constructive conflict transformation.

The causes of violence are complex and demand a deep multidimensional analysis if we are to fully understand its driving forces. Yet in the aftermath of such destruction there is hope in the resiliency, knowledge, and creativity of communities, organizations, leaders, and international agencies to transform the conditions that lead to such violence.

In a world desperate to comprehend and address what appears to be an ever-enlarging explosion of violence, this book provides important insights into crucial contemporary issues, with violence providing the lens. Violence: Analysis, Intervention, and Prevention provides a multidisciplinary approach to the analysis and resolution of violent conflicts. In particular, the book discusses ecologies of violence, and micro-macro linkages at the local, national, and international levels as well as intervention and prevention processes critical to constructive conflict transformation.

The causes of violence are complex and demand a deep multidimensional analysis if we are to fully understand its driving forces. Yet in the aftermath of such destruction there is hope in the resiliency, knowledge, and creativity of communities, organizations, leaders, and international agencies to transform the conditions that lead to such violence.