This chapter focuses on Charles Reznikoff’s 1934 version of his long poem Testimony, which consists almost entirely of collaged-together excerpts from nineteenth-century trial transcripts. The chapter proposes that Testimony utilizes these materials to suggest a link between past and present violence and social fragmentation, rejecting narratives of progress associated with the modern American nation and tacitly embracing the “debunking” imperative animating the work of interwar historians such as Caroline Ware. Reznikoff’s text is organized around the spectacle of the body in pain as a galvanizing scene within the modern public sphere, where public affect and social belonging were generated through collective acts of witnessing (and often perpetrating) violence and disaster. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the final subsection of Testimony, titled “Depression,” draws its subject matter from the aftermath of the “Depression” of 1873, as the text proposes this earlier period as a parallel to the crisis of the 1930s. In recalling this earlier period, the chapter claims further, Testimony proposes a negative vision of economic and technological modernity by revealing its human collateral, as well as the cyclical nature of modern social and economic crisis.

This chapter positions literature as a space in which polarized discourses on refugees can exist as conarratives, both acknowledging the grand scenes/sites of tragedy that produce the refugee and the refugees’ internal contextual dimensions. Utilizing Critical Refugee Studies frameworks and refugitude as conceived by Khatharya Um, this chapter reads Roxane Gay’s Ayiti as a text that balances conarratives of abjection and agency. The chapter argues that Gay’s strategic deployment of literary devices in Ayiti demonstrate how fiction can attend to both the exteriority of spectacle and the interiority of experience, thus constructing a more complete and robust conarrative framework through which the refugee can be portrayed with dignity.

This chapter explores the spectacles of gladiators, bare-knuckle boxing, and the early theater. Wild, violent bodies were banned in Rome and America: the gladiator excluded from civic participation and protections; boxing matches banned through much of the nineteenth century. Both bodies were marked by wounds, but even more by a brashness and ruggedness that was contrary to standards of elite decorum. These bodies were the object of elite condemnation as uncivilized, uneducated, and unrefined. And these bodies were the object of the gaze, put on display to perform to the expectations of the audience. The problem is that boundaries of exclusion prove to be permeable. And these boundaries prove to be permeable because the lawless, uncivilized bodies replay the role of violence in constituting a founding identity. The conquest of wild, lawless nature in the name of civilization required a type of body, one that could act with similar violent wildness. To the chagrin of certain elites, the taboo body comes to be valorized, grafted and grafting itself onto the rugged origins embedded in the founding ideal.

The turn of the century saw the emergence of a host of different entertainment media through which visual culture was industrialized, commodified, and otherwise modernized. New visual technologies, from photography, moving panoramas, stereoscopes, and cinema, to new image-delivery systems in advertisement and the illustrated press crystalized new forms of social organization and transformed visual perception. Following the modern crónicas of modernista writer Rubén Darío, the article explores the ways in which literary writing faced the challenge of the new mass culture and developed new languages and forms to reach a growing readership in the Latin American modernizing cities. Bridging both sides of the Atlantic and crossing over from the aesthete poet to the popular chronicler, Darío’s writing registers not just the intertwinement of high and mass culture, but above all the forms of spectatorship that delineated “the era of the mechanical reproducibility.”

Molière’s comedy ballets were devised to glorify Louis XIV and were often performed in the grounds of royal palaces, where the decors created spectacle by means of effects involving doubling and continuity with the surrounding area. This is true of La Princesse d’Élide and George Dandin, both performed in the Petit Parc at Versailles; Les Amants magnifiques, given at Saint-Germain-en-Laye; and Psyché, which was staged in the Salle des Machines in the Tuileries. This courtier-like celebration of the prince’s domain and his fairy-tale magic via Vigarani’s stagings was haunted by the memory of the sumptuous festivity Fouquet had offered the King in his gardens at Vaux shortly before his fall from favour, which had itself been inspired by Apolidon’s enchanted castle in Renaissance texts. It suggested that the domain of the powerful could only be imagined and created by means of the performance of fantasies that stimulated adhesion.

