Driven to Their Knees
eBook - ePub

Driven to Their Knees

Humiliation in Contemporary Politics

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Driven to Their Knees

Humiliation in Contemporary Politics

About this book

How the rhetoric of humiliation defines the powerful and the powerless in modern politics

Humiliation pervades our politics, from images of stripped Palestinian men in Gaza to mocking chants at MAGA rallies. It suffuses pictures and videos, speaks through bodies as well as words, and is expressed by those with too much power as well as by those with too little. In Driven to Their Knees, Roxanne Euben takes readers from conflicts in the Arabic-speaking world to America’s divided public square, advancing a theory of humiliation rooted in the ways people articulate and enact it. Euben analyzes some of the most conspicuous yet least studied Arabic expressions of humiliation, drawing on sources ranging from Qur??nic commentary by Islamists to videos, poetry, songs, and tweets from the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

Driven to Their Knees reveals what the language of humiliation says—and also how it works. This groundbreaking book shows how humiliation expresses the imposition of impotence by those with undeserved power, and the way it converts relations of power into crises of virility. Humiliation rhetoric defines both the humiliated and the humiliator and issues an urgent call for a remedy in the viscerally charged language of emasculation. For Donald Trump and Usama bin Laden alike, this means driving their enemy to his knees for all to see, and then boasting about it to compound the degradation. But for others, humiliation galvanizes their struggle to “stand erect,” uniting them in a refusal to be bowed low. Humiliation is not just about power but is itself a powerful language that does far more than reflect contemporary politics. The language of humiliation remakes the very world in which we live.

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Yes, you can access Driven to Their Knees by Roxanne L. Euben in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Politics & International Relations & Middle Eastern Politics. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. A Note on Transliteration and Spelling
  8. 1. Introduction: What’s in a Word?
  9. 2. A Theodicy for Powerlessness: Islamist Discourse and Retaliatory Humiliation
  10. 3. Spectacles of Sovereignty: ISIS Executions, Visual Rhetoric, and Sovereign Power
  11. 4. “Our Dignity Is Humiliated”: A Phenomenology of Humiliation in the Egyptian Revolution
  12. 5. Conclusion: Humiliation, Dignity, and Embodiment
  13. Bibliography
  14. Index