[lbo-talk] Balkan Mediations (was lynching)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>I had my students read Dracula alongside Douglas's Purity and Danger 
>for my Evil course... pointing out that the entire ad for the 
>terrorist narrative since Sept. 2001 is essentially a repeat of the 
>basic plot of Stoker's Dracula... which elegantly transforms and 
>simplifies morally complex questions and problems into basic purity 
>regulations: clean and unclean, impurity = danger (see Douglas's 
>chapter on internal lines for details). A solitary creature from the 
>east travels west and brings a plague of strange events... the 
>powers of the west align technology, reason, faith, science, and 
>capital against the monster and drive it back east...
>
>ken

Cf. Vesna Goldsworthy, _Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the 
Imagination_ (1998), <http://www.yale.edu/yup/books/073127.htm>; & 
Maria Todorova, _Imagining the Balkans_ (1997), 
<http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/reviewy3.htm>.

Also check out _Balkan Mediations_: 
<http://www.pomgrenade.org/pages/opening.html>.
-- 
Yoshie

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