Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

by Sarah Schulman Narrated by Sarah Schulman

Overview

From intimate relationships to global politics, Sarah Schulman observes a continuum: that inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability. Illuminating the difference between Conflict and Abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating. This deep, brave, and bold work reveals how punishment replaces personal and collective self-criticism, and shows why difference is so often used to justify cruelty and shunning. Rooting the problem of escalation in negative group relationships, Schulman illuminates the ways cliques, communities, families, and religious, racial, and national groups bond through the refusal to change their self-concept. She illustrates how Supremacy behavior and Traumatized behavior resemble each other, through a shared inability to tolerate difference.



This important and sure to be controversial book illuminates such contemporary and historical issues of personal, racial, and geo-political difference as tools of escalation towards injustice, exclusion, and punishment, whether the objects of dehumanization are other individuals in our families or communities, people with HIV, African Americans, or Palestinians.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 03/27/2017
In this incisive, refreshing work, Schulman (The Gentrification of the Mind), a novelist, documentarian, and social critic, documents how those with power and privilege increasingly tend to conflate any challenge to their authority or ways of thinking with being attacked. Exploring the overlap between the political and personal, Schulman poses thoughtful examples of how conflict and disagreement—especially when marginalized voices try to enter the commons—are met with false accusations of abuse and claims of victimization by those who may feel offended but are not harmed. Unafraid to tackle challenging subjects such as trigger warnings and safe spaces, Schulman also ruminates on what she sees as society’s collective failure to prioritize the teaching of basic problem-solving and relationship skills, resulting in a culture of knee-jerk escalation that, when expressed through physical or emotional force (as in interpersonal abuse and military conflicts) obscures the structural roots of interpersonal and societal breakdown. Like classic works of the early women’s and gay liberation movements, this thought-provoking title expertly analyzes power dynamics inherent to interactions as small-scale as spousal violence and as large-scale as the increasing criminalization of HIV-positive Canadians and the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza. A concluding call to address personal and social conflicts without state intervention via police and courts caps off a work that’s likely to inspire much discussion. (Oct.)

From the Publisher

"With awesome brilliance and insight, Sarah Schulman offers readers new strategies to intervene on all relations of domination both personal and political. The core of this book provides ways to think and move beyond blaming and/or assuming victimhood — so that each of us may come to understand the role we assume in creating and sustaining conflicts in all our relations. Sharing myriad ways, critical vigilance can help us all understand that conflict need not be viewed as abuse, that essential distinctions may be made between the hurt we experience in conflict and the violence of abuse, Schulman offers a vision of mutual recognition and accountability that liberates." —bell hooks

"It's impossible to be invested in the world and not be invested in this groundbreaking and challenging book. From a position of artist and social critic, Sarah Schulman gives us a detailed and considered reading of some of our most overly determined and venomous conflicts. Conflict Is Not Abuse is a book to interrogate, ponder, and discuss." —Claudia Rankine

"Schulman's book could not have come at a better time ... Conflict is a balm against comforting explanations for violence and abuse, ones we know aren't true, just easy." —Village Voice

"Conflict's publication could not be timelier ... A sharply observant and relevant text that is already getting its wish for action granted." —Lambda Literary

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171244224
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	07/10/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

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