Such matrices of power, as Mbembe elucidates, operate through practices of spatialization––or space-making like the colony, the plantation, the concentration camp, and the apartheid. The local inhabitants are exposed to the spectacle of death, but their lives are erased so their loss doesn't register as loss or grievable (Butler). Thus, highlighting these multiple forms of erasures through “narrative imaginings that witness sights unseen” (Nixon 2011, 15) is of paramount significance. These mechanisms of power also call for an investigation into the local spatial conditions as opposed to the broad issues of structural violence (Galtung) that often tend to neglect specific material conditions. Therefore, this panel brings together four panelists of diverse background and training from various geographical regions to engage in a dialogue regarding this translocal phenomenon. Each speaker will be strictly limited to a 13-minute presentation (totaling 52 minutes) thus leaving out 8 minutes for introductions/transitions, and allowing for at least 15 minutes of unstructured discussion.
"A Community of the Dead: Igor Barreto’s Invisible Violence" by Carlos Colmenares Gil discusses Barreto's poetic vision of the Venezuelan slum as a space of another logic of experience against the usual gaze which turns the slum into a space of extreme aesthetic and political simplifications. Gil argues that Barreto shows the State's self-legitimizing practice through making the slum a site of operations that renders people invisible and hence killable. Gil analyzes a series of poems that show the epitaphs of different characters in the slum and whose tombs form a community of the dead that speaks to us about their link with the necropolitical operations of the State thus rendering the invisible visible. "Synecdochal Bodies in Latin American Activism" by Madison Felman-Panagotacos draws on Mbembe, Valencia, and Estevez along with the work of Sutton, Vacarezza, and Gago to read the Argentinian’s activist artwork within a longstanding tradition of synecdochal bodily representation. Felman-Panagotacos uses the term “synecdochal bodies” to describe the use of individual body parts to stand in for the body as a whole. She asserts that the epistemological clash embodied by the seeming contradiction in protest movements reflects key right-wing political platforms that reduce women and feminized bodies to their individual body parts, while left-wing activists respond by heightening visibility through embodied activism.
"Literary sumud: Rebuilding ‘home’ in Atef Abu Saif’s The Drone Eats with Me" by Daniel O’Gorman draws on innovative home designs by Palestinian architect, Salem Al Qudwa analyzes Atef Abu Saif’s 2014 memoir, The Drone Eats with Me, as a case study for how Gazan literature – like homes rebuilt from rubble – weaves the fragments of Gazan urban life into the textures of its narrative. O'Gorman argues that Saif’s text highlights the impact of Israeli necropolitical violence not only upon Gaza’s built environment, but also on its social space. With entire neighborhoods destroyed and everyday life for Gazans shattered, literary texts like Saif’s testify to this life, offering a blueprint for rebuilding that can’t be erased by an airstrike. "Multiplicity of the 'Muslim' Concept in Colonial Algeria" by Tasnîm Tirkawi examines three novels: Nedjma by Yacine, The Big House by Dib, and The Olive Trees of Justice by Pélégri to investigate the process of dehumanization of Algeria Muslims, especially women, through the living dead figure of the "Muselmänner" (Levy). Tirkawi argues that it is through this complex figure that the colonial power maintained the invisibility of its necropolitical violence, and thus it is at the heart of discourses of authors who aimed to make the suffering but also the humanity of native Algerian people visible.