The hagiographic myth of Molière as a moralist philosopher and the fable of studies under Gassendi are cognitive obstacles to a philosophical clarification. Crystallised into scholarly core beliefs, such legends have caused the comedies to be interpreted unquestioningly as philosophical statements, while overlooking nondramatic texts that could be considered philosophical writings, including the preface to Tartuffe with its definition of philosophy. Molière composes comedies according to a purely theatrical logic, not to advertise ideologies through philosophising characters and philosophemes. Hence the doctrinal inconsistency of most philosophising characters, including the raisonneurs – regarded as flag-bearers of his supposed philosophy of moderation. Often taken literally, philosophemes require dramaturgical analysis to separate those dramatically motivated from those lacking dramaturgic purpose. Rather than a covert anti-Christian philosophy, the medical satire belongs to a robust comical epistemology correlating antiquated medicine and pseudoscience. Indeed, Molière’s last words on stage are to ridicule pseudoscience, which benefits the scientific revolution. Moreover, crucial experiments in the last comedies reflect the influence on his dramaturgy of the new, fashionable experimental culture promoted by Cartesians. Rejecting an Aristotelian tradition of theatre philosophically text centred, Molière invented total spectacle and accomplished a theatrical revolution concomitant with the paradigm shifts triggered by the Copernican revolution.

Chapter 2 demonstrates how the 2001 Patriot Act is necropolitical. As legislation, the Patriot Act takes on the authorizing, legitimizing resonances of the state. Debated and passed through Congress and the Senate, the Act emerges from processes of domestic legislation to enact this law’s global reach, in part through UN Security Council Resolutions. Additionally, the opening lines of the Patriot Act legislate necropolitical law’s planetary jurisdiction: the Act’s purpose is “[t]o deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world.” Necropolitical law’s dynamics of deception are immediately apparent in the naming of the Patriot Act, a naming that imports spectacle, the closures of meanings for “patriot” in war contexts, as well as the compound meanings of patriot as a peculiarly American keyword. The Patriot Act shows how legal illegibility is part of necropolitical law’s deception, operating through law as publicity to undo law as public thing. In 2022, we find ourselves in legal landscapes still conditioned by the Act. Chapter 2 traces the Patriot Act’s role in normalizing and consolidating necropolitical law’s planetary jurisdiction for the discounting of life in the unending long War on Terror.

This chapter establishes the core concept of ‘Romantic surgery’ by exploring the distinctive emotional, intellectual, and performative dimensions of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British surgery. It opens by considering how, building on the legacy of John Hunter, Romantic surgeons constructed their practice as ‘scientific’, grounded in the study of anatomy and physiology. This allegedly more scientific approach to surgery encouraged greater operative restraint, but so too did the emotional regime of Romantic sensibility, which valorised the feelings of the patient and stressed the need to temper personal ambition with emotional sensitivity. This had profound implications for the performance of surgery, as surgeons were encouraged to eschew operative bravura in favour of a more considered deportment. As this chapter demonstrates, such emotional considerations also extended to the spectacle of surgery, as surgeons were expected to manage not only their patients and themselves, but also their audience. The performative persona of the Romantic surgeon was not without ambiguities, however, and this chapter therefore concludes with a study of perhaps the era’s most contested figure, Robert Liston.

Chapter 5, on the showroom at the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas (1958–2006), investigates the international production of theatrical revue for a tourist audience. It exemplifies the modernist design of twentieth-century theatre architecture, with an aesthetic of curved planes and smooth surfaces designed to facilitate the flow of people through performance and level the encounter between artists and spectators. We focus on the initial 1958–9 design, which accommodated the latest stage technologies, including a swimming pool, an ice rink, a waterfall, and a firework show. The Stardust became the venue for the Lido de Paris, the long-running revue, which played in various editions until 1991. Since the showroom was demolished within the Stardust in 2007, our reconstruction illustrates how theatre venues were shaped by the capitalist development of international tourism. Virtual praxis in the model embodies insight into the design of the Stardust showroom as a tourist attraction and the choreography that made a gendered spectacle of international relations.

