Papers and essays by Giuseppe De Riso
This article uses three novels by Mohsin Hamid – The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2008), Exit West (... more This article uses three novels by Mohsin Hamid – The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2008), Exit West (2017) and The Last White Man (2022) – to describe how nostalgia is experienced in the contemporary world. In these novels, Hamid uses magical realism to portray nostalgia as a tension between dissatisfaction or resentment with a troubled present, often linked to the economic inequalities of capitalist society, and a longing for the restoration of an often idealised past in the future. The misleading appeal of nostalgia, which lures people into a comforting but false attachment to the past, can thus lead to resentment that justifies social discrimination, ethnic or religious violence, or economic exploitation. However, while providing a critical perspective on the restorative aspect of nostalgia, Hamid’s work also explores what Svetlana Boym (2001, 2007) defines as its “reflective” character. This dichotomy allows the reader to see that nostalgia is not only an escape into the past or an attempt to revive it, but can also be an inquiry into how to transform its lament into an elegy of growth and connection.
Le Simplegadi, 2023
This article attempts to conduct a comparative analysis between Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) a... more This article attempts to conduct a comparative analysis between Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) and Ali Smith's How to Be Both (2014). Specifically, this study posits Smith's novel as an appropriate successor to Woolf's work, as it successfully embraces and expresses the 'androgynous mind' theorised by Woolf. This is achieved through the removal of temporal boundaries between past and present, the ambivalence of the protagonists' sexual identity and, most importantly, through a literary paradigm that is able to explore the need for co-participation between authors and readers and the broader interplay between the literary text and other artistic and cultural sources with which it has a necessary dialogical relationship.
Anglistica AION, 2022
This article compares Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy (1994) with Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Ut... more This article compares Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy (1994) with Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) in order to describe the processes of discrimination against queer people within a strained social fabric marked by familial, ethnic, and class oppressions. Through Pankaj Mishra's theory of anger in capitalist societies, Hannah Arendt's concept of negative solidarity, and Kimberlé Crenshaw's notion of queer intersectionality, this paper examines how the two novels situate their queer characters' quest for sexual identity and self-affirmation against the backdrop of the neoliberal expansion of the Indian subcontinent at the turn of the 20th century into the present. Such process increased social inequalities, exacerbated class tensions, and preexisting ethno-religious conflicts, producing interlocking systems of repression in which queer subjectivities face various forms of physical and psychological discrimination, as existential anger and the threat of violence either force them to painful separations or to rebuild new social relationships.
Linguæ & - Journal of Modern Languages and Cultures, 2022
This article looks at Ali Smith’s The Accidental as a novel in which pastiche and mashups of cont... more This article looks at Ali Smith’s The Accidental as a novel in which pastiche and mashups of content create a kind of cross media storytelling that pushes the ontological boundaries of narrative. At the centre of the novel is Amber, a mysterious visitor introduced here as a transworld identity who weaves the novel’s plot by using contents and knowledge belonging to extradiegetic worlds and their timelines. Thus, she is in a position to interact with the other characters as if they were metareferential elements of the story and change their fate. By using Amber as a literary device which oscillates between different temporalities, Smith also explores how language mediates contemporary subjectivity, which is divided into a variety of fictional realities.
Del performativo. Reti, corpi, narrazioni, 2017
La collana intende investigare la centralità del concetto di interculturalità nei paesi di lingua... more La collana intende investigare la centralità del concetto di interculturalità nei paesi di lingua inglese offrendo una prospettiva interdisciplinare tra lingue, letterature, culture e media. Il termine "traduzione" è dunque inteso nella sua accezione più ampia che prende in considerazione non solo gli studi di traduzione interlinguistica ma anche intersemiotica e si apre ad un discorso sulla traduzione come trasposizione, adattamento e ibridazione tra generi e arti. Il discorso sull'interculturalità, sempre più centrale anche in un'Europa multietnica e multilinguistica, è fondamentale nelle aree anglofone dove il processo di decolonizzazione poi globalizzazione ha portato ad un ripensamento dei concetti di lingua, identità, nazione e cultura. La collana intende proporre strumenti di analisi per approfondire competenze linguistiche e culturali muovendosi tra diverse aree di studio come gli studi di traduzione, gli studi postcoloniali e di genere, gli studi culturali, la sociolinguistica (in particolare le varietà della lingua inglese), la critical discourse analysis e i linguaggi specialistici. Se come afferma Adrienne Rich "negli interstizi delle lingue si nascondono significativi segreti della cultura" è proprio dallo studio di diverse tipologie testuali che può iniziare un percorso critico verso un approfondimento di ciò che viene definito come interculturalità.
