Description
Book SynopsisThis 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.
Table of Contents1. Introduction: Complicity and the Politics of Representation
Cornelia Wächter
2. The Chapters
Cornelia Wächter and Robert Wirth
PART I: NARRATIVE COMPLICITIES AND COLLECTIVE REMEMBERING
3. Complicit Configurations: Narrating the Partition of India in Auden, Madhvani and Brenton
Christoph Singer
4. Complicity on the Small Screen: Ordinary Germans as Perpetrators in Recent German TV Miniseries on World War II and the Holocaust
Volker Benkert
5. Literary Complicity and the Differend: Naturalizing, Ontologizing, and Self-Referential Representations of National Socialist Persecution
Lorraine Markotic
6. Guilt and Autonomy in Geoffrey Hill’s and Hermann Broch’s Works
Olaf Berwald
7. An Illusion of Absence: The Picturesque and Culpable Ignorance in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and The Buried Giant
Ivan Stacy
PART II: ENFOLDINGS AND UNFOLDINGS
8. A Radical Unfolding: Utopianism Against Complicity
John Storey
9. Complicity: Narratives, Articulations and the Politics of Representation
Paul Reynolds
10. A Murmur of Indifference to Authorial Identity in Intellectual Life
Brendan Moran
11. I spy with my little eye something complicity simple: Eighteenth-Century Caricature Tricks
Mihaela Irimia
PART III: NARRATIVE COMPLICITY CRITIQUES
12. The Black Counter-Gaze: Complicity and White Privilege in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen
Alexandra Hartmann
13. Challenging Complicity in the Context of Mentalism: Mental Distress Autobiographies and Performance Art
Elisabeth Punzi and Katrin Röder
14. Representation of Complicity with Child Sexual Abuse in the Movies: Spotlight and Doubt
Eli Teram
15. “...to understand everything that came her way”: Complicity and the Child Protagonist
Elizabeth Gilbert
Works Cited
Index
About the Contributors
