Bruce Robbins: On Literature, Atrocity, and Academic Freedom

In this episode of Not to Forgive, but to Understand, we speak with Bruce Robbins—Columbia University professor and author of Atrocity: A Literary History. Drawing on his recent book, we explore how literature grapples with the representation of mass violence, and examine his work through the lens of genocide studies.

We explore questions about prolepsis and historical inevitability, the role of ethnocentrism in genocide narratives, and the shifting nature of violence through thinkers like Nietzsche, Foucault, and Pinker. Robbins also reflects on the personal and institutional consequences of his public teaching, including his support for student activism.

The episode features audience questions from Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba, Associate Professor at the University of Winnipeg.

00:00:00 – Opening

00:01:42 – How the Term “Genocide” Became Common

00:06:55 – Literature Review on Atrocity and Violence

00:13:57 – Avoiding Simplified Good vs. Evil Narratives

00:18:29 – Writing About Atrocity Without Exaggeration

00:19:42 – Ethnocentrism’s Role in Atrocity

00:26:03 – Nietzsche, Sadism, and Humanization in Violence

00:27:09 – Plunder in War: Historical and Modern Examples

00:36:47 – Marx and Foucault on Changing Forms of Violence

00:38:05 – Why “Violence” Is Often Missing in Genocide Studies

00:41:01 – Are Modern Societies Less Violent?

00:43:27 – How Publishing Influences Atrocity Narratives

00:48:46 – Audience Q1: Does Foreshadowing Misrepresent Violence?

