From COVID to climate-change-induced wildfires and hurricanes, we live in an era when catastrophes have become the new normal. But even though these events affect us all, some members of society are more vulnerable to harm than others.This essay collection explores how the definition of catastrophe might be expanded to include many forms of large-scale structural violence on communities, species, and ecosystems. Using feminist methodologies, the contributors to Public Catastrop...

This book offers a transnational feminist response to the gender politics of torture and terror from the viewpoint of populations of color who have come to be associated with acts of terror. Using the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, this book revisits other such racialized wars in Palestine, Guatemala, India, Algeria, and South Africa. It draws widely on postcolonial literature, photography, films, music, interdisciplinary arts, media/new media, and activism, joining the larger conv...

On the eve of the democratic elections scheduled in South Africa in 2009, this collection of essays analyses the many ways in which South Africans have been trying to heal the wounds of apartheid, as advocated in Nelson Mandela’s famous 1994 speech, delivered at the dawn of the ‘ new ’ South Africa. The articles encompass such diverse fields as politics, literature, cinema, welfare policies or education, and they all seek to explore the sea change which totally reshaped South African ident...