Session Abstract:

A reflection on the history of violence as a field, and a historicization of violence, are particularly urgent and compelling in this moment. Violence, both symbolic and outright, has been a central animating force within contemporary social movements in the vein of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. Debates about freedom of expression vis a vis violent language and sensationalized representations or the “pornography of violence” generate ongoing discussions in academia, journalism, and popular culture. At the same time, warfare, terrorism, the rise of extremism, and acts of “slow violence” with respect to the environment are ongoing parts of global and a more existential planetary consciousness. To make sense of this tumult, the past is commonly mined for its violent events in academic and particularly in popular arenas, and used as a guide for edification, sometimes to bolster an ideology of progress and suggest the superiority of the present. “Foundational pasts,” as Alon Confino has called them, often shot through with violence, have a powerful hold in collective memory. At the same time, reflections about “human nature,” sometimes inflected by sociobiology, and at other times asserted in a more casual or even resigned way, still have widespread popular appeal, whether as a means of showing essential human goodness or alternately essential depravity.

While the field of the history of violence as an emerging field in the 1970s had some affinity with social history, it has become a more diffuse one now with no one methodology dominating, but combines social history, the history of emotions, the history of biology, and intellectual/cultural history. Bringing together an historian who works on violence and cruelty in intimate realms in a history of bullying in 20^thCentury America, an historian who works on the carceral state and state violence in 20^thcentury America, a Europeanist who studies warfare and demeanours of violence in 18^thand 19^thcentury Europe as well as the history of violence in more global contexts, an early Americanist who works on emotions and violence in relation to warfare and the broader Atlantic World, and a Latin Americanist who has worked on apocalyptic thought, perceptions of violence amongst Indigenous Americans, and the history of humankind writ large, this roundtable aims to discuss foundational work in the history of violence as well as emerging themes and directions in this field.