Virtual Library

This is the most comprehensive, and most comprehensively chilling, study of modern torture yet written. Darius Rejali, one of the world’s leading experts on torture, takes the reader from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, from slavery and the electric chair to electrotorture in American inner cities, and from French and British colonial prison cells and the Spanish-American War to the fields of Vietnam, the wars of the Middle East, and the new democracies of Latin America and Europe.

As Rejali traces the development and application of one torture technique after another in these settings, he reaches startling conclusions. As the twentieth century progressed, he argues, democracies not only tortured, but set the international pace for torture. Dictatorships may have tortured more, and more indiscriminately, but the United States, Britain, and France pioneered and exported techniques that have become the lingua franca of modern torture: methods that leave no marks. Under the watchful eyes of reporters and human rights activists, low-level authorities in the world’s oldest democracies were the first to learn that to scar a victim was to advertise iniquity and invite scandal. Long before the CIA even existed, police and soldiers turned instead to “clean” techniques, such as torture by electricity, ice, water, noise, drugs, and stress positions. As democracy and human rights spread after World War II, so too did these methods.

Rejali makes this troubling case in fluid, arresting prose and on the basis of unprecedented research—conducted in multiple languages and on several continents—begun years before most of us had ever heard of Osama bin Laden or Abu Ghraib. The author of a major study of Iranian torture, Rejali also tackles the controversial question of whether torture really works, answering the new apologists for torture point by point. A brave and disturbing book, this is the benchmark against which all future studies of modern torture will be measured.

Torture is indisputably abhorrent. Why, you might ask, would you even want to think or read about torture? That is a very good question, and one this book addresses in a compelling and enlightening way. Torture is a very important issue, not least because millions of people around the world have been subjected to this odious practice—and many are enduring torture right now as you read these words.

"In overthrowing me, you have done no more than cut down the trunk of the tree of the black liberty in St. Domingue--it will spring back from the roots, for they are numerous and deep."

These are Toussaint Louverture's last words before being taken to prison in France. Heroic leader of the only successful slave revolt in history, Louverture is one of the greatest anti-imperialist fighters who ever lived. Born into slavery on a Caribbean plantation, he was able to break from his bondage to lead an army of freed African slaves to victory against the professional armies of France, Spain, and Britain in the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804.

In this lively narrative biography, Louverture's fascinating life is explored through the prism of his radical politics. Charles Forsdick and Christian Høgsbjerg champion the "black Robespierre," whose revolutionary legacy has inspired people and movements in the two centuries since his death. For anyone interested in the roots of modern resistance movements and black political radicalism, Louverture's extraordinary life provides the perfect groundwork.

Anna Seghers's Transit is an existential, political, literary thriller that explores the agonies of boredom, the vitality of storytelling, and the plight of the exile with extraordinary compassion and insight. Having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany in 1937, and later a camp in Rouen, the nameless twenty-seven-year-old German narrator of Seghers's multilayered masterpiece ends up in the dusty seaport of Marseille. Along the way he is asked to deliver a letter to a man named Weidel in Paris and discovers Weidel has committed suicide, leaving behind a suitcase containing letters and the manuscript of a novel. As he makes his way to Marseille to find Weidel's widow, the narrator assumes the identity of a refugee named Seidler, though the authorities think he is really Weidel. There in the giant waiting room of Marseille, the narrator converses with the refugees, listening to their stories over pizza and wine, while also gradually piecing together the story of Weidel, whose manuscript has shattered the narrator's "deathly boredom," bringing him to a deeper awareness of the transitory world the refugees inhabit as they wait and wait for that most precious of possessions: transit papers.

A powerfully argued work of intellectual history, Trauma will rewrite the terms of future discussion of its subject.

Psychic trauma is one of the most frequently invoked ideas in the behavioral sciences and the humanities today. Yet bitter disputes have marked the discussion of trauma ever since it first became an issue in the 1870s, growing even more heated in recent years following official recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
In this key work for psychoanalysis and hypnosis as well as trauma studies and intellectual history, Ruth Leys investigates the history of the concept of trauma. Leys argues that the concept of trauma has always been fundamentally unstable, oscillating uncontrollably between two competing models, each of which tends at its limit to collapse into the other. She explores the emergence of multiple personality disorder, Freud's approaches to trauma, medical responses to shellshock and combat fatigue, Sándor Ferenczi's revisions of psychoanalysis, and ends with a erudite and devastating critique of the neurobiologically influenced theories of Cathy Caruth and Besel A. Van der Kolk.

