Re-Visioning Terrorism. A Humanistic Perspective - Elena Coda;Ben Lawton

This revised and expanded edition of Re-Visioning Terrorism: A Humanistic Perspective builds on the original volume's interdisciplinary exploration of terrorism by incorporating new essays, broader global perspectives, and updated critical approaches that reflect the evolving nature of political violence and its representations. The collection offers a plurality of visions on terrorism, expanding its meaning across time, space, and cultural contexts while raising new questions that explore its multifaceted manifestations.

The different ideological, philosophical, and cultural perspectives emerging from the essays, together with the variety of humanistic disciplines represented, provide a complex and at times contradictory picture that emphasizes the impossibility of a single, univocal conception of terrorism or response to it, whether in practical, political, or intellectual terms.

The editors borrow the cinematic concept of the "rack focus response" to develop an innovative and flexible interpretative framework. In cinema, rack focus refers to the shifting of visual focus from one image to another within the same frame: although the focal distance changes, reality itself does not. Both elements coexist, but only one can be clearly perceived at a given moment. Extending this concept to emotional and intellectual perception, the editors argue that understanding terrorism requires shifting focus away from dominant and familiar narratives toward perspectives that may appear distant, unclear, or unfamiliar. This "rack focus response" encourages readers to engage with terrorism in a more nuanced, nondogmatic, and critically flexible manner.

The essays featured in this volume range from philosophical interpretations of terrorism and historical analyses of terror across different eras to cinematic, artistic, literary, and media representations of political violence that move beyond an exclusive focus on 9/11. Together, they present terrorism as a global, historical, and cultural phenomenon examined through a wide range of interdisciplinary methodologies and perspectives.