Atrocity

Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He has authored several books, among them Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (Stanford, 2022).

Preface Introduction 1. Violence Was Like the Weather 2. Plunder: Historicizing Atrocity 3. Self-Scrutiny in the Era of High Imperialism 4. Contextualizing and Decontextualizing in the Twentieth Century 5. Confusions of Self-Indictment 6. Strategy from Below Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Index

"Combining a creatively skeptical critical intelligence and an undercurrent of mordant irony, Atrocity is a superb literary and stylistic achievement. Anyone allergic to moral obviousness will find it as impossible to stop reading as I did." -Laura Kipnis, author of Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis "Robbins' brilliant, sweeping Atrocity seeks to release us from the 'indignation-free zone' into which atrocities normally fall. A counterintuitive reading of current discourses on violence." -Bonnie Honig, author of A Feminist Theory of Refusal "A probing study of the moral imagination, written with the erudite informality-and the ethical commitment-that we have come to expect from Bruce Robbins, one of our leading critics on the left." -Adam Shatz, author of The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon "Robbins's affirmative genealogy of cosmopolitan human rights documents the making of moral expectations that deserve to be met in a persistently violent world." -Samuel Moyn, author of Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War "This book carries readers along with clarity, wit, and undogmatic moral seriousness." -Christian Thorne, author of The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment "Robbins makes a humane and exhilarating case for the critical consciousness of atrocity. This is an essential, unsparing and often searing exploration of representations of violence that locates narratives of atrocity at the ethical heart of the humanities." -Patrick Deer, author of Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature