The Affect of Intimate Violence

Preity R. Kumar's An Ordinary Landscape of Violence opens with a striking account of violence into which the author's visit to Guyana to conduct field research is interpolated. Unveiling and reflecting upon the heinous circumstances surrounding the disappearance of a young Indo-Guyanese woman, Babita, Kumar situates the text within the political and social landscape of Guyana. Physical and conceptual markers like “the bush” that Babita is rumored to have disappeared into serve as early signals of the kinds of meaning-making that occurs in and through geospatial, ecological, and metaphorical sites. The opening narrative is especially effective as the author's own sense and sensibilities (their experiences of ambivalence, discomfort, and unease while in Guyana) punctuate their telling of the story. As Kumar asserts, affect studies are necessary to make sense of violence in this context. To this end, violence emerges in An Ordinary Landscape of Violence as an affect. Violence as an affect captures its ability to inform and alter a landscape as well as the people who inhabit its terrain.Kumar's theory of violence as an affect builds on Kerry Whigman's work on resonant violence, which tracks how large-scale violence continues to resonate within individuals and communities even after the initial violent event (11), yet notably departs from this previous work in its specific consideration of women-loving women's (WLW) individual and collective embodiment of violence. As Kumar notes, “the colonial history of Guyana created a landscape where an enforced social death, or the devaluation of life, was based on racialized, sexualized, spatialized, and state-sanctioned violence” (11). She continues, stating that the book's objective is not to simply describe the violence in WLW's lives but to describe “what happens to . . . WLW when violence is folded into their lives” (11). It is this deep reckoning with the material conditions of women's lives that orients the text and serves as its urgent intervention.In chapter 1, Kumar examines histories of fear, distrust, and suspicion between Guyana's Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese communities. The resultant violence between these ethnic communities, as Kumar argues, “is embodied and becomes the stuff of intimate lives in Guyana” (33). Notably, Kumar explores these affective dispositions (fear, distrust, suspicion) as inheritances from Guyana's colonial past (the British “divide-and-rule” tactics that exacerbated racial tensions between these communities). Kumar's interest in the chapter is how imprints of coloniality remain visible in Guyana through politics, environmental catastrophe, economic stagnation, and law. The chapter is a rich exploration of how long-held battles between Afro- and Indo-Guyanese men over claims to “masculinity,” as well as efforts to mitigate the effects of political and social downturns on their masculinity, materialize as gender and sexuality-based violence in the lives of women in general and WLW in particular.Chapters 2 and 3 track how religious and domestic institutions, respectively, impact the lives of women in Guyana. In chapter 2, Kumar considers how religion, as an “affective economy,” impacts individual beliefs, emotions, and rituals as well as public and social landscapes (57). Through the framework of affective economy, the chapter seeks to displace the primacy of the individual in discussions about the locus and impact of religious principles, instead emphasizing how religion circulates, “producing a wide range of affectual experiences and encounters that simultaneously belongs to anyone, communal and public” (59). In the book's third chapter, Kumar examines how family (heterosexual partnership, marriage, childbearing) and the stigma surrounding nonnormative embodiments of domesticity affect the lives and attitudes of women in Guyana. In both chapters, Kumar illuminates how shame — the affect associated with the internalized stigma of nonconformity to religious expectations and nonheteronormativity alike — governs the behavior of women in Guyana. As Kumar contends in chapter 3, “Family status and respectability discourses produce a type of emotional violence that is never seen or spoken of” (80). Interviews conducted with three working-class women living in rural Berbice provide texture to the nature of this emotional violence. Chapters 2 and 3 extend previous sections’ considerations of the violence that takes place in physical and geographical locations to account for the social and conceptual sites that regulate the lives of women in Guyana.Beginning with the paradigm of “jealousy-murder-suicide” as a trope that remains the dominant framework in discussions of intimate partner violence in Guyana (93), chapter 4 argues for a more expansive account of how jealousy unfolds in the lives of WLW. Specifically, it explores how jealousy circulates in Guyana as an essential part of love and precipitates behaviors and symptoms such as stalking, gossiping, and policing women's behaviors and whereabouts (94). The chapter offers important insights into not only the affective dimensions of intimate partner violence but also its colonial origins. One of the most compelling elements of the chapter is its interrogation of how unique aspects of the public sphere trigger violence. Kumar notes that during interviews, most women pointed out shops, bars, clubs, hotels, and so on as locations where instances of violence occurred (97). In her discussion of the relationship between rum shops (small rooms built on the ground levels of homes in Guyana, owned and operated predominantly by working-class women and catering toward men) and violence against women, Kumar writes, “Rum shops convey a particular aesthetic of lewd, drunken, and brawling behaviors, often resulting in fights by night's end. Consumed like rum, women's bodies and sexualities are no exception” (97). Throughout the chapter Kumar reckons with violence as both a cultural and environmental phenomenon with deleterious effects on WLW in Guyana.In the fifth and final chapter, Kumar explores the prevalence of suicide in Guyana. As it is consistently named a country among the highest in suicide rates, Kumar charts the “affective grip” (127) that suicide has on the landscape and “intangible embodiments” in Guyana (126). In the chapter, Kumar puts forth a concept of “still life” to convey the concurrence of stillness (pause, resignation) and ongoing elements of aliveness that permeate both the rhetoric and feelings of suicidality in the lives of WLW in Guyana. The chapter poignantly situates suicide and nonsuidical self-harm among WLW within broader narratives of heterosexism and homophobia in Guyana by depicting these acts of violence as modes of managing and shielding against feelings of shame and guilt. All in all, An Ordinary Landscape of Violence is an important treatise on the ubiquity and ordinariness of violence in the lives of women in Guyana. In this book, Kumar reads this violence as an extension and inheritance of British colonial rule in Guyana, as diffused across space and communities, and as enfolded into the lives of those who traverse Guyana's spatial and immaterial geographies. By centering women-loving women, An Ordinary Landscape of Violence offers a poignant and innovative approach to studies of Guyana. This book is a valuable contribution to the field of Caribbean studies and will be beneficially read by scholars of Caribbean and Latin American studies as well as those of queer global studies, queer ethnography, and Caribbean sexualities.