00:50:32 – Audience Q2: Addressing Eurocentrism in the Book

00:52:51 – Gaza Encampment, Teaching Risk, and Institutional Pushback

Transcript

0:00

But genocide immediately, to pronounce the word genocide was to incur a responsibility to act, to do something. And atrocity was a much more convenient term because you could mark your outrage, your indignation, your sadness, whatever the word was, but you didn't have to do anything. Today we're joined by Bruce Robbins, professor of the humanities at Columbia University and author of numerous influential works in literary and cultural theory, including Criticism and Politics, a polemical Introduction, and most recently, Atrocity, A Literary History. In this conversation, we explore how the concept of atrocity has evolved, the role of literature in shaping our moral responses to violence, and how these questions intersect with current global crises. Please enjoy our conversation. I'd like to welcome you to our program, and I'm really excited to have this conversation with you today, especially because I've read your book a few times, and I always do that whenever I really enjoy a few times. Seems like too many. But anyway, I'm glad that you've read it once. Well, I also listened to many of your interviews online and I wanted to find a unique angle to our interview. I didn't want to repeat the same questions that other hosts have already asked you. That's the reason I came up with the idea of centering your work within the context of genocide studies specifically in addressing these issues. So the way I think about it, and please correct me if I'm wrong here, I use as a genocide study scholar, the word atrocity when I don't want to get into the complications of the word genocide. For me, atrocity is an umbrella term and when I was reading your book, what fascinated me was the fact that you said the word atrocity had its own history, its own use over time, whereby there was a point, and you're going to tell us more about this, where it insinuated moral responsibility, moral guilt for whatever had happened. And you also spoke about how there was a peak in its use and then there was a bit of a trough, you know, a fall, a decrease. And you say people became a bit uncomfortable with the term. Now, that really marked me because that's exactly what's happened with genocide. The word genocide was coined in 1944 by Rafael Lemkin. People didn't use it for the longest time. We still called, for instance, whatever happened in African regions and other African states and other parts of the world., we called them civil war, we never used the word genocide. Suddenly it became a thing. This is after the eighties and nineties and even the field of genocide studies became a thing in that period. People use the word genocide now very loosely. That's one of the criticisms I hear all the time. So now people are getting uncomfortable with the term. So one of my predictions is that maybe we will need a new term after genocide to replace it. Well, that's a completely new idea to me, and I'd love to hear you talk about it. It had certainly not occurred to me. I share your feeling that people have turned to atrocity when they don't want to use genocide because genocide brings with it certain responsibilities of action. I think the the history in international law is, and all this is very recent, as you say, it starts with Lemkin after World War Two. But genocide immediately, to pronounce the word genocide was to incur a responsibility to act, to do something. And atrocity was a much more convenient term because you could mark your outrage, your indignation, your sadness, whatever the word was, but you didn't have to do anything. So, I would obviously like for there to be more accountability. And I understand from looking at your project that accountability is one of the key things that you have in mind. But from that point of view, you know, genocide obviously involves more than atrocities does. You can talk about atrocity without incurring the same kind of responsibility. People can say the word more loosely. That said, I think also you are right that there was a rise in the use of the word after it sort of came into its modern meaning and then a fall. And the fall, as I interpret it, happened when it became visible to people that they might be accused of committing atrocities themselves. When the word was no longer, you know, attached in a very easy and convenient way to things other people did. But it could be attached to things that we did. So that made people more uncomfortable using it. And I mean, that's the my understanding of why they've kind of used it less just to get us off on absolutely the wrong foot. I will say that this book of mine Atrocity: A Literary History isn't centrally concerned at all with the question of prevention, which is, you know, the much more urgent and important issue. And again, I worry a little bit that I'm not going to be able to say anything that's going to satisfy you on that. I mean, I will have a couple of things to say, but my sense of it is that you guys have thought about this more than I have, that, you know, being a literary person, I mean, literature is slow. It's much too slow in most cases to really deal with, you know, the thing that happened yesterday. So, you know, just to say to all your readers, don't, listeners, don't go out and read it because it's not going to help. You know, what you really need to know, which is how to prevent this stuff. But I would also like to know more details about the inquiry that you engaged in that revealed, the evolution in the way in which we interacted with the subject of atrocity. I would really like a review of that literature. Well, actually, let me go personal first and then maybe do some literary history afterwards. So there are kind of two personal narratives, maybe actually more, but two that I can think of right now. One is simply that I come out of the Vietnam War generation and you know the sort of key experience for many of us was the mass killing of civilians by the United States in Vietnam, which just seemed the simplest possible marker of good and evil in the world. And it probably helped as far as, let's say, Israel is concerned, for me to look around and say, okay, the U.S. is doing this in Vietnam. It is supporting military dictatorships in other places which have death squads. And, you know, we are the bad guys in this case. Is Israel really any different? Gosh, I hadn't really thought of that