A different look at violence
Year-long conference to examine our concept of humanity

By PAT DONOVAN
News Services Editor

This fall, the College of Arts and Sciences "University and the World" lecture series will begin a year-long exploration of violence from a number of different perspectives that will feature major figures in the fields of anthropology, psychology, history, comparative literatures and law.

"The topic was chosen because violence has shaped not only the entire history of the human condition, but our conceptions of humanity itself," says James Bono, UB professor of history who helped coordinate the program.

"Violence is simultaneously offensive and fascinating," he notes, "and this paradox, which has been exploited in literature for centuries, continues to trouble and engage us today.

"Although a serious threat to social order, hardly a society exists that does not maintain some level of chronic violence," he adds. "It saturates our world from the playground to the battlefield and its causes and effects are the subject of contentious policy debates throughout our society."

The university can and should inform this debate, he says, and help the larger community develop new perspectives on a subject of universal interest and concern.

The series will run from September through May. Among the issues to be addressed are personal and state-sponsored violence; the evolutionary aspects of violence; how such behavior is perceived by individuals and social groups, and how self-censorship and official censorship is used to "remake" violence in an effort to redefine reality.

All events will be free and open to the public and will take place at 4 p.m. in the Screening Room in the Center for the Arts on the UB North Campus.

n The series will open Sept. 12 with a roundtable discussion titled, "Why Violence? The University and the Problem of Violence."

Roundtable participants will be UB faculty experts on the subject of violence who will map out the basic dimensions of the subject of violence as a disturbing template on which every form of human interaction and expression has been shaped.

Panelists will be Robert K. Dentan, professor, Department of Anthropology; Charles P. Ewing, professor, School of Law and Department of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences; Elizabeth Grosz, professor, Department of English, and Isabelle Marcus, professor, School of Law and co-director, Institute for Research on Women and Gender.

n On Oct. 26, Barbara E. Johnson, Frederic Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society, Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, will present a lecture titled "The Poet's Mother: The Cases of Sylvia Plath and Charles Baudelaire."

Besides an early death, the poets shared a heightened sense of morbidity, an obsession with "the abyss," late poetry noted for dissonant harmonies and barely contained fury, and censorious mothers.

"What could be more antithetical to the notion of violence than the notion of motherhood?" Johnson asks. "That very antithesis may contain its own violence, however. In this lecture, I will look at the work of two poets renowned for their hostility toward their own mothers and at the position of 'mother' which their rage presupposes."

Bono says, "Clearly Johnson is dealing with the paradoxical position of the 'mother' in our culture and its relation to violence and to creativity.

"To my mind, this is an important topic to address, since it is all too easy to dismiss violence as a negative force and undesirable phenomenon in society, without realizing just how deeply implicated in, and dependent on, violence our culture is," he adds. "In addition, the description seems to suggest that the arbitrary (gendered) dichotomies-motherhood vs. violence-enshrined in our culture is itself perhaps a kind of violence."

Johnson is the author of "Defigurations du langage poétique," "The Critical Difference" and "A World of Difference." She edited "The Pedagogical Imperative, Consequences of Theory" (with Jonathan Arac) and "Freedom and Interpretation: Oxford Amnesty Lectures, 1992." Her most recent book is "The Wake of Deconstruction."

n On Nov. 21, historian Peter Novick, professor emeritus, University of Chicago, will present a lecture titled "How We Talk About the Holocaust" in which he will discuss the way those events are regarded today versus the way they were viewed at the time they took place.

Novick is the author of the insightful and controversial book "The Holocaust in American Life" (1999, Houghton Mifflin Co.), a trenchant analysis of the ways in which the Holocaust has been interpreted in America. In it, Novick argues for the importance of understanding such events in historical context and questions whether the continued preoccupation with the Holocaust is the "good thing" it is commonly held to be.

Contemporary consciousness is deeply lodged in political conditions, Novick says. He maintains that such events as the Holocaust should be studied-not to extract lessons, but to appreciate their complexities and contradictions.

Novick is also the author of "The Resistance vs. Vichy: The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France."

The series will return to the subject of state-sponsored violence in the spring semester with a lecture by University of Chicago anthropologist Jean Comaroff, who has conducted fieldwork in southern Africa and will discuss the impact of South Africa's covert state violence and the response of those subjected to repression. She also will reflect upon the larger significance of violence revealed by the series as a whole.

Because it is a universal and ubiquitous an aspect of human life, Bono says that violence appears to many to be hardwired into the human species by the evolutionary process.

Also in the spring semester, the series will enter this discussion with a joint lecture by researchers Margo Wilson and Martin Daly of Ontario's McMaster University, who will address the topic from the perspectives of evolutionary psychology. Their work includes a number of epidemiological analyses of patterns of risk of lethal and nonlethal violence in different categories of relationships, especially marital and parent-offspring relationships.

The final lecture will be presented by renowned Dutch primate-behavior specialist Frans de Waal, C.H. Candler Professor of Primate Behavior at Emory University, whose research suggests that evidence from our closest evolutionary relatives that violence is innate is far from clear.

"The University and the World" series is sponsored by the Dean of the UB College of Arts and Sciences, and in part by the Edmund H. Butler Chair (Johnson) and the Thomas B. Lockwood Chair in American History, both at UB. Novick's talk is sponsored by the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies.