sharing some info about this book reading event. it is good to have representation at such events, and be an active reading member of the community.
best,
Dushwari
Torture and the Twilight of Empire
Alwan for the Arts Presents:
www.alwanforthearts.org
Torture and the Twilight of Empire
Book Reading/ Signing by Mirnia Lazreg with an Introduction and
Discussion- Chaired by Joseph Massad
Thursday, January 31, 2008. 7 PM
Free and Open to the Public
Torture and the Twilight of Empire looks at the intimate relationship
between torture and colonial domination through a close examination of
the French army s coercive tactics during the Algerian war from 1954
to 1962. By tracing the psychological, cultural, and political
meanings of torture at the end of the French empire, Marnia Lazreg
also sheds new light on the United States and its recourse to torture
in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This book is nothing less than an anatomy of torture–its methods,
justifications, functions, and consequences. Drawing extensively from
archives, confessions by former torturers, interviews with former
soldiers, and war diaries, as well as writings by Jean-Paul Sartre,
Albert Camus, and others, Lazreg argues that occupying nations
justify their systematic use of torture as a regrettable but
necessary means of saving Western civilization from those who
challenge their rule. She shows how torture was central to guerre
révolutionnaire, a French theory of modern warfare that called for
total war against the subject population and which informed a
pacification strategy founded on brutal psychological techniques
borrowed from totalitarian movements. Lazreg seeks to understand
torture s impact on the Algerian population–especially women–and
also on the French troops who became their torturers. She explores
the roles Christianity and Islam played in rationalizing these acts,
and the ways in which torture became not only routine but even
acceptable.
Written by a preeminent historical sociologist, Torture and the
Twilight of Empire holds particularly disturbing lessons for us today
as we carry out the War on Terror.
Marnia Lazreg is professor of sociology at Hunter College and the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her books include
The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question.
Joseph A. Massad is associate professor of modern Arab politics and
intellectual history at Columbia University. He is the author of
Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan; The
Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the
Palestinians, and Desiring Arabs
This book interprets torture not as an incidental if frequent
characteristic of neocolonial conflict, but as one of its major
elements. %Her work is certainly pertinent to the present. Peter
Paret, Institute for Advanced Study
The premise of this book is excellent. Lazreg seeks to link the
extensive
use of torture to the demise of empire by means of two case studies,
France in Algeria and the United States in Iraq. Her analysis is a
theoretical psychohistory in which she uses her archival research to
extrapolate on the psychology that motivates the torturer and to
theorize about state terror. Patricia Lorcin, University of Minnesota
Alwan for the Arts
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