Introduction to the Special Section on Lee Ann Fujii’s Show Time

Lee Ann Fujii was a remarkable scholar of political violence. Her sudden death in 2018 stunned not only her friends and family, but also the community of scholars whom she had influenced, inspired, and supported. It would be hard to overemphasize the deep sense of loss that her passing engendered. This symposium is a tribute to her and to her posthumous book, Show Time: The Logic and Power of Violent Display, which was published in 2021 by Cornell University Press.

Professor Fujii had been working on Show Time for several years before her death. After her passing, colleagues with whom she had shared a working draft retrieved the manuscript, and, with the consent of her family, Martha Finnemore—a renowned scholar of International Relations and Fujii’s former dissertation director (and friend)—volunteered to revise the article for publication. She worked with Roger Haydon, a senior editor at Cornell University Press who, in more than two decades of publishing, had produced some of the best monographs on political violence, including Fujii’s first book on the genocide in Rwanda. Elisabeth Wood, a major contemporary scholar of political violence, agreed to write an epilogue in lieu of Fujii’s unfinished conclusion. This engagement from Finnemore, Haydon, and Wood demonstrates Fujii’s significance to the field.

Show Time is excellent. The book is polished and highly readable, a testament to editorial work and to Fujii’s skills. The scholarship is strikingly original and ambitious. The work makes multiple contributions—in conceptualization, theory, comparison, and subject matter. Fujii’s prose is powerful; her accounts haunt and disturb. She is a scholar, as I shall argue, who attends to people and to detail. Those qualities make her work stand out in the academic study of violence. Her accounts are unsparing (though not gratuitous or manipulative); they do not render abstract or disguise cruelty.

I admire Fujii’s work for many reasons. Some were obvious from the start, and some took longer to reveal themselves. She is a courageous scholar. She is willing to look hard when our minds and bodies want us to look away. In Show Time, she offers vivid, micro-descriptions of lynching and other violent displays. Readers cannot escape brutality in her text.

Fujii is also a scholar who takes people and their fashioned identities seriously. She writes about people as people, rather than as categories of people. They are not “bullies,” “white supremacists,” or “militiamen,” they have names. They are “Jude,” “Rusty Hearn,” and “Marko Samardzija.” In my personal interactions and conversations with her, I always found Fujii to be a keen observer of people. That is especially the case in her writing. She slows down the processes of violence to probe what people are actually doing when they harm and maim others. Her micro-observations of people infuse the book.

One of the key contributions of Fujii’s first book, on Rwanda (2009), was the importance of local and social ties. Fujii argues that the social relations in which Rwandans were embedded shaped their participation in violence, their process of targeting, and their recruitment of others to participate in violence. That book feels intimate in the ways in which Fujii brings the reader to particular individuals who acted during the genocide on the basis of their friendships, families, power relations, and other ties. The noun “neighbors” in the title is, to me, not accidental: attention to people is a current through her work. Fujii examined human relationships even in the midst of mass violence.

The same theme is evident in her methodological contributions to scholarship on political violence and more generally. Fujii was an interpretivist. She sought to understand and explicate meaning, and in so doing she placed people at the center of her analysis. She championed the concept of “relational interviewing” in qualitative research (Fujii, 2017). She saw interviewing not as a process of extracting information, but as a two-way dialog, where she, as the researcher, not only listened actively but also co-produced the contents of the interview. She promoted the importance of reflexivity, about being aware of one’s positionality as a scholar and as an interviewer.

Fujii also advocated for the importance of paying attention not only to what was said but to what was not said. This was one of her seminal contributions. She argued that interviewees’ prevarications, silences, half-truths, and general non-verbal responses all were laden with meaning that researchers could interpret. She called these “meta-data” (Fujii, 2010). These contributions to qualitative methodological research, often based on intuitions and lessons she learned from her intensive fieldwork into the Rwandan genocide, are highly original. They also have proven deeply influential for younger scholars who conduct field research on violence. ¹

Show Time showcases these varied strengths. The book is conceptually innovative with its focus on “violent display.” In the book and in previous work, Fujii attends to what she calls “extra-lethal violence,” or “the acts of physical, face-to-face violence that transgress shared norms about the proper treatment of persons and bodies” (Fujii, 2013). Here again she highlights what people do in violence, and she is not content to limit her analysis to those outcomes of violence that exist in the literature, such as homicide, rape, and other manifestations. She studies brutality. Why do perpetrators make victims sing and dance before they are killed? Why do people beat and mutilate bodies after murder? Why are people tortured in public before being killed? These are hard questions to ask, and they are especially hard to answer.

Fujii’s attention to the puzzle of extra-lethal violence relates to her attention to people. Her humanizing sensibility makes her exceptionally observant of how people act, including during moments of violence. I admire this quality in Fujii. In my writing, I tend to normalize perpetrators and violence, to emphasize how situations drive regular people to commit violence. Fujii also humanizes those whom she meets and analyzes, but her lens allows not only for what makes sense but also what does not. She does not dismiss those aspects of violence that would seem to exceed reason. She pays attention to what is “abnormal” and in that finds much meaning.

Show Time is also ambitious theoretically. In North America, the dominant paradigm for analyzing political violence is through a strategic lens. Scholars often seek to isolate the calculus, or logic, of violence and the instrumental purpose of using violence. Political scientists also tend to foreground institutions. Fujii does not refute these approaches, but she deflects them to draw our attention elsewhere. She emphasizes people over institutions. She also emphasizes the expressive elements of violence.