Transnational Subjects: Cultural and Literary Encounters, 2017
As Janus gazes through chained gates (after, before) toward the time he can't get to & the one he... more As Janus gazes through chained gates (after, before) toward the time he can't get to & the one he can't get beyond: only this seized not yet, not anymore, not anymore, not yet, this zero exposure.
In trying to reframe Indian history as a chance for oppressed categories to improve their conditi... more In trying to reframe Indian history as a chance for oppressed categories to improve their condition, Ranajit Guha and his collaborators have also questioned the concept of the 'political' as it has been conveyed in English derivations of Marxist historiographical approaches.
Regenerating Community, Territory, Voices. Memory and Vision (Proceedings of the 25th AIA Conference), 2012
By virtue of the widespread adoption of the computer in the course of the last four decades, digi... more By virtue of the widespread adoption of the computer in the course of the last four decades, digital media play now a prominent role in the lives of millions of people. Online games and social networks, in particular, represent two of the most rapidly expanding forms of expression in the digital domain, showing no sign of stopping. Commanding an increasingly bigger chunk of new media economic, social, technical and cultural resources, they represent now one of the main channels responsible for the production and consumption of "social knowledge". Consequently, their mediation is bound to form the basis upon which individuals and communities can construct images of themselves and the other. Second Life, developed by Linden Lab and launched in the summer of 2003, is one of such virtual worlds, yet it manages to be unique while having in common most of the others' commonly shared features. Before rushing into one of the many islands which make up the world of Second Life, users are first required to choose between a free, basic account, which only grants access to the world, and a premium one implying a monthly fee and the payment of taxes, in return for a digital stipend of 300 Linden Dollars which can be used to purchase or rent virtual land, or to fuel the world's internal economy by buying and selling virtual goods with other users (or residents, as they call themselves once they become citizens of Second Life). Then, they are asked to create an avatar, that is an embodied representation of themselves in the world, choosing from a wide range of options aimed at customizing every aspect of their digital alter ego. Sex, height, build, skin colour, hair style, facial features and any other physical trait can be chosen or designed to taste in order to recreate one's own look in real life or to put oneself under the skin of a completely different self. Not only that, it is also possible to be embodied in an animal or take even more abstract forms. Avatars place at the users' disposal new faces, features and abilities to be 'lived' within the simulated world. Irrespective of sex or appearance, no choice is final. At any time users can change their mind in favour of whatever modification or adjustment they may wish to carry out, also by creating content like skins or garments anew. Consequently avatars are in part pre-structured by the features of the game world interface, and partly the outcome of users' free choice
Anglistica AION, 2021
Il saggio intende discutere Quichotte (2019) di Salman Rushdie come un romanzo in
cui la critica ... more Il saggio intende discutere Quichotte (2019) di Salman Rushdie come un romanzo in
cui la critica sociale si esprime attraverso la contaminazione intertestuale tra generi,
stili e media diversi. Sebbene il testo rushdiano appartenga al collaudato filone di
metafiction storiografica (Hutcheon 1985, 1988, 1989) che tanta diffusione ha visto
negli ultimi decenni, tale declinazione letteraria trova qui applicazione originale con
lo sviluppo narrativo asimmetrico di due storie, quella dello scrittore Sam DuChamp
e del personaggio di sua invenzione Quichotte.
La mescolanza tra show e competizioni di vario genere, serial tv, film e computer
grafica gioca continuamente su processi di attrazione e repulsione delle storie dei due
protagonisti, ed è infine compressa in un calco parodico dell’epopea donchisciotte-
sca modellato sui codici della televisione contemporanea. Nell’originale impalcatura
strutturale del romanzo, situazioni comiche si tingono progressivamente di sfumature
tragiche per rivelare, in ultima analisi, una visione del mondo basata sulla necessaria
contaminazione tra le facoltà immaginative dell’arte e la vita reale come disperato
tentativo di far fronte alle contraddizioni umane.
