In Promises Beyond Memory, Vikki Bell shows how archives of contemporary political violence in Argentina, Chile, and Colombia challenge the idea that simply sheltering the documentation of violence is sufficient to fulfill the obligations of attending to the past. Beyond mere preservation, these archives, museums, and sites of memory invite exploratory modes of enlivening the past through aesthetic practices like photography, installation, film, and performance. These practices fo...

Since the end of the last dictatorship in 1983, Argentina’s visual artists and art-activists have been central to campaigns to demand the criminal prosecution of those initially granted amnesty and to a variety of commemorative projects. In The Art of Post-Dictatorship: Ethics and Aesthetics in Transitional Argentina Vikki Bell examines this involvement and intervention. She argues that the problematics that arise within the aesthetic realm cannot be understood solely through an a...

Winner of British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 1993 Within feminism incest has often been subsumed under a discussion of sexual violence and abuse. Yet, important as this is, there has been little account of how feminist work itself relates to other ways of talking about and understanding incest.In Interrogating Incest Vikki Bell focuses on the issue of incest and its place in sociological theory, feminist theory and criminal law. By examining inces...

This volume is based on the first set of formal conversations which brings together the dynamic philosophies of two eminent thinkers: Judith Butler and Alfred North Whitehead. Each has drawn from a wide palette of disciplines to develop distinctive theories of becoming, of syntactical violence, and creative opportunities of limitation. In bringing together internationally renowned interpreters of Butler and Whitehead from a variety of fields and disciplines—philosophy, rhetoric, gender and...