Mass Violence and the Self

In an age when emotions are being elicited through more images more than ever before, Howard Brown’s analysis of representations of mass violence is a timely reminder that different media have always been used to provoke responses from their users. Brown examines four case studies of mass violence during very different periods of civil strife in French history: the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacres of 1572, the Fronde of 1652, the Terror in 1793–94 and the ‘Bloody Week’ of the Paris Commune in 1871. In particular, Brown looks at how textual and visual representations of those events may have influenced French collective identity, as well as the development of the self, which he defines as a ‘form of individual psychological awareness’. The argument is that reactions to mass violence acted as a catalyst that ‘accelerated and intensified the development of the self’. In other words, Brown is not only looking at acts of mass violence but trying to figure out how their representations may have had an impact on individuals and societies that did not directly experience them. It relies on the concepts of ‘collective trauma’ as well as its corollary, ‘collective compassion’, which are skilfully woven into this analysis of the evolution of the modern self and mass violence to produce some new and original insights. According to Brown, the dissemination of information around mass violence through whatever media was relevant at the time allowed those who had neither witnessed nor suffered from the violence both to identify with the victims and to create larger group identities.

Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Compassion · Criminology · Identity (music) · Mass media · Political science · Sociology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Medicine · Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

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