About
27
Publications
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Introduction
Archives of the Insensible: of War, Photopolitics and Dead Memory (The University of Chicago Press,. Forthcoming Fall 2015
Current institution
Additional affiliations
September 2003 - September 2020
Position
- Professor (Full)
Description
- Allen Feldman teaches and researches visual culture, media archeology, critical war studies and critical race theory. He is a cultural anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic and visual culture research on policing as fusing warfare and lawfare in Northern Ireland, South Africa, with the HIV+ homeless in NYC and in the global “war of terror.” His research and teaching interests also include media ethnography, the anthropology of the body, the political sensorium & transitional justice.
January 2003 - present
Position
- Professor (Full)
Description
- Allen Feldman teaches and researches visual culture, media archeology, critical war studies and critical race theory. He is a cultural anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic and visual culture research on policing as fusing warfare and lawfare in Northern Ireland, South Africa, with the HIV+ homeless in NYC and in the global “war of terror.” His research and teaching interests also include media ethnography, the anthropology of the body, the political sensorium, transitional justice.
Publications
Publications (27)
When the planes disappear, the white, white doves Fly off and wash the cheeks of heaven With unbound wings taking radiance back again, taking possession Of the ether and of play. Higher, higher still, the white, white doves Fly off. Ah, if only the sky Were real [a man passing between two bombs said to me].-Mahmoud Darwish, "Under Siege" The settle...
In Kafka's fable ‘Before the Law’ the appeal to infinite regress, to higher and deeper authority, creates the illusion of an interiority of law that someone or something is within the hallowed and hollowed abode of the law even if this indwelling is merely the performance of withholding law from others. The Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guan...
The counterfactual sound-byte, a technocratic aphorism for phobogenic rumor, has bisected the public use of (un)reason, such as the counterfactual pattern recognitions that precipitated the invasion of Iraq. The militarized datafication of the counterfactual is predicated on signal/noise discriminations or cacography. Interrogation by torture, prom...
Abstract Interlacing collateral damage, political disappearance, state anthropophagy and survivance, this essay engages the Derridean contretemps- the essential accident- as the time out of time of wartime. The contretemps fractures teleocratic optics while escalating the sovereign right to be without right in war. Accidentalized violence does not...
Abstract Interlacing collateral damage, political disappearance,
state anthropophagy and survivance, this essay anatomizes the
Derridean contretemps- the essential accident- as the time out
of time of wartime. The contretemps fractures teleocratic optics
while escalating the sovereign right to be without right in war.
Accidentalized violence does n...
Althusser would describe this war within war as a politics of the aleatory not because it occurred by chance, but because it randomizes war. He wrote: “And supposing that this place… [of the political] ... is a point, it would not be fixed, but mobile—better still, unstable in its very being, since all its effort must tend towards giving itself exi...
In this jarring look at contemporary warfare and political visuality, renowned anthropologist of violence Allen
Feldman provocatively argues that contemporary sovereign power mobilizes asymmetric, clandestine, and
ultimately unending war as a will to truth. Whether responding to the fantasy of weapons of mass destruction or
an existential threat to...
Enigmatic Tibet. 1942. 105 minutes. Schäer expedition, private copy.
Since the first Gulf War, we have witnessed a global repositioning of the visual communication practices, utilities and techniques of the state and media as regards political mobilization, identity formation, geographic perception, political violence, urban planning, public safety and human rights. The circulation, of anthropologically threatening...
Radical History Review 85 (2003) 58-73
I was driving with a republican ex-paramilitary, "Sean," on a battlefield tour of Belfast. He was showing me the sites of INLA (Irish National Liberation Army) operations he had participated in or possessed logistical knowledge of in order to explain how urban guerrilla operations were planned and carried out....
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Northern Ireland and South Africa, this paper contends that the so–called ‘children of violence’ are perceived in terms of the serious cultural contradictions of the adult world and rarely in their own terms. Does the concept and norm of childhood give us permission to give violence a defining site of origination?...
Social Text 19.3 (2001) 57-89
--Sophocles
--Sophocles
Without consideration, without pity, without shame they have built great and high walls around me.
And now I sit here and despair. I think of nothing else: this fate gnaws at my mind;
for I had many things to do outside. Ah why did I not pay attention when they were building the walls.
But I nev...
"A sophisticated and persuasive late-modernist political analysis that consistently draws the reader into the narratives of the author and those of the people of violence in Northern Ireland to whom he talked. . . . Simply put, this book is a feast for the intellect"â Thomas M. Wilson, American Anthropologist "One of the best books to have been w...
