pain
The Military Service Acts of 1916–18, passed under the more general Defense of the Realm Act (1914), implemented conscription throughout England, Scotland, and Wales. Opposition to conscription led to the imprisonment and abuse of thousands of conscientious objectors, who were in an ambiguous legal position, subject to punishment from both military and civil law, but protected by neither.
[Content note: brief discussion and accompanying imagery of racialized propaganda.]
The bodily injury caused by nuclear warfare constitutes a massively collective form of modern suffering. However, for many in the West, it also represents a markedly “foreign” pain, inflicted on distant bodies in other lands. The only instances (thus far) of nuclear weapons being deliberately utilized in combat are the US deployment of the “Little Boy” A-bomb in Hiroshima and the “Fat Man” in Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945 respectively. The 100,000 immediate deaths and ensuing agonies of radiation poisoning were borne primarily by Japanese soldiers and civilians and Korean slave laborers––who were, for many midcentury British and American citizens, unimaginably “foreign” bodies, caricatured and dehumanized in Allied war propaganda throughout the 1940s (fig. 1).
Reading Loy in the twenty-first century, after the material turn in the humanities, sheds new light on her writing as particularly attuned to how the material and the incorporeal are embedded in each other. Perhaps today the question is no longer whether Loy’s poetics epitomizes the dance of the intellect or the dance of the body, but how it renegotiates intricate entanglements of mind and matter, spirit and flesh, or nature and culture.
Contemporary archival (The National Memorial for Peace and Justice), medical (Janice Sabin, “How we fail black patients in pain”), and political (BLM) practices continue to depend on the legibility of Black pain, where pain’s visibility is assumed to make it politically transformative. Rather than an obviously valuable experience, however, Black pain requires political validation by an American whiteness all too often unable or unwilling to recognize or respond to that pain. Miranda Fricker’s “testimonial injustice” describes this ethical failing, which “occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker's word,” producing an “epistemic dysfunction in the exchange.”
[Content note: this article contains graphic images of lynching.]
For a work that is pivotal to scholarship on Jim Crow racial violence, the phrase “Jim Crow” is conspicuously absent in Ida B. Wells’s The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. Instead, she calls the epoch “nineteenth-century civilization,” a deceptively toothless choice of words until one begins to understand its full import.
On June 30, 1945, the Jersey Evening Post on the Channel Island of Jersey ran a story boldly titled “Sentenced to Death by Island Nazis: The Story of Two Gallant Frenchwomen.” It was an interview with French Surrealist photographers, writers, sculptors, political activists, Resistance fighters, and life partners Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob) and Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe), just over a month after their release from Gloucester Street Prison in St. Helier, where they had been serving several sentences (including an imminent death sentence) for their Resistance activities on the island in the early 1940s
Literary modernism has a close relationship with pain, though not an untroubled one. To make a very general comparison, pain is to literary criticism today what illness was to literature for Virginia Woolf, and likewise betrays an under-interrogated dualism. “Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind,” Woolf writes, and so “this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism.”