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3 books match the query 'Graff Zivin, Erin'

cover of Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic

Figurative Inquisitions

Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic

Erin Graff Zivin

Northwestern University Press, 2014

Winner, 2015 LAJSA Best Book in Latin American Jewish Studies

The practices of interrogation, torture, and confession have resurfaced in public debates since the early 2000s following human rights abuses around the globe. Yet discussion of torture has remained restricted to three principal fields: the legal, the pragmatic, and the moral, eclipsing the less immediate but vital question of what torture does.Figurative Inquisitions seeks to correct this lacuna by approaching the question of torture from a literary vantage point.

This book investigates the uncanny presence of the Inquisition and marranismo (crypto-Judaism) in modern literature, theater, and film from Mexico, Brazil, and Portugal. Through a critique of fictional scenes of interrogation, it underscores the vital role of the literary in deconstructing the relation between torture and truth. Figurative Inquisitions traces the contours of a relationship among aesthetics, ethics, and politics in an account of the "Inquisitional logic" that continues to haunt contemporary political forms. In so doing, the book offers a unique humanistic perspective on current torture debates.

 
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cover of The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary

The Wandering Signifier

Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary

Erin Graff Zivin

Duke University Press, 2008

While Jews figure in the work of many modern Latin American writers, the questions of how and to what end they are represented have received remarkably little critical attention. Helping to correct this imbalance, Erin Graff Zivin traces the symbolic presence of Jews and Jewishness in late-nineteenth- through late-twentieth-century literary works from Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, and Nicaragua. Ultimately, Graff Zivin’s investigation of representations of Jewishness reveals a broader, more complex anxiety surrounding difference in modern Latin American culture.

In her readings of Spanish American and Brazilian fiction, Graff Zivin highlights inventions of Jewishness in which the concept is constructed as a rhetorical device. She argues that Jewishness functions as a wandering signifier that while not wholly empty, can be infused with meaning based on the demands of the textual project in question. Just as Jews in Latin America possess distinct histories relative to their European and North American counterparts, they also occupy different symbolic spaces in the cultural landscape. Graff Zivin suggests that in Latin American fiction, anxiety, desire, paranoia, attraction, and repulsion toward Jewishness are always either in tension with or representative of larger attitudes toward otherness, whether racial, sexual, religious, national, economic, or metaphysical. She concludes The Wandering Signifier with an inquiry into whether it is possible to ethically represent the other within the literary text, or whether the act of representation necessarily involves the objectification of the other.

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cover of Transmedial Exposure: Toward an Experimental Humanities

Transmedial Exposure

Toward an Experimental Humanities

Erin Graff Zivin

Duke University Press, 2027

In Transmedial Exposure, Erin Graff Zivin analyzes how works of art are adapted, translated, reenacted, or distorted by works in other media. Taking as her conceptual point of departure philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of exposure as that which unsettles the sovereignty of the self and demands ethical responsibility, Graff Zivin investigates experimental works of art across a range of media from the Americas and Europe. She demonstrates that each ostensibly autonomous work, discipline, or sensory experience is constitutively relational, heteronomous, and exposed: philosophy to music, prose to film, performance to documentation, movement to montage, sound to touch. Exposing Latin American literary and cultural studies to continental philosophy, critical theory, Black thought, and media scholarship, Transmedial Exposure foregrounds the far-reaching ethical and political consequences of embodied, sensorial thought while imagining the possibility of a future experimental humanities.
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