before. I certainly wasn't raised to ask that question. But it's a natural question to ask if what you're doing is coming out of Vietnam, an American foreign policy, Latin America in particular. I mean, there are just so many cases in Latin America where, you know, mass killing was, you know, directly supported and sponsored, instigated by the United States. So that's one story that's kind of a generational story. I think it's true for a lot of people. It's not just true for me. The personal thing which probably led to complications that I might not have otherwise gotten into And this is a story since you've read the book, you'll know that I tell in the book has to do with my father being a bomber pilot during World War Two and me growing up thinking of him as a kind of hero, which on some level I still do. I mean, instead of going to college, he was flying over Germany and dropping bombs and getting people killed in his squadron that he was a commander of when he was 20 years old, which is kind of insane. He said at one point to me, you know, I wasn't writing college papers. I was writing letters home to the families of the people who were killed in my squadron. Like, okay, you know, try to digest that one, you know, But my paper is really hard and it's due tomorrow. And little by little, it became obvious to me, as it should have been probably from the beginning, that when the American Army Air Corps was bombing German cities, it wasn't just bombing military sites and industrial sites, but it was bombing cities and cities have civilians in them. And that, you know, like fighting the Nazis was a good thing to do. And bombing cities was a very bad thing to do. So I had to deal with the kind of moral complications and political complications of that. And it made me think that this atrocity subject was complicated enough to be, you know, not just a literary history, but, you know, to write a book about because otherwise people might just say, well, yeah, what's to say about atrocity? We're all against, right? So, you know, what's to talk about? What are you interested in? What are you going to say? Well, you know, it for me, it was more complicated. And then I had this special experience related to that, which again, I talk about in the book that I was planning a seminar on some of these materials. And I read the book Air Raid by Alexander Kluge, the German philosopher, poet, TV producer, you know, just overall sort of man of letters and the full title of his book, which was not on the cover of the book, was The Air Raid on Halberstadt on 8th April 1945, and as I looked at the title inside the book, 8th April 1945, Halberstadt, I had an uncanny experience of having seen those words together before, and I walked into my office where I have on the wall a list of missions that my father flew and lo and behold, there it was, Halberstadt 8th April 1945. So my father had bombed Alexander Kluge and been part of the killing of between 2000 – 3000 people in Halberstadt this within days of the end of the war for no military purpose whatsoever. So I didn't know what to do with this. But then I won't go through the whole story. I got a chance to talk to Alexander Kluge, who was 13 years old at the time, and we had a nice chat and he was very generous and poetically interesting about what had happened in Halberstadt. The book, by the way, Air Raid is a brilliant book, a kind of montage of different kinds of evidence and bits and pieces of prose and songs. He kind of recreates the experience in a very weird way. And leaves out his own personal experience, which was probably as meaningful as anything that he put in. Because if he had talked about being a terrified 13 year old, I think he would have simplified the experience, the meaning of the bombing of Halberstadt in a way that it seemed to me. On reflection, he didn't want to simplify. People would have simply taken the position of the victims, which lord knows you want to do anyway. But they wouldn't have thought certain other things that he wanted them to think, including, you know, a certain amount of German guilt, which I don't think he as a German could do without. So this was a very complicated view of an atrocity. I'm not giving you a chance to ask your question about what good writing about atrocity is. But this is an example of it, I think. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting you refer to good writing. I mean, what constitutes good writing after your own inquiry into atrocity and how the term has evolved? Because I was really curious about what you deemed to be good writing. And I think what really stuck out even in the book and I read it a few times, was when you said, we tend to assign blame. And I think we really have to reiterate that point, because I feel this is, again, something a lot of us genocide studies scholars suffer from till today, which is in any kind of conflict. And we know this for a fact. Even when we look at conflict at a micro level within among ourselves, at this level of society, within peaceful conditions, it's never one sided. The story is never simplistic. It's not about binary parties, there’s one outrageous perpetrator and a poor victim who's involved in that conflict. The plot is way more complicated. It's way more complex. And that's what you bring out. You are not advocating and which is what I thought at first, this was my first reading and thank god there were a few. But my first reading was to think you want an amoral perspective or take on the way in which war in conflict is described. Because as a reader of philosophy, I remember very clearly reading Nietzche, reading Schopenhauer, reading Heidegger. These are the philosophers who touted, who encouraged us to write in an amoral fashion based on the belief that if you write in an amoral way, your work is going to be timeless and universal, because morality is a changing affair. It's relative. But that's not the take you adopt. So please tell us more about that. Well, at a philosophical level, since you mention it, I guess I'm a bit of an old fashioned Hegelian in the sense that I think that, yes, morality is historical and it develops along with human, you know, society, but that doesn't make it any less necessary or any less important for us to invest in. So I don't want to be amoral and I don't want to do without blame. I just want to be adequate to the complications of blaming. And, you know, there are complications. And again, your project about the prevention