Anglistica AION, Nov 20, 2019
In the last few decades a variety of bioethically-relevant issues have been at the centre of publ... more In the last few decades a variety of bioethically-relevant issues have been at the centre of public debate, attracting ample coverage from the media in a context where unprecedentedly fast and pervasive scientific and technological progress has led to new questions on the actual application of advances to real life cases, e.g. in biotechnologies, genetics, medicine, with an impact on human identities, relations and practices, and therefore effect on human rights and fundamental freedoms. This special issue of Anglistica AION on Representing, Disseminating, and Debating Controversial Bioethical Issues in Popularised Discourse focuses on the discursive representation of such issues in popularising texts. It owes its core idea to the main theme of investigation of the Milan research unitthe representation of bioethical issues -co-ordinated by Giuliana Garzone as part of a National Research Programme on knowledge dissemination. In particular, attention is centred on the linguistic 1 and discursive strategies that are employed in 'translating' and framing specialised bioethical notions, terms and debates within journalistic, online, promotional, corporate and legal texts, and media coverage. While the literature on the strategies enacted in knowledge dissemination and popularisation in general has grown exponentially over the past few years, the texts and discourses that are deployed in the popularisation of bioethical themes have received much less scholarly attention in linguistic and literary studies, in spite of the prominence and discursive complexity of communication on bioethical themes. This special issue therefore aims at filling this research gap by specifically focusing on the reframing of bioethically sensitive issues by popularising writers and by public and private institutions through determined language, genres and channels on a large scale, and providing an overview on potential manners to influence public opinion and socio-cultural debates. In fact, it is all the more essential for linguistic, literary and cultural studies dealing with bioethical issues to detect all possible linguistic, discursive and rhetorical alterations and imbalances that might lead to inaccuracies, especially when they involve ideological manipulation or slant, and identify the linguistic and discursive transformations that bioethically relevant and sensitive knowledge may be consciously or unconsciously subjected to in the course of the dissemination process by individual writers, institutions, professions, organisations or corporations. 2 1 Research programme "Knowledge dissemination across media in English: continuity and change in discourse strategies, ideologies and epistemologies" financed by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (PRIN 2015TJ8ZAS). 2 Among the innumerable studies on popularisation in general, see Greg Myers, "Discourse Studies of Scientific Popularization:
UniorPress, 2019
Attingendo alle riflessioni critiche innestatesi sulle teorie psicoa- nalitiche del filosofo fran... more Attingendo alle riflessioni critiche innestatesi sulle teorie psicoa- nalitiche del filosofo francese Jacques Lacan, il saggio propone un’analisi di A Midsummer Night’s Dream al fine di mettere in evidenza la stretta re- lazione esistente tra la funzione costitutiva dello sguardo e la dimensione affettiva del luogo rappresentato sul palcoscenico. L’attraversamento dei confini spaziali nella commedia produce delle variazioni affettive che alte- rano il modo in cui i personaggi guardano gli altri e nell’altrui sguardo si riconoscono. Le fluttuazioni della dimensione erotica che ne conseguono si riflettono nel linguaggio impiegato dai quattro giovani protagonisti del dramma e sono da questo a loro volta influenzate. Si tratta di una relazione di reciprocità magistralmente impiegata da Shakespeare in riconfigurazioni visive dello sguardo all’origine dei mancati riconoscimenti e degli errori di valutazione attraverso cui vengono ricreate le condizioni pseudo-oniriche del dramma. Queste ultime sono necessarie affinché i personaggi possano condurre le esplorazioni di versioni ‘altre’ del sé che rappresentano uno dei principali, e più efficaci, strumenti drammaturgici nella costruzione dell’im- palcatura comica a sostegno della commedia. Nella divertita rimappatura affettiva dei luoghi e degli oggetti del desiderio, A Midsummer Night’s Dream sembra così produrre una visione anamorfica in grado di trasportare gli spettatori, prima ancora che i suoi personaggi, nel flusso intimamente ‘nomade’ dell’eros e del desiderio.
