Violence Archives - Public Seminar

North America

A Martyr and a Meme

After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Walter Benjamin’s politics of spectacle should serve as a warning to Trump’s America

September 17, 2025 • by Benjamin Andrew Schupmann

Within minutes of the deadly shot, millions of viewers across the digital public sphere saw right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s last moments in full graphic horror, from multiple angles. Each clip was pared down to shareable content. His death made him at once a martyr and meme. German philosopher Walter Benjamin, writing ...

Gender

Mexico’s First Woman President Inherits a Crisis of Femicide

How do we reconcile these coexisting realities?

November 11, 2024 • by Ever Osorio

This July, two of the three party-backed candidates in the Mexican presidential elections were women. Claudia Sheinbaum, the candidate of the ruling left-wing party, MORENA (an acronym for “Movement for National Regeneration”) won with between 58.3 and 60.7 percent of the vote, the highest percentage in Mexico's democratic history. As ...

Mexico’s First Woman President Inherits a Crisis of Femicide

Literature

Very Far From the Homeland

On contemporary readings from Etel Adnan, Mahmoud Darwish, and Alice Oswald exile in the Iliad

September 4, 2024 • by Lyndsey Stonebridge

One of the cruelties of the Iliad is how alive each person is made to appear just before they are killed. That is the point of Homer's long, detailed lists of Greeks and Trojans: names, deeds, parents, brothers, spouses, children, lovers, skills, bad hair, swift feet, words, and weapons. The poem about ...

Gender

The Furies Reconsidered

A review of Elizabeth Flock’s new book on women and vengeance

June 3, 2024 • by Gregory Laski

Read as a book about how institutions disempower women, The Furies makes the kind of actions that the three characters take seem not only reasonable but necessary for their survival. ...

Kinships

Traumatized Heroes

Living with wrongdoing

February 21, 2024 • by Helga Varden

Hope for the future is only possible if we choose peace by stopping the killing and resist the temptation of avenging heroism....

Activism

Liliana’s Invincible Summer

In an excerpt from her new memoir, Cristina Rivera Garza confronts the trauma of losing her sister

November 6, 2023 • by Cristina Rivera Garza

Through this remarkable and genre-defying memoir, Rivera Garza confronts the trauma of losing her sister and examines from multiple angles how this tragedy continues to shape who she is—and what she fights for—today....

Prisons and Police

When Children Commit Atrocities

Crimes that tear at our hearts are also opportunities to forgive

January 5, 2022 • by Harold Pollack

A member of my own family was beaten to death by a high school student. That boy is now a man. He walks the streets today. I believe justice has been served....

Race

There’s a Black Man Running Down My Street

When nice white neighbors criminalize a man for being Black and kill him it’s not just murder—it’s a lynching.

December 1, 2021 • by Mark Allan Williams

When is a murder not a murder? When it’s a lynching. On November 24, 2021—the day before Thanksgiving—many Americans let out a collective breath of relief. In Brunswick, Georgia, a jury convicted Travis McMichael, his father Gregory McMichael, and William Bryan of murder for hunting down and killing Ahmaud Arbery, an ...

There’s a Black Man Running Down My Street

Reviews

Titane: Transformative Gender and Intimacy

The winner of the 2021 Palme d’Or takes us through hell and out the other side

November 3, 2021 • by Melinda Freudenberger

The following review contains spoilers. My friend has a phrase she likes to use about her new dog. “I look at him from across the room,” she says, after talking to me about all the piss pads littering her apartment floor, “and I can tell he’s having bad dog thoughts.” Something ...

<em>Titane</em>: Transformative Gender and Intimacy

Race

Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

At last, a policeman is held accountable for murdering a Black American. But the process of imagining an end to lethal policing has only begun

April 21, 2021 • by Claire Potter

_____ My greatest fear as I waited for the verdict in the George Floyd case yesterday was not that former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin wasn’t going to be convicted of something. The prosecution had carefully left two back doors open for the jury, alternative charges that would have allowed the ...

Interviews

On Fascism, Non-fascism, and Antifa

Natasha Lennard in conversation with James Miller

October 15, 2020 • by Natasha Lennard and James Miller

JM: Since you've written an entire book with the title Essays on a Non-Fascist Life, can you tell me a bit about how you chose that title, and what the term "non-fascist" means to you, in the context of those essays? We both know the appearance of the phrase in the context ...

Feature

How “Blue Lives Matter” Perpetuates Police Violence

The movement fosters an environment of fear, hatred, and racism

June 9, 2020 • by Adam Quinn

In the aftermath of the killings of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa and Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte at the hands of police, the Blue Lives Matter hashtag rallied around a video of a group of black youth attacking a white man and taking his pants off in a parking garage ...