[Air-L] New book announcement: Figurations of Violence and Belonging: Queerness, Migranthood and Nationalism in Cyberspace and Beyond

[Adi Kuntsman]

Dear all,

I am pleased
to announce my new book which came out this month
best wishes
Adi



Figurations
of Violence and Belonging: Queerness,
Migranthood and Nationalism in Cyberspace and Beyond
Adi Kuntsman
Peter Lang, Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New
York, Wien.
ISBN 978-3-03911-564-8 pb.

http://www.peterlang.com/Index.cfm?vID=11564&vLang=E

Violence is
often seen as contradictory to
belonging, as an obstacle to it, or as a background against which
belonging –
understood as the creation of ‘safe spaces’ – takes place. Instead,
this
book  offers a more nuanced and critical analysis of the complex
relationship between violence and belonging, by exploring the ways
sexual,
ethnic or national belonging can work through, rather than against,
violence.
Based on an ethnographic study of Russian-speaking, queer immigrants in
Israel/Palestine, and also in cyberspace, this book is a fascinating,
albeit at
times disturbing, journey into the world of hate speech and fantasies
of torture
and sexual abuse; of tormented subjectivities and uncanny homes; of
ghostly
hauntings  from the past and anxieties about the present and future.
The
author raises daring questions about the responsibilities of national
homemaking, the complicity of queerness within violent regimes of
colonialism
and war, and the ambivalence of immigrant belonging at the intersection
of
marginality and privilege. Drawing from scholarship on migration,
diaspora and
critical race studies, feminist and queer theory, psychoanalysis and
studies on
cyberculture, the book skillfully traces the interplay between the
different
forms of violence – physical and verbal, social and psychic, material
and
semiotic – and offers novel insights into the analysis of nationalism,
on-line sociality
and queer migranthood. 
Mapping
multiple displacements and fraught
belongings in uncharted virtual worlds, Adi Kunstman bravely and
creatively
opens up new paths to understanding Israeli immigrant queer subjects by
figuring with and through the affective dimensions of their political
and
cultural lives. Utterly convincing and provocative in her assertions
regarding
the haunted travels, violent histories and discordant discourses of
these
queers, Kuntsman offers us a work that will be an exemplar for future
research
in the field.   –  Martin
F. Manalansan IV,
author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora 
Deftly
traversing numerous overlapping locations of
belonging – Russia, Israel, the UK, and cyberspace – Adi Kuntsman has
produced
a compelling multi-sited ethnography of forms of violence and their
constitutive and connective capacities for and between queer subjects. 
Her eloquent interrogation of Israeli nationalism and anti-Palestinian
sentiment in relation to queerness is a valuable contribution to the
scholarship on sexuality and nationalism, not to mention, urgently
needed in
these times. This book is not only intellectually rich but also
politically
inspiring.  –  Jasbir K.
Puar, authorof Terrorist Assemblages:
Homonationalism in queer times 
Working
through intersections of Russian and
Israeli, Palestinian and Jew, queer and homophobe, home and exile,
presents and
pasts, recognition and erasure, Adi Kuntsman traces the ghostly but no
less
wounding acts of violence that are the conditions of belonging in
contemporary
Israel/Palestine.  Inhabiting sites both online and off she shows us
the
realness of virtual spaces, and the virtualities that haunt the real.
Theoretically sophisticated and ethnographically rich, this book
eschews any
easy reconciliations as Kuntsman insists that violence and belonging
must be
thought through one another. Not only will this book be of interest to
a broad
range of students and scholars, but it addresses as well urgent
questions with
respect to how we might live together in difference and more justly.– Lucy Suchman, Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, UK
  

Table of
contents
Preface
Prologue: The journey to this book
Introduction: Violence and Belonging

PART I HAUNTED FIGURES
Chapter 1 The Shadow by the Latrine
Chapter 2 The Jewish Victim
 
PART II BORDER FIGURES
Chapter 3 The Soldier and the Terrorist
Chapter 4  Daughter of Palestine
 
PART III FLAMING FIGURES
Chapter 5 The Club
Chapter 6 The Flamer
 
Conclusion: Belonging Through Violence
Bibliography
Index
-- 

Dr. Adi Kuntsman 
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow 
Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures 
The University of Manchester 
Second Floor, Arthur Lewis Building, room 2.007 
Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK 
http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/ricc/index.html 
http://adi.kuntsman.googlepages.com