of genocide is one of the key factors. Also in my head, even though it's not primarily what I was writing about. So, you know, one of the examples I give in the book is Gladstone, who’s an important figure in the history of humanitarianism. And I have to say that the book overlaps to some extent with the history of humanitarianism. So he is someone who calls out the so-called Bulgarian horrors. In 1876, I think it was 1876, there were atrocities committed by the Ottoman authorities against nationalist independent forces in Bulgaria. And there's no question they were atrocities. I mean, mass killing of civilians, not all of whom were responsible for fighting against the Ottoman authorities. And Gladstone's call for the British state to do something was couched in completely racist terms. And if people had actually listened to him and sent in the Navy and bombarded the coastal cities and so on and so forth, the result would have been more atrocities. So one of my criteria is how do you talk about atrocity and assign blame without doing so in a fashion that would create more right or even create an endless cycle of atrocity? I'm sure you guys have thought about this. It was hard for me because, you know, my indignation is quickly ignited and I want to do something also. I give the example of this extremely popular pamphlet that Gladstone wrote popularizing the horrors that were, you know, perpetrated in Bulgaria. I give this as an example of how not to write about atrocity. Yes, you want to work people up, but you want to work them up and in some other way. I think what I took away from that was how and I used it in the review that I'm currently writing about your work, which is you insist on maintaining a distance from any melodrama, any hyperbolic writing, and you want the writing to be sober and understated. These seem to be the objectives I thought that stood out. You don't seem to be very convinced. Well, yeah, there's something about that description that makes me recoil a little bit. It's not all about, you know, being sober and understated, you know, just the facts, because there's got to be a place for indignation. I mean, you feel it, you know, I feel it. You know, you have to allow for people to make other people feel it. I mean, it's it's not wrong to feel indignation, but it's just complicated. Once you let the indignation in there, how do you keep it under control and not just say these people are monsters, eradicate them, eradicate their families, eradicate their nation? You know, which is kind of the direction I exaggerate a bit, but that Gladstone was going. I also noticed again the perspective of genocide studies We make certain assumptions about what is expected in a genocidal scenario. One is dehumanization. And I think we have many examples of dehumanization in various instances of genocide, In terms of dehumanization, we have, of course, the treatment of the Jews and other minorities during the Holocaust. We have the dehumanization of Tutsis who were treated as “cockroaches” by the Hutus. There are many other instances in your book. What I felt was, and this stood out very clearly for me. You mentioned that dehumanization was not necessarily a prerequisite in the context of an atrocity. That's one, there was another given again in the context of genocide that we take for granted, and that's ethnocentrism. And we can keep arguing because ethnocentrism is connected to dehumanization in many ways. But ethnocentrism would refer to the Aryans the ideology of the Aryans, thinking they're better, they're superior to the Jews and other minorities. Ethnocentrism going back to the example of Rwanda, the genocide in 1994, ethnocentrism also came in a way from the Tutsis who were therefore targeted by the Hutus. I mean, again, I'm simplifying the story, which is way more complex in terms of who was the victim. And also I have to mention the Uyghurs, the Uyghur Muslims who are now being persecuted by the Han Chinese majority in China. And so again, that's another example of ethnocentrism. You speak about ethnocentrism as well and say again that it was not necessarily a prerequisite in the context of atrocity. So please tell us more about this. Well, that was a bit of a shock to me, actually. I think when I went into this project, I was thinking that ethnocentrism and the overcoming of ethnocentrism would be absolutely central, and they ended up being a little bit less central than than I expected. Partly this is because I was looking at ancient materials, pre-modern materials that I really didn't know very well because they had not really been part of my education. Things like Caesar's The Gallic War, which every schoolboy read for hundreds and hundreds of years, I think when that's how they learned Latin. And I was looking for, you know, just to call it crudely, racism, in the way Caesar talked about the people, the various Gallic tribes or nations that he was fighting. And I wasn't finding it. And when I looked around the classical scholars, it seemed to me he didn't really need to think of them as inhuman, less than human. He was perfectly happy to do this kind of thing to Romans. I mean, you know, this was just kind of the way people thought about violence back then. And there was even I hope this isn't too literary or I don't know, over subtle, but I mean, if you're a conqueror and you want to tell everyone what a great military hero you are, you don't want to make the people that you're conquering seem too, you know, less than human because that takes something away from your conquest. You want to say they were great and noble adversaries and I conquered them anyway. And that's kind of more the way Caesar talked. So I thought, okay, that's a kind of example of, not even wanting to dehumanize the enemy, you know, making the adversaries as strategic and rational and whatever, as you make yourselves, it’s just you're even better. I saw something similar. Another thing that I had never read, Josephus’, The Jewish War, which is again, written on the part of Roman imperialism. And it's about, you know, the conquest of ancient Israel and the destruction of the second temple, which is, by the way, one of the bloodiest and most impressive atrocity descriptions out there that I encountered. But, you know, not one that involved dehumanizing the enemy again. And of course, you could say I mean, you mentioned the term civil war. I think civil war is probably a really good thing to look at. I mean, if I were rewriting