Anglistica AION, 2014
Abstract: Cultural and Post-Colonial Studies have long identified ocularcentrism, or the privileg... more Abstract: Cultural and Post-Colonial Studies have long identified ocularcentrism, or the privilege of vision in culture and thought, as one of the prime causes behind the tendency to manipulate and categorize matter, bodies and meanings. This paper examines the power of computer-generated images to produce a kind of digital interaction which upsets gendered visual and listening conventions, such as those traditionally experienced in cinema. The article will take into consideration Valve’s Portal (2007), a first person videogame which proposes a ‘topological’ way of seeing relying on the synaesthetic working of the human sensorium. Images do not simply represent objects and places, but allow for countless configurations of space. The visual effort to confront with images of pure potential brings about an affective intensification of sensory faculties, especially of the senses of touch and hearing. As a consequence, images are endowed with tactile qualities which make possible the absorption and propagation of sound stimuli. In the game, the ‘haptic’ quality of images works together with acousmatic resonances of female voice in order to recreate a hybrid embodied condition which dissolves the male-female binarism and, in so doing, challenges gendered cultural assumptions and established spectatorial positions.
Reti performative. Letteratura, arte, teatro, nuovi media, 2015
Textus. English Studies in Italy, no. 33.3 (September-December 2020), numero intitolato Millennium’s Children. New trends in South-Asian Postmillennial Anglophone Literature, 2020
This paper proposes an analysis of Anil's Ghost (2000) by Michael
Ondaatje in the attempt to ove... more This paper proposes an analysis of Anil's Ghost (2000) by Michael
Ondaatje in the attempt to overcome a marginalisation of Sri Lankan
literary production, both in the canon of the contemporary South Asian
novel, and postcolonial criticism. The novel is set in a Sri Lanka ravaged
by the civil war lx•tween Sinhalese and Tamils that plagued the country for
about a quarter of a century. The war represents a pivotal historical and
political circumstance that has attracted the attention of many Sri Lankan
literary authors for the last 30 years. Such scrutiny sometimes put in the
foreground the active influence that past events still exert in the present,
an influence that is often invisible, hidden or neglected.
This is also true for Ondaatje. The author chooses to focus on the
investigations of a forensic anthropologist who has returned from the
United States to her native Sri Lanka in order to recover the identity
of a skeleton abandoned in a zone protected by the government. In her
surveys to solve the mystery behind the identity of the nameless victim,
and uncover the truth about the mass killings plaguing the region, not
only does Anil's quest represent a new generation's attempt to give voice
to the voiceless victims of wars and national conflicts but also provides
her author with a narrative space made of voids, gaps and blind spots.
Attention to such narrative breaks provides space for truths that prove
essential to making visible those unaccountable processes through which
social authorities and symbolic formations interacted during those
warring years. Following Jacques Derrida (2016) and Horni Bhabha
(1990), the aim of my paper consists in showing that Ondaatje's novel
belongs to a wave of literary fiction concerned with (and even haunted
by) the 'ghosts' produced by the violence of the recently ended war. In
Ondaatje's literary effort the Civil War works as a moment of temporal
negotiation, whose dreadful events are used to highlight the need to
recover history in the clash between historical happenings, subjective
experience and the distortions of memory.
