Humanity's Ruins: Ethics, Feminism, and Genocidal Humanitarianism

by Danielle Bouchard

Overview

In Humanity’s Ruins, Danielle Bouchard examines how genocidal aspirations animate contemporary Western humanitarian projects and discourses. Drawing on anticolonial and antiracist feminist critique, Bouchard argues that humanitarianism has functioned in the Cold War and post-Cold War eras to perpetuate longer-lived, fundamentally racist conceptualizations of humanity’s defining characteristics. She examines the aesthetics of humanitarian texts, which are filled with figures of the wounded, dead, and disappeared—the atomic bomb victim whose only remainder is a shadow imprinted on concrete, the grievously injured Muslim woman, the vanished members of Amazonian “uncontacted” tribes, the dying African—to elucidate how the appearance of these figures reaffirms a genocidal view of humanity that aligns with the continuation of Western imperial warfare. Humanitarian discourses conceive of humanity as a community which, by definition, is under existential threat from some humans who are explicitly or implicitly understood as needing to be eliminated. Bouchard invokes “humanity’s ruins” to expose the genocidal fantasy of a human world in which such threat has been eliminated in the interest of supposedly ensuring humanity’s survival.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478032069
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	08/15/2025
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Danielle Bouchard is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and author of A Community of Disagreement: Feminism in the University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction. Cynicism, Death, and Humanitarianism: The Aesthetic of Ruination  1
1. Bomb Ethics: Vulnerable Humanity in the Anthropocene  41
2. Postcolonial Histories of the Bomb: Differential Temporalities of Destruction in Kidlat Tahimik’s Mababangong Baungugot and Soleymane Cissé’s Yeelen  77
3. Converting Absences into Signs: The War on Terror and the Humanitarian Necessity of Violence  111
4. Documentation as Eradication: The Amazon’s "Uncontacted Tribes" and the Securitizing of Humanity  149
5. A Differential Humanity: Beyond the New Feminist Ethics of Vulnerability  183
Coda. Zero Logics, Atomic Semiotics; or, an Aesthetics of Debris  218
Notes  227
Bibliography  263
Index  283

Editorial Reviews

Humanity’s Ruins is a riveting portrait of humanitarianism’s genocidal logics not just in its collaborations with state-sanctioned violence—most obviously as warfare but also as rehabilitation, ethnography, and preservation—but also in its ethical claims about vulnerability, crisis, and ‘humanity as a whole.’ Reading this book is a revelation.”—Mimi Thi Nguyen, author of, The Promise of Beauty

“Arguing that visions of human extinction and vulnerability are central to the expansion of humanitarian justifications for racial and colonial violence, Danielle Bouchard offers a new and insightful contribution to (post)colonial studies, media studies, and feminist theory. By attending to invocations of the human across media, literature, journalism, philosophy, and other genres, Bouchard unravels the violent logics of humanitarianism in public culture.”—Neel Ahuja, author of, Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century

From the Publisher

Humanity’s Ruins is a riveting portrait of humanitarianism’s genocidal logics not just in its collaborations with state-sanctioned violence—most obviously as warfare but also as rehabilitation, ethnography, and preservation—but also in its ethical claims about vulnerability, crisis, and ‘humanity as a whole.’ Reading this book is a revelation.

The Promise of Beauty - Mimi Thi Nguyen

Arguing that visions of human extinction and vulnerability are central to the expansion of humanitarian justifications for racial and colonial violence, Danielle Bouchard offers a new and insightful contribution to (post)colonial studies, media studies, and feminist theory. By attending to invocations of the human across media, literature, journalism, philosophy, and other genres, Bouchard unravels the violent logics of humanitarianism in public culture.

Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century - Neel Ahuja