this book, I would pay more attention to civil war, because civil war is probably the best category in which to find people who don't dehumanize the other side or who don't see them as completely alien, who don't Orientalize them, you know, to use that Edward Said’s expression, who don't do an absolute ‘us’ and ‘them’. These are people like us and we massacre them anyway, you know, because it's a civil war. They chose the wrong general. You know, we chose the right general. They chose the wrong general. So we massacre them and their families and so on. Anyway, Josephus was an Israelite general who, when faced either death or join the Romans, he joined the Romans. So he was there to see the destruction of Jerusalem and the tens of thousands of Israelites who were killed. And naturally, he had somewhat mixed feelings because, you know, these were his people on some level. So it's again, not an example of ideal writing, but example of kind of good writing in the sense that it's not all, you know, good guys, bad guys, the human and the inhuman, the alien race and, you know, the real people like us. Well, the two points that emanate from the last segment of this conversation right now and the first one is when you speak about and you refer to Nietzche quite often in the book. And I'm also a Nietzche enthusiast in many ways, as you mentioned you are, and I felt that in terms of dehumanization, what you wrote resonated with my thoughts on that is because Nietzche speaks about the sadistic instinct in man. And I think when man wants to exercise that sadistic instinct, he actually doesn't want the person, his victim, to be dehumanize. On the contrary, he wants that victim to be as humanized as possible so that then he can inflict that sadism upon that person. So in many ways, I believe that dehumanization is also not necessary in the context of the genocide. And that is why you work resonated with me. I wish I had thought that I had Nietzche on my side when I wrote the book, but I am very happy to have the commentary added on. And I think the other point that I wanted to bring up here is after this conversation or after this discussion that you had in chapter one, about dehumanization and ethnocentrism, you naturally veer into the topic of plunder, which is essential to this conversation, because you speak about how, again, plunder was deemed to be normal. In fact, there was even a very elaborate system for people to enjoy the fruits of their effort that would mean basically the spoils of war. And that would include not just goods and riches and jewels and all of that, but also women. Don't forget, very important spoils of war. Now, when we're talking about plunder, again, if we have these two contexts that you keep bringing up in the book, which is a pre-modern and modern context. But in the modern context, we do have instances of plunder in the case of the Holocaust, which we all knew about. But there are also some cases where, again, I like that you complicated the plot by also including examples where there was war but there was no plunder involved and so please tell us more about all of these complexities. I'm not sure I can talk about all of them, but in your preparatory questions for this, conversation, you did ask me what I thought the causes of genocide were. And I thought, my goodness, I'm not sure I have anything intelligent to say about that. And there, I am going to be shown to be lacking. And then I thought that the closest I come, at least in a lot of the book, would be something like the following metanarrative. Once upon a time it was considered normal for a society to support itself to prosper or simply to survive by stealing things from other people. And to the extent that that was true, violence was built in. I mean, you don't steal things most of the time from other people without having to hurt them or coerce them. And you know, the simplest way to remember this is in Homer's Iliad, which is not primarily about that. One of the ways of praising Achilles is that he was a great thief of horses, you know, and this is now kind of official moral praise of Achilles to be in this society, to be able to steal horses well, is, you know, considered virtuous. So obviously killing people, well, was also considered virtuous. Maybe this is a way to kind of shorten the long exposition, I think and I'm not necessarily in the mainstream here, that there's a difference to be drawn between nation states and empires in the sense that empires really depend on extending their territory and to some extent on either plunder or tribute. So the thing about tribute is you march in, you conquer, and you plunder, but you say, okay, you're going to pay us something every month or every year, or else we'll come back and we'll, you know, kill a whole bunch of you again, as we just did. So that's a kind of institutionalized, normalized routinized version of plunder, which was, you know, the system in I want to say most empires, maybe all empires, I'm not enough of a historian to be able to judge that. Now, the question is modern violence in the era of the nation state when there are some empires, but there are also just nation states that are not empires, is violence as necessary to the system now as it used to be? I don't think so. I think nation states have committed incredible amounts of mass violence, many atrocities. But it is not intrinsic to the nature of the nature, the nation state, that it has to expand its territory and, you know, kill or coerce people in order to conquer them in a way that was true for the empire. Within Marxist theory, which maybe not all of your listeners are interested in, there's an interesting debate about and Nancy Fraser has put this really well, expropriation and exploitation. So the idea is the champions of capitalism, people like Adam Smith said capitalism is going to be a lot better than feudalism, because in feudalism violence is absolutely necessary. The only way you get to sort of take over the surplus is the people who've got the swords and the spears and the shields. They march in and they say, “Look, we're taking half off your crop or else will kill you.” Right? And in capitalism, you get this is Adam Smith. Now we're going to take a surplus. It's Adam Smith, but it's also Marx. But we're going to take it in a very tranquil, peaceful way. You work, and the difference between the value of what you produce and what we pay you, surplus value will be what we would have taken by means of violence