A Roundtable in Honor of Lee Ann Fujji's "Show Time"

Session Submission Type: Virtual Roundtable

Session Description

Roundtable participants discuss Lee Ann Fujii’s new book Show Time (Cornell University Press, 2021), published posthumously, and its contributions to studies of political violence, race and ethnic studies, and interpretive methods. A study of violent display, Show Time asks if perpetrators of political violence just want to kill, why do killers so often go to extravagant lengths to put their acts of violence on display-- to draw them out, to create public spectacles out of the killing, to make a “show”? Show Time investigates these violent displays and what they accomplish politically. Staging, watching, and participating in these violent displays and killings has profound transformative effects for the people involved. It reinforces political identities and social hierarchies, making it vividly clear which groups are in power. These public episodes of violent display also force ordinary people to choose sides in communities and publicly show support for the violence or risk violence themselves. By examining the way violence unfolds at the micro level, within communities among individual ordinary people, Fujii reveals the fluidity of lived social lives and the way politically motivated perpetrators of violence can exploit social ties for their own ends.

Sub Unit

• Division 21: Conflict Processes

Chair

• Martha Finnemore George Washington University

Presenters

• Elisabeth Jean Wood Yale University

• Scott Straus University of California, Berkeley

• Julia S. Jordan-Zachery Wake Forest University

• Lahoma Thomas X University

• Nicholas Rush Smith CUNY-City College