Transnational Subjects: Cultural and Literary Encounters, 2016
Bolter relates the question of remediation to a process of resonation between "the transparent pr... more Bolter relates the question of remediation to a process of resonation between "the transparent presentation of the real and the enjoyment of the opacity of media themselves" (Bolter, Grusin, 2000, p. 21). We can see this as an invitation to move beyond ocularcentric tendencies and consider media, identities, institutions, or cultural artifacts as individual entities, transparently interacting with each other in a way that is immediately apparent. This makes it possible to take into account their opacity, namely those processes which fade into the background of our experience. It should be remembered that, as Bolter himself admits, his idea of a genealogy of remediation is indebted to Foucault's concept of 'genealogy' not as 'origin', but as a kind of turbulent field of forces which constitute the conditions of possibility through which cultural events emerge or are formed. New critical intricacies thus emerge, insofar as critical accounts face the challenge of taking into consideration the structural properties of the cultural artifact; and the difficulty of framing or, better still, 'registering' the peculiar invisibility that characterizes its elementary processes should also be considered. From this perspective, Bolter's ideas prove to be particularly significant when they introduce the concept of bodily remediation. With this expression Bolter referred to the ability of the body to virtually interact with the invisible layers of experience which resonate or interfere with the content of any given medium. More specifically, the process of remediation relies on the simultaneous, or synaesthetic, functioning of the human sensorium. Even when apparently only one of the human senses is directly engaged by a given medium, the former always activates the indirect, or abstract, contribution of all the other senses, thus allowing a virtual connection with the invisible dimensions or fields of experience to which the content of any given medium refers to. This is especially interesting when we consider that the concept of remediation has usually been applied between acknowledged media such as writing, speech, painting, photography etc., yet only recently has research started to investigate the ca
Pisa University Press, 2019
My paper takes into consideration Neel Mukherjee's The Lives of Others as an opportunity to inter... more My paper takes into consideration Neel Mukherjee's The Lives of Others as an opportunity to interrogate the effects of the timeserving practices of leading political parties in India during the first decades following the Partition separating India and Pakistan. They were made possible by the instrumental employment of military forces following an internal reorganisation in the '50s and '60s. The then young Indian state de facto deprived tribals of their lands for profit with the com- plicity of the police and the military, whose repressive force was em- ployed not only to repress and stifle any form of dissent or protest, but also to "creatively" produce normative discourses which represented a constant threat to national growth and development. By blurring the line between truth and fantasy, the military decisively contributed to the symbolic binding of tribals to an imaginary of fear which proved instrumental to the emergence of the "modernity" of the nation-state. From this perspective, Mukherjee's novel highlights how such biased forms of knowledge traversed the different networks composing the social body in its entirety.
Anglistica AION : An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2014
Le Simplegadi, 2018
This article focuses on Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan to analyse the ne- gotiations of iden... more This article focuses on Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan to analyse the ne- gotiations of identity among different ethnic communities at the time of the Partition between India and Pakistan which occurred in August 1947. In par- ticular, this paper will try to show the impact, in the economy of social rela- tionships and violence in Singh’s novel, of uncertainties put forward through the circulation of ‘rumours’ along and across the then still uncertain borders dividing the two budding nations.
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Papers and essays by Giuseppe De Riso
cui la critica sociale si esprime attraverso la contaminazione intertestuale tra generi,
stili e media diversi. Sebbene il testo rushdiano appartenga al collaudato filone di
metafiction storiografica (Hutcheon 1985, 1988, 1989) che tanta diffusione ha visto
negli ultimi decenni, tale declinazione letteraria trova qui applicazione originale con
lo sviluppo narrativo asimmetrico di due storie, quella dello scrittore Sam DuChamp
e del personaggio di sua invenzione Quichotte.
La mescolanza tra show e competizioni di vario genere, serial tv, film e computer
grafica gioca continuamente su processi di attrazione e repulsione delle storie dei due
protagonisti, ed è infine compressa in un calco parodico dell’epopea donchisciotte-
sca modellato sui codici della televisione contemporanea. Nell’originale impalcatura
strutturale del romanzo, situazioni comiche si tingono progressivamente di sfumature
tragiche per rivelare, in ultima analisi, una visione del mondo basata sulla necessaria
contaminazione tra le facoltà immaginative dell’arte e la vita reale come disperato
tentativo di far fronte alle contraddizioni umane.
Ondaatje in the attempt to overcome a marginalisation of Sri Lankan
literary production, both in the canon of the contemporary South Asian
novel, and postcolonial criticism. The novel is set in a Sri Lanka ravaged
by the civil war lx•tween Sinhalese and Tamils that plagued the country for
about a quarter of a century. The war represents a pivotal historical and
political circumstance that has attracted the attention of many Sri Lankan
literary authors for the last 30 years. Such scrutiny sometimes put in the
foreground the active influence that past events still exert in the present,
an influence that is often invisible, hidden or neglected.
This is also true for Ondaatje. The author chooses to focus on the
investigations of a forensic anthropologist who has returned from the
United States to her native Sri Lanka in order to recover the identity
of a skeleton abandoned in a zone protected by the government. In her
surveys to solve the mystery behind the identity of the nameless victim,
and uncover the truth about the mass killings plaguing the region, not
only does Anil's quest represent a new generation's attempt to give voice
to the voiceless victims of wars and national conflicts but also provides
her author with a narrative space made of voids, gaps and blind spots.
