Abortive Rituals: Historical Apologies in the Global Era

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph

doi:10.1080/136980100427298

Cited by 113 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…As these sentiments become public spectacles, significant political effects emerge. For instance, these effects have bound recognition and its resources to toothless rituals of redress, to impossible demands that harmed subjects embody their harm convincingly, or to the reassurances that come with engaging suffering at a compassionate remove (Allen 2009; Povinelli 2002; Trouillot 2000). For good reasons, this work has critiqued the limits of publics that cohere around these spectacles, as well as the empathic relations they reinforce.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

THE MUSEUM OF RESILIENCE: Raising a Sympathetic Public in Postwelfare Chicago

Fennell

2012

Cultural Anthropology

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This article offers an analysis of a “sympathetic public” cohering around the U.S. welfare state's wreckage that is tuned to the material dimensions of emplacement. It does this through an exploration of efforts to bring a national public housing museum to Chicago. Museum supporters mobilized the properties of ruined public housing to summon affinities and identifications with the U.S. poor and to reconfigure public reckoning about poverty in the United States. The public examined here is an anticipated one. Conceptually, I depart from text‐based understandings of publics and publicity. I follow how museum supporters sought to curate encounters with ruined housing in ways that would socialize beholders into the attentiveness necessary to reflect and act properly on poverty. The “sympathetic” dimensions of this anticipated public operate on two levels. First, future visitors’ identifications with the struggles of bygone residents would combat “unsympathetic” representations of U.S. poor. Second, visceral contact with a place once inhabited by bygone residents would render contagious the perspectives, values, and practices they used to navigate social inequality and state‐mediated neglect. The anticipated public then also anticipates the kind of citizenry capable of managing social protection at a “postwelfare” moment.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

THE MUSEUM OF RESILIENCE: Raising a Sympathetic Public in Postwelfare Chicago

Fennell

2012

Cultural Anthropology

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“…This way of working backwards to make sense of modernity is in keeping with his fundamentally historical approach (Trouillot, 1995(Trouillot, , 2000, an approach that insists on starting with struggles in the present, in order to make sense of how the past impinges on and informs it (Trouillot 2000). For Trouillot, postmodernism is precisely what helps reveal the nature of modernity.…”

Section: Alexander Trouillot and The Role Of Social Theorymentioning

confidence: 91%

Beyond binary thinking: Making sense of modernity as a historical phenomenon

Goga¹

2015

PINS

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Jeffrey Alexander's The dark side of modernity is an attempt at making sense of the fact that "modernity" -the Western quest for progress and reason and pursuit of perfection -went awry and all the questions that come with having to recognize that. Questions such as how to make sense of the persistence of evil, the relationship between good and evil, how to make sense of modernity and its meanings in the world today, and the place of social theory in helping us understand shifts in Western modernity.In this review I consider the central arguments of Alexander's book in relation to the work of the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and specifically Trouillot's (2001) book chapter entitled Anthropology and the savage slot: The poetics and politics of otherness. I contrast Alexander's book against Trouillot's work as a way of: 1) illuminating how differently the authors conceptualize and conclude on the good / evil dichotomy; 2) showing how their divergence on the question of "postmodernity" has significant implications for making sense of what came before it (modernity) and for how they make sense of and see the world today; and 3) providing preliminary insight into how differently the authors harness social theory/ anthropology, theorizing, empirical work and analysis in making sense of a changing world.

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“…In this way, the 'abortive ritual' (Trouillot 2000) of commemoration becomes less about recognition than about nostalgia, creating what Boym terms 'a comforting collective script for individual longing' that aims to establish 'social cohesion, a sense of security and an obedient relationship to authority ' (2001, 42). At the same time, the transformation of a recognition struggle into identity politics not only evokes nostalgia for a less complicated and more unified past, but should also be seen as a political strategy for non-action at an institutional level; that is, for action that remains symbolic and memorial, as opposed to practical and transformational.…”

Section: Renegotiating Recognition Reparation and Reconciliationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Saving the Republic: State Nostalgia and Slavery Reparations in Media and Political Discourses

Frith¹

2015

Modern & Contemporary France

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Abortive Rituals: Historical Apologies in the Global Era

Cited by 113 publications

References 9 publications

THE MUSEUM OF RESILIENCE: Raising a Sympathetic Public in Postwelfare Chicago

THE MUSEUM OF RESILIENCE: Raising a Sympathetic Public in Postwelfare Chicago

Beyond binary thinking: Making sense of modernity as a historical phenomenon

Saving the Republic: State Nostalgia and Slavery Reparations in Media and Political Discourses

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