In this highly original work, Robert Desjarlais and Khalil Habrih present a dialogic account of the lingering effects of the terroristic attacks that occurred in Paris in November 2015. Situating the events within broader histories of state violence in metropolitan France and its colonial geographies, the authors interweave narrative accounts and photographs to explore a range of related phenomena: governmental and journalistic discourses on terrorism, the political work of archives, police and military apparatuses of control and anti-terror deterrence, the histories of wounds, and the haunting reverberations of violence in a plurality of lives and deaths. Traces of Violence is a moving work that aids our understanding of the afterlife of violence and offers an innovative example of collaborative writing across anthropology and sociology.
Robert Desjarlais teaches anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. He is the author of numerous books, including Subject to Death: Life and Loss in a Buddhist World and The Blind Man: A Phantasmography.
Khalil Habrih is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Ottawa.
"Traces of Violence is a highly original account of the Paris attacks. The authors show how violence is imprinted on a place, how it lingers, and in no small way test the methods by which we might apprehend these traces."—Todd Meyers, Marjorie Bronfman Chair in the Social Studies of Medicine, McGill University
"What does it mean to write in the aftermath of political violence—of sudden and spectacular violence, as well as of enduring, even everyday violence? This book, a 'collection of shadows' surrounding the 2015 Paris attacks, is a searing set of meditations on the impossibility and necessity of writing about disaster. I am extremely grateful to Robert Desjarlais and Khalil Habrih for what they have risked in choosing to write—and to write collaboratively/contrapuntally––in the face of disaster."—Lisa Stevenson, author of Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic
316 pp.6 x 9Illus: 45 b/w illustrations
9780520382466$34.95|£30.00Paper
Nov 2021