61: The Aesthetics of Violence

Introduction: Aesthetics of Violence - Imagining Realities

Arturo Aldama, Joe Lockard
The simple truth is that we do not know the precise internal causes of human violence. In the absence of convincing explanation, human societies must deal with the legal, ethical and cultural consequences of mass and individual acts of violence.

A Tired Aesthetic

Alfred Arteaga
Race is tired. Fucking tired. The concept has seen better days.

Reflections on a Holocaust Impostor: Fragments and Its Tortured History

Andrew Gross, Michael Hoffman
Fragments is a controversial book because it exposes the machinations behind some of our most cherished myths. It teaches us that a "people" is as contingent as its history, and that memory is a political metaphor. Wilkomirski might not be an actual victim of the Holocaust, but he is a fitting monument to victim culture.

Ornaments of the Rio Yaqui and Beyond

Delberto Dario Ruiz
For Yoemem, and neighboring indigenous nations, land was and continues to be central to their survival, both in a material and spiritual sense.

Euro-Trash Vampires, Toothless Kung-Fu Serfs, and Cinematic Orientale Nouveau

Arturo J. Aldama
The message becomes that on a metaphorical level they are descendents of African civilizations, but white people and their ways of polite and cultured violence are still superior to the primal blood of the "wretched of the earth."

Dario Argento's Blood on the Walls

David Sanjek
For all their admirable qualities, Argento's films can be repulsive and flat-out mind-numbing. Argento possesses little interest in the petty details of our daily lives, but lavishes all the technical powers at his command to create cruel and audacious images of extinction.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Male Defeat

Leanne McRae
It is on our television screens where radical reinterpretations of gendered identity are finding their most current manifestation.

Falling Down: Social Contracts and the Logic of the Absurd

Justin Shaw
Films often operate as a form of social contract by challenging our moral and empathic capacity as spectators. Through its peculiar mixture of violence, humour and social critique, Falling Down tests our ability to empathise with victims of the violence perpetrated by its central character.

Rafagazos de imágenes: jóvenes y violencia en relatos fílmicos de Medellín.

Juana Suarez
Rodrigo D: no futuro (1989) y La vendedora de rosas (1998) del director colombiano Víctor Gaviria y La virgen de los sicarios (2000) del director francés Barbet Schroeder suceden en Medellín. Estas tres producciones representan algunas de las consecuencias de la economía del narcotráfico en la juventud, enfatizando particularmente el entorno violento de la periferia de Medellín y la manera cómo confluyen diferentes estéticas e ideologías de la violencia importadas a través de la industria del entretenimiento.

El teatro de la violencia: El Nuevo Teatro Pobre de América de Pedro Santaliz

Carlos Manuel Rivera
La hegemonía de este discurso ha establecido que el discurso femenino debe estar afiliado a las acciones básicas de la casa y de la maternidad en la sociedad puertorriqueña.

Meditations on Brutality and Digital Imagery

Cheryl Greene, Zachary Waggoner
How realistic do you want your virtual dreams to be?

Extreme Sex, Death, and Computer Graphics Imaging Technology

Claudia Herbst
CGI is a highly gendered technology. Its origins in primarily male disciplines contribute to its gendering. The cornerstones of CGI are the sciences, mathematics, and the military, all disciplines in which women have had little presence.

[Sadistic] California Dreaming: Pleasure in the Breaking of Mexican Bodies

William Anthony Nericcio
I am beginning to think that the recent history of our Southern Californian cultural space, Rodney King, the Rebellion in LA, the beatings of various Mexicans, has more to do with de Sade than it does with Hitler or Mengele or whatever.

Beware of Dog: Trauma and Repetition in Leon Golub's Art

Aaron Scott
In Golub's politically-charged oeuvre over the last 50 years he has repeatedly and compulsively depicted the more extreme atrocities to plague our century. While his vision falls more in the category of the dystopic, he has struggled to expose what is truly human in our response to violence and suffering.

"Aquí La Justicia Sale Sobrando": Lila Downs and Transfrontera Music

Sarah Ramirez
In order to transform the male-dominated Mexican cultural legacies present in Chicano nationalism, Chicanas not only have had to re-write themselves into the "movement script," but Chicanas had to participate in a Chicana-Mexicana connectivity through recuperation and transformation of Mexican female symbols and icons.

Hyper-Masculine and Misogynist Violence in Chicano Rap

Pancho McFarland
Chicano rappers rap about hitting each other, hitting cops, and hitting and abusing women. My first question was why do these young men spend so much time thinking about, writing about, and listening to stories of violence?

Violent Ballads as Border Representations: The Aesthetics of Violence in the Mexican and Chicana/o Corrido

Peter J. Garcia
The contents, poetic organization, musical form, and aesthetic history of corridos lead to an alternative interpretation of the nature of violence in Mexican and American societies as seen through the Mexican's sense of history, music, and culture.