Abstract
Examining both content and pedagogy in university courses on the representation of torture, Hron argues for fostering students’ imaginative, intellectual, and empathic capacities to actively and ethically witness representations of torture, and to analyze how those representations may be formulated and mobilized toward particular political ends. As she evinces, pedagogies that work against the acceptance and normalization of torture must cultivate students’ ability to move beyond compassion fatigue and/or simple demonstrations of sympathy, and must challenge popularized portrayals of the body as a reservoir of truth that may be broken open by force. To accomplish these aims, Hron advocates several key components of courses on literary and cultural representations of torture, and exhorts educators to avoid presenting torture and interrogation as spectacles in their own classrooms.
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Notes
- 1.
For a compelling examination of the role of service learning and how to develop it in such contexts, the editors recommend Marike Janzen’s “Experiencing Form: Service Learning in the Literature of Human Rights Classroom,” Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Alexandra Schultheis Moore and Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg (New York: Modern Language Association, 2015): 284–93.
- 2.
Michael Ignatieff , The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997), 29.
- 3.
Ibid., 11.
- 4.
Susan D. Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death (New York: Routledge, 1999), 53.
- 5.
Stanley Cohen , States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 187.
- 6.
Ibid., 189; 191.
- 7.
Ibid., 187.
- 8.
Ibid., 192.
- 9.
Ibid., 193.
- 10.
Ibid., 194.
- 11.
Boltanski , Luc. Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics. Cambridge University Press, 1999.
- 12.
Aristotle. Rhetoric. Trans. Rhys Roberts. Internet Classics Archive.
- 13.
Ibid., 196.
- 14.
Ignatieff , The Warrior’s Honor, 29.
- 15.
Throughout this essay I make various remarks about torture in current Hollywood films. For more elaboration, see my article “Torture Goes Pop!” in Peace Review 20, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 22–30.
- 16.
Hansen, 54.
- 17.
Amnesty International , Amnesty International Report 2015/16: The State of the World’s Human Rights (London: Amnesty International Ltd., 2016), available online at https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2016/02/annual-report-201516/
- 18.
For instance, at the time of writing, American Republican nominee Donald Trump is advocating returning to waterboarding and inventing torture techniques that are “worse than waterboarding” to fight the “war on terror .” Trevor Timm, “Donald Trump’s Anti-Terror Policies Sound a Lot Like War Crimes,” The Guardian, July 1, 2016.
- 19.
The Abu Ghraib photographs first aired on April 28, 2004 on CBS’s 60 Minutes II.
- 20.
For example, new photos from Abu Ghraib appeared in The New Yorker (May 10, 2004: 42) and The Washington Post (May 21, 2004: A01; June 11, 2004: A01).
- 21.
Renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, the SOA had trained nearly 60,000 graduates in torture, execution, and extortion techniques, including such dictators as Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina , Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia.
- 22.
In the climactic scene of 1984, Winston is tortured by what he fears most—in his case, rats. Moreover, during his torture session, he develops a twisted relationship with his torturer O’Brien, and thus betrays his love, Julia. In class, this scene can be used to ask students a number of thought-provoking questions: about what their possible behavior in a totalitarian system might be; about their fears , loyalties, and beliefs; about the dynamics of the tortured/torturer , or about the dependency/betrayal that a torture session educes.
- 23.
Barahéni ’s Persian text has only been translated into French; however, an English chapter from his book “The Dismemberment” can be found in God’s Spies, ed. Albert Manguel (Toronto: Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1999).
- 24.
For more, see Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977).
- 25.
Azo, thirteenth century CE, quoted in Barry Allen, Truth in Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 21.
- 26.
Ulpian, third century CE, quoted in Edward Peters, Torture (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 55.
- 27.
Ibid., 3.
- 28.
US Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel, “Memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzales Counsel to the President, Re: Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 U.S.C. §§ 2340–2340A,” August 1, 2002, available online at https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//NSAEBB/NSAEBB127/02.08.01.pdf
- 29.
UN General Assembly, Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment , December 10, 1984.
- 30.
See, for instance, Luc Boltanski’s Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, trans. Graham Burchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), or chapters 6–8 in Martha C. Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), or her widely circulated article “Cosmopolitan Emotions,” in New Humanist: The Bimonthly Journal of the Rationalist Press Association 116, no. 4 (2001). Or going back to the 1670s, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a major dramatist of the German Enlightenment, developed a theory of “tragic pity” [tragisches Mitleid], in which he argued that the goal of tragedy was to transform “passions into virtuous capacities” (quoted in H. B. Nisbet, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: His Life, Works, and Thought [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013], 402).
- 31.
See, for instance, PMLA’s Special Issue on Human Rights 121, no. 5 (Fall 2006); the South Central Review’s Special Issue on Torture 24 , no. 1 (Spring 2007); or the Peace Review issue on Human Rights in Literature and Film 20, no. 1 (Spring 2008).
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Hron, M. (2018). Teaching about Torture, or, Reading between the Lines in the Humanities. In: Moore, A., Swanson, E. (eds) Witnessing Torture. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74965-5_12
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