Book Review: Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle

Abstract

In 2011, Brad Evans, a political theorist now based at the University of Bristol in the UK, launched a web project called Histories of Violence. 1 It was designed to commemorate the attacks of September 11 th , 2001 and to assess the development and legacy of the decade-long so called War on Terror that ensued.In the years since its launch, Evans has collaborated with intellectuals and artists from all over the world to produce an excellent resource for interpreting violence in the contemporary age.Most recently, the contributors to the web project have focussed on the phenomenon of what they call disposable lives.In Evans' words: "Mass violence is poorly understood if it simply refers to casualties on battlefields or continues to be framed through conventional notions of warfare.We need to interrogate the multiple ways in which entire populations are rendered disposable on a daily basis if we are to take seriously the meaning of global citizenship in the 21 st Century." 2 It is in this spirit of interrogation that Disposable Futures is situated.Evans is here joined by the American-Canadian cultural critic Henry Giroux, who is well-known for his critical writings on education.It is no surprise, then, that the book, drawing on the writings of the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paolo Freire, should be so focussed on the transformative powers of critical pedagogy.The book is prefaced with a consideration of the concept of disposability and the seductive power of violence as they appear in the writings of Primo Levi.Levi's testimonies, however, concern the 20 th century experience of mass violence.The authors argue that the character of violence in our young century differs from that of its precursor.What Levi would not have anticipated, they argue, is the extent to which disposability has been "recast by the very regimes that claimed to defeat ideological fascism" (xii).Subsequently, for Evans and Giroux "there is no greater task today than to develop a critique of violence adequate to our deeply unjust, inequitable, and violent times" (3).These provocative statements are interesting for genocide studies scholars because they explicitly set out to decentre the 20 th century in the history of violence.This century, which many have called the "century of genocide," 3 constitutes the large bulk of genocide studies' empirical object.The book thus provokes a consideration of whether genocide, as a specific form of violence, might have changed in character too, and what that might mean for the practice of prevention.Steps have been made in this direction already-as shown by the special issue of the International Journal of Human Rights edited by Jürgen Zimmerer, dedicated to thinking about the possibilities for genocide in the context of rapid climate change and rising "environmental violence" 4 -but Evans and Giroux point to a number of different paths in which these steps might be made.The authors present something of a whirlwind tour of the contemporary analysis of violence, drawing on a wide array of thinkers from Gorgio Agamben to Howard Zinn, and suffused with 1 www.historiesofviolence.com