In Show Time, Fujii argues that scenes of violence are like a stage. In so doing, she underlines the dramatic and performative aspects of violence. She sees actors who perform scripts and who take on parts. This is not an analogy in Show Time; she sees the violence as scripted enactment. There is power and purpose in these violent displays, and so Fujii does not, in my reading, reject the instrumental purposes of violence. She claims that display and performance erect boundaries and categories. But she centers the performative dimensions, showing how drama infuses the public infliction of harm.

These claims are bold, and original; they move the analysis away from stock-in-trade of political science—strategic choices, institutions, and incentives—to performance. To my mind, her theoretical innovation moves us away from seeing violence as an outcome to explain or as the cause of outcomes. Her work lies somewhere between those analytical emphases. Violence does things in Show Time. Violence has force and power; the book wrestles with this dimension of violence.

The monograph is also innovative for the cases it compares. The book analyzes three cases: the genocide in Rwanda, the mass violence in Bosnia, and lynching along the eastern seashore of the United States. The inclusion of the latter case is the bold move, in that Rwanda and Bosnia have been paired together frequently given the similarity of time period and type of violence. Fujii did a tremendous amount of research for her work on lynching, and it shows. The book’s accounts of lynching scenes are particularly detailed, insightful, and disturbing. That she finds patterns of performance and violent display across these different locations, types of violence, and time periods underscores the power of the book.

Lynching and anti-Black violence have not featured prominently, to date, in recent Political Science studies of violence. Here too is another contribution: Fujii brings the United States into the study of political violence, and she puts lynching as a category of violence in conversation with other forms of group-selective, identity-targeting violence. I suspect that Show Time will be seminal for this aspect as well; increasingly, scholars of political violence in the United States are turning inwards to examine patterns of violence that they had studied elsewhere.

The symposium brings together scholars whom Fujii has influenced over the years. Elisabeth Wood offers a revised version of her incisive epilogue. Wood carefully delineates key arguments in Show Time and situates them within the literature on political violence. In two essays, Devorah Manekin and Sarah Parkinson and Jonathan Blake and Nicholas Smith build on their conversations with Fujii and their interactions with her in a writing group before her death. All four scholars are rising stars in the study of political violence, and in these essays one can see the ways in which Fujii’s generosity and vivaciousness shaped their thinking about violence. In her contribution, Julia Jordan-Zachery emphasizes the intersection of gender and race in Fujii’s work. Jordan-Zachery, in a bold and effective format, structures an imagined conversation with Fujii. Lahoma Thomas was one of Fujii’s mentees at the University of Toronto, where Fujii taught. In her essay, Thomas echoes Jordan-Zachery’s emphasis on race by underlining the implicit and explicit ways in which race infused police-citizen interactions in lynching. And lastly, Claudine Vidal, a major scholar of Rwanda, reflects on the enduring contributions of Fujii’s work on Rwanda. In a thoughtful, concise essay, Vidal shows how Fujii shaped our understanding of the genocide in Rwanda and how international her influence was.

Throughout these essays, two themes are present. One is how much Fujii is missed. She was not only a pioneering scholar of political violence, someone who brought out dimensions of violence that other scholars did not. But she also was deeply kind, energetic, irreverent, and smart. She was a joy to be around. Several of the contributors recall or imagine conversations and exchanges with Fujii in these pages. We crave engagement with her.

Another theme is how much we want to be in conversation with Fujii about political violence in the United States. The attempted violent takeover of Congress on January 6, 2022 in the United States was a shocking violent display. Fujii already anticipates the pivot to the United States in Show Time, but even more powerfully her analysis points us to the performative, strange, and haunting moments of the January 6 insurrection. The essays speak to the insight Show Time affords us in understanding that day and violence that surely will follow.

Speaking personally, I knew Lee Ann for 20 years before her death. We were graduate students together in California when we both started to work on Rwanda and at a time when the genocide in Rwanda was less well known than it is today. Rwanda is an intense place to study—not only the violence and the autocracy that followed the genocide, but also the politics and polarization of the scholarship on the genocide. I always trusted Lee Ann. She was one of my few confidantes on Rwanda, and from conversations in California, Rwanda, Canada, and at many conferences, we established a deep friendship.

My knowledge of Lee Ann’s scholarship was primarily focused on her work on Rwanda. But it was after her death that I learned how massive her work and her influence were. In various tributes, it became clear that Lee Ann was seen as a pioneer for a generation of students and younger scholars who followed her. Lee Ann was a political scientist of color, and she championed diversifying the field. Lee Ann also did not pull punches. She called things as they were, and she was not shy to call out the whiteness of the professoriate.

But Lee Ann was also a pioneer in the political science she championed. She aimed not only for inclusion, but also for a political science that was empathic, that took people seriously, and that valued interpretivist and qualitative research. In that, she was a trailblazer; she wanted to change the field, not just join it.

The significance of her influence and her example are rife in the essays collected here. The reflections seek to capture some of Lee Ann’s intellect, humor, and vivacity; it is evident how acutely she is missed. Through those memories and her scholarship, we hope her work and legacy will continue to live on and influence the study of political violence.