Infrared (IR)-A irradiation can be useful in back and musculoskeletal pain therapy. In this study joint and vertebral column pain and mobility were measured during two weeks of IR-A irradiation treatment of patients suffering from degenerative osteoarthritis of hip and knee, low back pain, or rheumatoid arthritis. Additionally, before and after IR-A treatment MDA serum levels were measured to check if MDA variations accompany changes in pain intensity and mobility. Two-hundred and seven patients were divided into verum groups getting IR-irradiation, placebo groups getting visible, but not IR irradiation, and groups getting no irradiation. In osteoarthritis significant pain reduction according to Visual Analogue Scale and mobility improvements occurred in the verum group. Even though beneficial mean value changes occurred in the placebo group, the improvements in the placebo and No Irradiation groups were without statistical significance. In low back pain, pain and mobility improvements (by 35-40%) in the verum group were found, too. A delayed (2nd week) mobility improvement in rheumatoid arthritis was seen. However, pain relief was seen immediately. In patients suffering from low back pain or rheumatoid arthritis, the pain and mobility improvements were accompanied by significant changes of MDA serum levels. However, MDA appears not a sensitive biofactor for changes of the pain intensity in degenerative osteoarthritis. Nevertheless, unaffected or lowered MDA levels during intensive IR-A therapy argue against previous reports on free radical formation upon infrared. In conclusion, rapid beneficial effects of IR-A towards musculoskeletal pain and joint mobility loss were demonstrated.

This essay argues that the media-generated spectacle of the dead African body serves as a historically and rhetorically continuous signifier through which the West mounts a revisionary practice of cultural introspection and self-reinvention. Analyzing different representations of the 1994 Rwandan genocide in the West, this essay examines the cultural and narrative logic of the rise of “humanitarianist capital.” Not unlike earlier imperial civilization projects, the cultural production of humanitarianist capital relies on discursive and structural forms of violence that generate patterns of affect and empathy and legitimize the perceived need for economic and institutional aid while reifying the inhabitants of the global South in general and Africa in particular as dependent nonsubjects. Juxtaposing Gil Courtemanche's novel Un dimanche à la piscine à Kigali/A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (2000/2003) with Marcel Odenbach's video installation In stillen Teichen lauern Krokodile/In Still Ponds Crocodiles May Be Lurking (2002/2004), the essay scrutinizes the ways in which the “necropoeic” narrative strategies of dominant representations of violence in sub-Saharan Africa tend to constitute and perpetuate the social and political death of the African citizen to build Western communities of humanitarianist sentiment. In contrast, Odenbach's installation presents a rare exception to this tendency in that it refuses an immediate access to and consumption of the displayed African body, dismantles the depoliticized economy of humanitarian affect, and stresses the need for and possibility of a politics of proximity and complicity.

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The essays collected in this issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East explore the ways in which writers and artists from Africa and the Middle East have deployed diverse genres and modes of narrative or discursive practices in order not only to challenge the entrapments of contemporary violence but also to do so in a self-reflexively anti-redemptory fashion. They conceptualize narrative violence as a modality of cultural and literary analysis, practice and critique; understand violence as a historically situated phenomenon in constant need of social, political, and cultural authorization and reinvention to be effectively implemented at the level of warfare, mobilization, and conscription; and illuminate the ways in which literary and cultural products (literature, film, graphics, etc.) not merely illustrate but actively produce and intervene into the material and palpable workings of violence. As such, the essays in this issue compel us into interrogating the widely circulated discourses about Africa and the Middle East as ahistorical places of violence, death, and disease; question our fatigued notions of the ineluctability and immutability of the contemporary institutionalization of violence; and demonstrate how particular constellations of (corporate) power, (instrumental) knowledge, and (biased) mass media work to foreclose alternative human and humane spaces of survival, agency, resistance, and, above all, narrative departures.