Complicity and the Politics of Representation

Description

This book explores the concept of complicity with regard to the politics of representation. Over the past decades, complicity critique has evolved and become integral to literary and cultural studies. Nonetheless, the concept of complicity remains fundamentally underresearched. Addressing topical and exigent concerns such as white supremacy, war and displacement, child abuse and mentalism, this timely volume explores how producers, texts, consumers and critics can either intentionally or unwittingly become complicit in the creation and perpetuation of social harm - and how the structures supporting such complicities can be resisted. The contributors aim to raise awareness and lay the groundwork for a utopian 'radical unfolding' that enables not just non-complicity, i.e. the refusal to be complicit, but anti-complicity - the active and collective resistance to social harm. Contents Acknowledgments Chapter 1. Introduction: Complicity and the Politics of Representation Chapter 2. The Chapters Part I. NARRATIVE COMPLICITIES AND COLLECTIVE REMEMBERING Chapter 3. Complicit Configurations: Narrating the Partition of India in Auden, Madhvani, and Brenton Chapter 4. Complicity on the Small Screen: Ordinary Germans as Perpetrators in Recent German TV Miniseries on World War II and the Holocaust Chapter 5. Literary Complicity and the Differend: Naturalizing, Ontologizing, and Self-Referential Representations of National Socialist Persecution Chapter 6. Guilt and Autonomy in Harmann Broch’s and Geoffrey Hill’s Works Chapter 7. An Illusion of Absence: The Picturesque and Culpable Ignorance in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and The Buried Giant Part II. ENFOLDINGS AND UNFOLDINGS Chapter 8. A Radical Unfolding: Utopianism against Complicity Chapter 9. Complicity: Narratives, Articulations, and the Politics of Representation Chapter 10. A Murmur of Indifference to Authorial Identity in Intellectual Life Chapter 11. “I spy with my little eye something complicitly simple”: Eighteenth-Century Caricature Tricks Part III. NARRATIVE COMPLICITY CRITIQUES Chapter 12. The Black Counter-Gaze: Complicity and White Privilege in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen Chapter 13. Challenging Complicity in the Context of Mentalism: Mental Distress Autobiographies and Performance Art Chapter 14. Representation of Complicity with Child Sexual Abuse in the Movies: Spotlight and Doubt Chapter 15. “. . . to understand everything that came her way”: Complicity and the Child Protagonist Works Cited Index About the Contributors