before. So capitalism is going to be peaceful now. Marx, in volume one of Capital, puts right at the end what he calls primal or primitive accumulation. And he says the only way capitalism gets going is by means of coercion. That is, and of course, this got applied also to colonialism. You know, first there's violence, and that is that establishes who gets to to buy the labor of the other people and who has to sell the labor because there are rich people and poor people. How does it work out that, you know, there are some who can buy the labor of other people and there are others who have to sell their labor? And he calls it primitive or primal accumulation. The more recent theory is that it doesn't go away. Marx thought there would be a moment in the beginnings of capitalism where violence would be necessary, but after that it would work by exploitation. Meaning, you sell me your labor and I pay you for that labor and I end up rich and you end up poor. But there's no violence. You are free making a rational choice, you know, as a free person to sell me your labor and I'm free to buy it. We're both free. It's great to be free, except I end up rich and you end up poor. Anyway, so the big question is, and I think this is interesting to you as scholars of genocide, how necessary is this accumulation by means of violence, by means of coercion to the current system, if you believe there is a system and it's not just, you know, random actors, how necessary is it? And to what extent have we been moving from away from a system of violent expropriation like colonialism, toward a system of exploitation where, again, the rich get rich and the poor get poorer? But all that happens mainly without violence, right? So those of us who are kind of stupid optimists, we think that the acquisition of political rights that constitutes a kind of protection against violence and to the extent that we can really kind of universalize political rights, we are protecting people against violence. And obviously that hasn't worked all that well up to now. And you still have the kind of mass incarceration which of course works by coercion, right? Where some people find themselves in prison, certain groups find themselves in prison in a major way and are subject to violence and are not just being exploited, but they're also being expropriated. I still feel that there has been, however slow and imperfect, a move away from expropriation and in the direction of exploitation, meaning that the rich still get rich and the poor still get poor. But it happens with less violence than used to be built into the system. Which is therefore very foucaultian in that sense, because we are drawing from Marx, which is what you talked about, where, you know, he likened the feudal lord to the industrial capitalist, that sort of change where the exploitation stays the same. And then we go on to Foucault, who talks about the same thing in terms of how that violence has moved away from what he speaks about in his discipline and punish. Michel Foucault discusses how violence has evolved or punishment has evolved and the relationship that it had with the body has basically undergone change. So that's very much reflected in what you just said. Basically. I was a bit surprised this may be what you're referring to, but maybe not that the only use of the word atrocity that I found in that book was a description of the punishments that the king would visit upon the body of, you know, somebody. But the idea that the word would actually refer to an objection to the king. That the word atrocity could be used as a critique of the government. He doesn't seem to register it at least there. Maybe he does. He does somewhere else. I was actually thinking about another interview we had a few months ago with a genocide studies scholar who said, look at our books on genocide. When is the word violence ever used, count the number of times the word violence is used? And so that's what mark me when you just talked about, you know, how Foucault talks about atrocity or when he mentions those words or how he interprets it. It's interesting how we lose sight of so many of these very basic ideas and notions. Right. And I think this is the reason why many genocide studies scholars are very reluctant to stick to that area because I think it is connected in such an intricate way to many other subjects. So just looking at the subject and analyzing it from within those confines is very limiting, I think. And it doesn't help us. So let me say something that I hope will be more coherent than what I said about Foucault before, which certainly relevant to what you just said. As I understand his intentions, you know, he's fighting a progressive humanitarian narrative, according to which once upon a time there was all this direct violence on the body. And now we're against direct violence on the body. We're against whipping and, you know, public torture and public as executions and so on and so forth. And we think that we're better. And what he wants to show is that there are regimes of domination that work in gentler and even nonviolent ways. And he wants people to pay attention to the fact that they are, in fact, regimes of domination, even though you can't see violence. And maybe there isn't any violence. But it's still a regime of domination even without the violence. I think that's at least that's I read Foucault. That's interesting because I had a slightly different interpretation of it when I was reading it. I felt that instead of it being gentler, as you said, the type of punishment, on the contrary, I felt like what he was saying was that punishment had become less about that physical violence inflicted on the body, especially that first case study that he starts with, you know, which is very gruesome. He says instead and again, this is my interpretation, he says that violence has become more psychological. So it is as intimate—right— but it has become more psychological. So we are torturing you in psychological ways. And that's as that as any kind of violence. Yeah, No, that's entirely consonant with what I was trying to say. It's just not physical violence. That's right. So I also now want to go on to discussing the review of literature that you propose in your work, in discussing how Nietzche, Michel Foucault, and Steven Pinker approach violence, or rather the incidents of violence, the evolution of violence in our society. So the big question is, are we a less, more violent society than we were