Each panelist will be allotted 18 minutes for a presentation, presented thematically by reconciliation, repair, and memory. Transnationally moving from Canada, South Africa, and Peru, we consider three different histories of dispossession, each connected through colonial violence followed by state-sponsored nominal attempts at progress.

Dallas Hunt will begin by focusing on the question of reconciliation. His paper, “Process Without End(s): The Politics of Perpetual Reconciliation and Indigenous Dispossession,” critically examines the mobilization of reconciliatory discourse within legal, political, and academic realms, arguing that its emphasis on process over material outcomes perpetuates Indigenous dispossession. Hunt foregrounds the “non-performative performance of reconciliation,” as a futile speech act that sustains the status quo in the ostensible quest for justice, which brings us to a political impasse shrouded in the notion of ongoing progress.

Building upon the failure of speech acts, Shukri Bana’s “Foot Washings and Failures: Collective Apology and Split Guilt in Post-TRC South African Writing” analyzes embodied acts performed with the goal of repair. By examining the foot washings done by former South African Minister of Law and Order, Adriaan Vlok, Bana traces psychoanalytic discourse on how perpetrators of violence contend with their actions. Turning to apologies that attempt repair from one individual to another, Bana interrogates the manner through which the interpersonal comes to represent the collective. This is shaped by racial categorization, where whiteness can perpetually split from itself, and blackness becomes a stand-in for the multiple.

Moving from the embodied, ostensibly private act, to the public, state-funded exhibition, Silvana Scott’s “National Affects, Memory, and Queer Temporalities in ‘El Pecado Social: Los Sobrevivientes del Olvido’” foregrounds the aesthetic and affective potentialities of loss, mourning and melancholia in memory. In searching for the silenced voices of the gendered and sexual LGBTQ+ minority, Scott theorizes alongside Guiseppe Campuzano’s “travesti” analytic to examine the Peruvian nation state’s purported narrative about LGBTQ+ persecution during the Peruvian armed conflict. Her analysis of memory and commemoration challenges the systematic marginalization of gender and sexual minorities in the Peruvian nation-state.

This selection of panelists features diverse voices, including Cree, Somali, and Peruvian thinkers. They are also disciplinarily diverse, with backgrounds in Indigenous Cultural and Literary Studies, Black Performance Studies, and Queer Media Studies. Additionally, these scholars vary in academic rank, including an Assistant Professor and two PhD Candidates, as well as geographical diversity in institutional affiliation, including the United States and Canada. Working across diverse regions, Hunt, Bana and Scott represent the Familial Resemblances of the 2026 theme, in both their positionalities and their scholarly focus on the dispossessed.