This chapter is about processes of display. Examining the history of ‘freakshows’ I argue that those labelled ‘freaks’ not only constituted part of the population of disabled people, but helped to contribute to the conceptualisation of that category in the public sphere. I argue that the popularity of the freakshow and the prevalence of impairment as a key part of it, attests to the significance of disability as a contemporary social concern. Relatedly, I argue that freakshows contributed to how disability came to be objectified as something ‘other’ and something beyond, if not antithetical to, the self. The chapter is structured around the lives of key performers on the nineteenth-century freakshow circuit: Joseph Merrick (the ‘Elephant Man’); Eng and Chung Bunker (the ‘original Siamese Twins’); Tom Wiggins (‘Blind Tom’); Krao (the ‘Missing Link’); and Maximo and Bartola (‘The Aztec Lilliputians’). It will be noted that all of these performers, except for my first example, Joseph Merrick, were not only disabled or disfigured but were also people of colour and often from colonial sites. This fact, which arises from the sources, tells us something important about the relationship between disability and race in the construction of bodily anomaly.

This chapter argues that previous discussions of Harlem Renaissance literature have overlooked the role of religion in shaping ideas of Black modernity. Examining the literature and art of the 1920s, Farebrother posits that religion plays a key role in shaping Black modernity, serving as the means through which Rudolph Fisher can explore anxieties about generational conflict, gender, sexuality, tradition, consumerism, and the Great Migration. Not only are there a large number of Black modernist texts that include religious scenes, but also these texts reveal the relationship between religion and entertainment, church and cabaret. Spatially, scenes of the cabaret and the church are depicted in similar ways, and the role of the spectator is significant in both church and cabaret scenes – someone who can observe the scenes and remark upon unusual elements.

This chapter examines the curious new landscapes of affluence which were installed in Britain’s towns and cities in the post-war decades. It shows how new shopping spaces were consciously engineered by designers as entertaining spectacles and served as sites in which a new public culture of affluence and acquisition was propagated. I relate this to the powerful political and cultural critiques of new retail environments which have proliferated in literatures on the ‘postmodern’ consumer city. I also stress that, in the 1960s, many public planners felt themselves to be engaged in the production of a new and energising type of civic space in the redeveloped shopping landscape and saw this endeavour in light of contemporary ideas about entitlements to mass leisure. For the more high-minded public planners new retail developments were a means of revitalising public space and public culture through uniting the civic with the commercial realms, and thus reflected the wider mingling of the categories of citizen and consumer, of welfare statehood with affluence. In practice this attempt to harness commercial retail development with an invigorated urban public sphere was inherently unstable and could not be sustained over the longer term.

This chapter provides an account of why and how the dominant “atrocity aesthetic” model identified in the previous chapter has persisted, despite remaining itself, grounded in unstated and untested assumptions concerning the fundamental nature of the causal dynamics of mass harm causation. It does so by examining the substance, structure, and application of ICL in light of insights from social constructivist norm development theories, and research on the role aesthetic considerations play in individual and social meaning-making processes. Through this analysis, this chapter identifies a variety of factors within the substance and practice of ICL that encourage actors to rely heavily on aesthetic perception when identifying potential international crimes and assessing their relative gravity. These factors include: the complexity of many atrocity situations; the continued presences of considerable zones of ambiguity within ICL; the extreme selectivity of ICL investigations and prosecutions; and the spectacular visibility and self-evident nature of many historical, recent and ongoing situations involving the commission of genocide, crimes against humanity, and/or war crimes.

This chapter introduces the main themes explored in this book, provides an overview of the methodological framework utilized and summarizes the main claims advanced.

This chapter assesses the role aesthetics play in the social construction of dominant shared understandings of the so-called core crimes of ICL: genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. It demonstrates how, since the inception of ICL, widely shared understandings of these crimes have remained grounded in an aesthetics of horrific spectacle, which I refer to as the “atrocity aesthetic.” That is, shared understandings of both atrocity and international crime are associated with spectacular acts of horrific violence and abuse, reflecting deeply held, if rarely articulated, assumptions concerning how genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes will manifest themselves and the means through which they may be committed.