before? So you have these two, as I said, big domains of comparison where you take the premodern era and the modern era. What have been your observations based on the works of all these writers? I'm going to disappoint you. I don't really have anything very intelligent to say in answer to that question. I didn't actually try to engage with Steven Pinker's argument that violence has in fact declined in the modern era. I would be very interested, you know, to see somebody do that. I'm not sure where exactly I would come down if I had studied it, which I haven't done. So all I was trying to talk about is the way we think about violence, the way we represent violence. Not you know, whether the streets are safer. You know, the streets may be safer now for most people than they were, let's say, 300 years ago. I mean, I just don't know that. And I don't even know how I would go about trying to establish that. So, I mean, I dislike Steven Pinker's argument in various ways, which are relevant to what I want to say, but I can't really engage with the actual quantity of violence in the world. I mean, I did notice that, for example, colonialism doesn't appear in the index of his book. And that seems to me crazy because it may be that, you know, the streets of New York are safer, but there are a lot of other places in the world where they have not been safer. And they probably, you know, as a result of the global capitalist system that he's so happy about are still not, you know, very safe. I can't really enter into that. I just you know, I had a limited number of things I could try to do, and I didn't try to do it. My question. Or rather, this is more a critique of your work in the sense that I feel like and I feel this about many works which are based on analyzing literary or historical representations. I feel that there is one more factor that I learned as a creative writer and as a person who was exposed to the demands of the publishing industry and how it affects what we writers produce as a result. So one of my questions is when you are analyzing or you are researching literary and historical representations and which means you have to literally read whatever people have produced before, whatever they’ve written before. Isn't there also an element of curation that goes on, on their side, the side of the writers, because they have to tend to the demands of the publishing industry or to the writers or to their own authorial priorities or to the availability or non-availability of information around them. Doesn't that automatically influence what you write? Because here is an example, with the interest in the atrocities committed in residential schools in Canada, and the US, there has been a sudden surge in the literature produced in the last decade over that, over that subject. And so I'm just imagining if I wanted to write about something important, I would look at what's needed, what's on demand, and then base my interest, align my interest according to these demands. So having said that, when we are as researchers indulging in these inquiries, isn't there an element of that also involved? And so isn't our research limited by that factor when we analyzing the works of all of these people? your question makes me think how little I approach this question from the perspective of a creative writer. My perspective is absolutely not that of a creative writer and the dilemmas of the creative writer are, thank goodness I have my own dilemmas, but not those. Yeah, I mean, I think there are lots of considerations that go into this from an editorial point of view. And, you know, I'm just going to try to put myself in your position. But I think it's a more complicated position. Obviously, there's a question of what information is available. There's a question of how much personal risk you may run if you try to make information available that other people do not want made available. I mean, part of the story behind García Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, which I think is the single most influential atrocity description in modern literature is when he was 20 years old and he was studying in Bogota, the journalist who was trying to make the information about this massacre that had happened 20 years earlier. 20 years earlier available was assassinated. So that was a story about what happens to you even 20 years later when you try to tell, you know, what happened. So you've got to worry, you know, I mean, is there going to be a hand grenade thrown through the window of my family's house or whatever? Meanwhile, García Márquez writes this novel and has this incredible description which now people take as absolutely factual truth, which it was not. It was literary. And it was a very interesting piece of literary literature and a very good example, again, of good atrocity writing. I think. And it's incredibly influential to the point where writers from many different countries writing in various languages feel like they can establish a claim to moral and political seriousness by imitating the description that García Márquez gave of this banana worker plantation massacre that had happened in whatever it was, 1928. So that's kind of I don't know whether this is the opposite of what you're asking. I mean, I think there are editors who will say, okay, you're writing a serious novel. And I can tell because look how critical you're being of things that happened in your country, which we you know, in the metropolis, whatever, don't know about. We're going to be really interested in publishing this because you are so critical, etc., etc.. I don't know if this is the opposite of what you're talking about, but it's in some ways a positive incentive, We also have a set of questions from a friend and former guest of the show, Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba associate professor at the University of Winnipeg, and he writes in your discussion of prolepsis as a productive literary strategy for representing atrocity, how would you respond to critiques like Michael André Bernstein’s in Foregone Conclusions which argue that such foreshadowing imposes a sense of inevitability and misrepresents the historical contingency of violence? That's a great question. Well, since I was just talking about Gabriel García Márquez, I'm going to keep using him as an example. Probably the most famous prolepsis, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, is the first sentence, which is not really an atrocity description, but

