Words Hurt

Investigates how discourse spills from language to action, generating, obfuscating, and perpetuating violence while also offering the words, principles, and practices that may interrupt it.

We are continually catching up with and being caught by words, especially words that hurt. These collected essays probe the interaction of violence and words across time, place, and circumstance. Often cited as the core source of violence, religion’s capacity for coordinating ideas, symbols, and groups has made it a potent force in the production and deflection of violence. Yet the production of the category “religion” has also contributed to violence; employed to surveille and subjugate targeted populations, “religion” enabled and conveyed colonial domination on a global scale. The claim that religion causes violence has therefore missed a fundamental insight: as a word, “religion” also acts in and on the world. Contributors thus ask: How does persecution become weaponized in and through language? Whose stories are told and who is allowed to speak them? And how do language, symbols, art, activism, and performance find ways to speak back, push back, and offer critique? Theorizing, historicizing, and addressing the violence of words and words of violence, “religion” emerges as critical theory and embodies the very practice of critique.