Attention to such narrative breaks provides space for truths that prove
essential to making visible those unaccountable processes through which
social authorities and symbolic formations interacted during those
warring years. Following Jacques Derrida (2016) and Horni Bhabha
(1990), the aim of my paper consists in showing that Ondaatje's novel
belongs to a wave of literary fiction concerned with (and even haunted
by) the 'ghosts' produced by the violence of the recently ended war. In
Ondaatje's literary effort the Civil War works as a moment of temporal
negotiation, whose dreadful events are used to highlight the need to
recover history in the clash between historical happenings, subjective
experience and the distortions of memory.
cui la critica sociale si esprime attraverso la contaminazione intertestuale tra generi,
stili e media diversi. Sebbene il testo rushdiano appartenga al collaudato filone di
metafiction storiografica (Hutcheon 1985, 1988, 1989) che tanta diffusione ha visto
negli ultimi decenni, tale declinazione letteraria trova qui applicazione originale con
lo sviluppo narrativo asimmetrico di due storie, quella dello scrittore Sam DuChamp
e del personaggio di sua invenzione Quichotte.
La mescolanza tra show e competizioni di vario genere, serial tv, film e computer
grafica gioca continuamente su processi di attrazione e repulsione delle storie dei due
protagonisti, ed è infine compressa in un calco parodico dell’epopea donchisciotte-
sca modellato sui codici della televisione contemporanea. Nell’originale impalcatura
strutturale del romanzo, situazioni comiche si tingono progressivamente di sfumature
tragiche per rivelare, in ultima analisi, una visione del mondo basata sulla necessaria
contaminazione tra le facoltà immaginative dell’arte e la vita reale come disperato
tentativo di far fronte alle contraddizioni umane.
Ondaatje in the attempt to overcome a marginalisation of Sri Lankan
literary production, both in the canon of the contemporary South Asian
novel, and postcolonial criticism. The novel is set in a Sri Lanka ravaged
by the civil war lx•tween Sinhalese and Tamils that plagued the country for
about a quarter of a century. The war represents a pivotal historical and
political circumstance that has attracted the attention of many Sri Lankan
literary authors for the last 30 years. Such scrutiny sometimes put in the
foreground the active influence that past events still exert in the present,
an influence that is often invisible, hidden or neglected.
This is also true for Ondaatje. The author chooses to focus on the
investigations of a forensic anthropologist who has returned from the
United States to her native Sri Lanka in order to recover the identity
of a skeleton abandoned in a zone protected by the government. In her
surveys to solve the mystery behind the identity of the nameless victim,
and uncover the truth about the mass killings plaguing the region, not
only does Anil's quest represent a new generation's attempt to give voice
to the voiceless victims of wars and national conflicts but also provides
her author with a narrative space made of voids, gaps and blind spots.
Attention to such narrative breaks provides space for truths that prove
essential to making visible those unaccountable processes through which
social authorities and symbolic formations interacted during those
warring years. Following Jacques Derrida (2016) and Horni Bhabha
(1990), the aim of my paper consists in showing that Ondaatje's novel
belongs to a wave of literary fiction concerned with (and even haunted
by) the 'ghosts' produced by the violence of the recently ended war. In
Ondaatje's literary effort the Civil War works as a moment of temporal
negotiation, whose dreadful events are used to highlight the need to
recover history in the clash between historical happenings, subjective
experience and the distortions of memory.
(1956), Neel Mukherjee's The Lives of Others (2014) and Rohinton Mistry's A
Fine Balance (1995) to provide a literary account of three fundamental
moments in India's history: the Partition of 1947, the Naxalbari movement, and
Indira Gandhi's Emergency.
These novels provide literary interpretations of the ways in which feelings of
fear and insecurity connected with ethno-religious rivalries, as well as with new
power shifts in Indian socio-economic structure, gave a significant
contribution to the formation of the political landscape in post-colonial India.
More specifically, defying any kind of identitarian juxtaposition (be it related to
ethnic belonging, religion, sexuality, or social class), the present work reads
those three major novels in Indian English fiction to investigate how episodes of
violence, in the first three decades after India's independence from the British
Empire, were enacted under the influence of cultural images and "affects"
which legitimised different social groups to claim for themselves the right to
prevail over others, or even take their lives.