Photographs of the Holocaust bear a double burden: to act as history lessons for future generations so we will “never forget” and to provide a means of mourning. In Trespassing through Shadows, Andrea Liss examines the inherent difficulties and productive possibilities of using photographs to bear witness, initiating a critical dialogue about the ways the post-Auschwitz generation has employed these documents to represent Holocaust memory and history.

In Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth proposes that in the widespread and bewildering experience of trauma in our century--both in its occurrence and in our attempt to understand it--we can recognize the possibility of a history no longer based on simple models of straightforward experience and reference. Through the notion of trauma, she contends, we come to a new understanding that permits history to arise where immediate understanding may not.
Caruth explores the ways in which the texts of psychoanalysis, literature, and literary theory both speak about and speak through the profound story of traumatic experience. Rather than straightforwardly describing actual case studies of trauma survivors, or attempting to elucidate directly the psychiatry of trauma, she examines the complex ways that knowing and not knowing are entangled in the language of trauma and in the stories associated with it. Caruth's wide-ranging discussion touches on Freud's theory of trauma as outlined in Moses and Monotheism and Beyond the Pleasure Principle. She traces the notion of reference and the figure of the falling body in de Man, Kleist, and Kant; the narratives of personal catastrophe in Hiroshima mon amour; and the traumatic address in Lecompte's reinterpretation of Freud's narrative of the dream of the burning child.

After learning her unborn daughter had developed a tumor in the womb, former China Central Television journalist Chai Jing embarked on a documentary journey believing air pollution to be the cause. Presented through a series of interviews, site visits, and TED talk-style lectures based on her research, Chai's film is a powerful account of both the widespread effects of pollution and the present challenges facing the enviromental protection movement.

[With English and Chinese subtitles]

Undivided Rights presents a textured understanding of the reproductive rights movement by placing the experiences, priorities, and activism of women of color in the foreground. Using historical research, original organizational case studies, and personal interviews, the authors illuminate how women of color have led the fight to control their own bodies and reproductive destinies. Undivided Rights shows how women of color---starting within their own Latina, African American, Native American, and Asian American communities--have resisted coercion of their reproductive abilities. Projected against the backdrop of the mainstream pro-choice movement and radical right agendas, these dynamic case studies feature the groundbreaking work being done by health and reproductive rights organizations led by women-of-color.

The book details how and why these women have defined and implemented expansive reproductive health agendas that reject legalistic remedies and seek instead to address the wider needs of their communities. It stresses the urgency for innovative strategies that push beyond the traditional base and goals of the mainstream pro-choice movement--strategies that are broadly inclusive while being specific, strategies that speak to all women by speaking to each woman. While the authors raise tough questions about inclusion, identity politics, and the future of women's organizing, they also offer a way out of the limiting focus on "choice."

Undivided Rights articulates a holistic vision for reproductive freedom. It refuses to allow our human rights to be divvied up and parceled out into isolated boxes that people are then forced to pick and choose among.

Une si longue lettre est une oeuvre majeure, pour ce qu'elle dit de la condition des femmes. Au coeur de ce roman, la lettre que l'une d'elle, Ramatoulaye, adresse à sa meilleure amie, pendant la réclusion traditionnelle qui suit son veuvage. Elle y évoque leurs souvenirs heureux d'étudiantes impatientes de changer le monde, et cet espoir suscité par les Indépendances. Mais elle rappelle aussi les mariages forcés, l'absence de droit des femmes. Et tandis que sa belle-famille vient prestement reprendre les affaires du défunt, Ramatoulaye évoque alors avec douleur le jour où son mari prit une seconde épouse, plus jeune, ruinant vingt-cinq années de vie commune et d'amour. La Sénégalaise Mariana Bâ est la première romancière africaine à décrire avec une telle lumière la place faite aux femmes dans sa société.