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“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” truly one of the great sentences, and it creates a sense of tragic inevitability about Colonel Aureliano Buendía dying in front of a firing squad. Well, surprise surprise he doesn't. That is, he finds himself in front of a firing squad, but the firing squad at the last minute decides if we kill him, they will kill us. Let's join him and go make the revolution. So it's not a formula that insists on an inevitability. On the contrary, it can be a way of exposing the contingency which, as your questioner mentioned, is absolutely real. Your book foregrounds self-critical Western literature as central to the development of atrocity consciousness, given its cosmopolitan ambition, how do you respond to concerns that the work remains predominantly Eurocentric? Simple answer, the work does remain predominantly Eurocentric, and this is just limited, unfortunately, by my limited knowledge. So I have been really pleased to discover examples that I didn't know from outside Western literature. But it was a question of trying to write this in a few years, or taking 20 years and trying to educate myself and maybe not even succeeding. But there's this wonderful Japanese novel called Soldiers Alive. It's not clear that that's the possible translation, but which is an account of atrocities committed by the Japanese forces, which were invading China in the 1930s. And there's no obvious Western influence on this. I can't say that there was none, but it does seem in some ways within Japanese traditions, to the extent that I know anything at all about them, there's very deep exploration of the subjectivity of the soldiers and their sense of, for example not really wanting to kill Chinese civilians or captured prisoners of war, but feeling that they have to make this moral sacrifice for the emperor you know, I don't want to do it. It upsets me deeply to do it. But the emperor is asking this of me. So it's a sacrifice that I will make for the emperor. And it's amazing. And of course, he was arrested for writing this because and the charges against him never said that. What he what he said was untrue. They merely said, you know, he's bringing dishonor to the Japanese army. One pitiful little example, unfortunately, of non-Western materials. I'm sure there are many others out there. But unfortunately, the book is limited by my own very limited knowledge. In the spring of 2024, you invited students from your course on atrocity relating to the book that we are referring to, to visit a Gaza solidarity encampment, an act that clearly resonated with the themes of your work. This culminated in charges brought against you by two students and considering this, along with the recent release of Mahmoud Khalil on bail, how do you understand the significance of these events within the moral and pedagogical framework you've developed in your work? What does it mean to make atrocity visible in real time, especially when doing so invites institutional scrutiny or personal risks? And if you can update about those risks and scrutiny that you have faced yourself. Thank you for the question. So let me go back pretty far and say in January of 2024, when I distributed the syllabus for this course on atrocity The last week, which is April 22nd and 24th, was devoted to Gaza. It was a course on atrocity. There was clearly a lot to say about atrocities in Gaza already in January of 2024. Obviously, this round of violence in Gaza had started on October 7th, 2023. There had been many rounds of atrocity in Gaza before that. So it's not as if, you know, there was no precedent for it. In any case, I knew that I wanted to talk about what had happened on October 7th and since October 7th. And I knew that in January. And then when April 22nd came, lo and behold, there was an encampment a few steps from my classroom. And the students were, of course, protesting atrocity in Gaza. So I took this as, talk about contingency, a real contingency. I could not have predicted this, but it was a historical opportunity for me to expose students who had been reading texts, a lot of them from the ancient world, from all over the place, to very strong feelings of their fellow students, which were being expressed in the form of an encampment, literally steps away. So I said to the class, Look, I think this is a very important opportunity for us to think about our subject, which happens to be Gaza and atrocity anyway to think about it in the midst of students who are protesting it. But I understand that not everybody may be comfortable doing this. So if there's anybody who's not comfortable, please don't come. There will be no consequences if you're not coming. But anybody who is comfortable, let's go. So we had maybe a half an hour's worth of conversation in the encampment in the middle. I just discovered a picture of myself, a photo taken which I didn't know about in the encampment on Twitter today, anyway. And then charges were brought against me by two students who are anonymous, so as to make retaliation impossible, which is quite right. And the charge was that I had interfered with their equality of educational opportunity. Holding the class that day in the encampment. Now, that seems to me kind of absurd to bring charges against somebody for one missed class. It makes me wonder about the judgment of the institution which employs me, that they would actually, you know, proceed to act on charges like this. People miss class all the time. I mean, I don't know, for sure the names of the students who did this, but I suspect that they're among the other students who didn't always show up. So they were interfering with their own equality opportunity to get an education anyway. So I had to lawyer up and I had a hearing and then I didn't hear back the results of the hearing and after some months had gone by, I wrote an email to the the Office of Institutional Equity, which had been created in order to deal with the Gaza situation, to say, what's what's going on? Can you tell me what you've decided? And they said, actually, there are new charges against you. So we're going to have another hearing. So we had another hearing. And I'd make a long story short, I was eventually informed that I was guilty of violating the equality of opportunity for an education of the students who had brought the charges against me. And because the institution had actually managed to force into retirement one of the strongest supporters of the student protesters, a woman called Katherine Franke, who teaches or taught at the law school. And as lawyer, really knows how to defend herself very well. It did occur to me that they might really try to get rid of me. I didn't think it was very likely. I didn't lose sleep over it, to be honest. And as it turned out, they just let me off with a slap on the wrist. They condemned me to having a conversation with the chair of my department and my dean. A brief conversation, and then an hour and a half's of training with a lawyer appointed by Columbia University who wanted to explain the law to me. And she explained the law to me a bit, and I explained the law to her a bit. If she's going to train me, I thought, well, maybe I'll do a little training also I had asked during that hearing whether they recognized the category of the frivolous charge, which is to say a charge which, even if true, would not be worth acting on. And they did not recognize the category of the frivolous charge anyway. They are understanding Title six of the 1964 Civil Rights Act such that if you are critical of the Israeli military and actions committed by the Israeli military because because there is universal conscription in Israel on pretty much everybody, not everybody, actually, but most people have to serve in the military. You are being critical of the entire nation. And to be critical of the entire nation is the equivalent of being a racist. That seems me a grotesque misinterpretation of Title six of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and I can’t that it will eventually stand up in court if it's challenged in a Supreme Court, not put together by the present administration, but that is the way the law is being interpreted by the present administration, and that is the way the law is being interpreted by Columbia University. But I personally have not suffered by being found guilty. If they had tried to do something more serious to me, it would have made me feel really important. I would have made a big to do about it, you know, raised a ruckus. As it is, my story kind of fades away. It's very kind of you to think of it. And I'm very happy to mention it here in public, but it's obviously not drawing as much attention as it would have if they had, for example, tried to fire me. This was not to forgive, but to understand with our guest, Bruce Robbins. To our listeners, don't forget to, like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions.