Category: Uncategorized

Posted October 2014

Marianne Hirsch, describing her choice of theme for the 2014 MLA convention, wrote, “Vulnerable Times addresses vulnerabilities of life, the planet, and our professional disciplines, in our own time and throughout history. Its aim is to illuminate acts of imagination and forms of solidarity and resistance that promote social change.” Over the past century, studies and theorizations of trauma and memory—whether alone or paired with each other—have created flourishing academic subfields in the disciplines of history, psychology, philosophy, political theory, and neurobiology (to name only the most prominent). And of course trauma and memory have been treated in artistic works for more than two thousand years, from the Bible and Greek tragedy to contemporary fiction, theater, and visual arts. The joining of vulnerability to these established concepts is more recent; if I am not mistaken, vulnerability as a concept linked to trauma and memory entered into circulation after September 11, 2001. Another related and relatively recent concept is that of resilience, which is sometimes seen as the antithesis of vulnerability, though I think it is not exactly that, since one can be both vulnerable and resilient at the same time.

One thing that may appear significant to some readers of the four essays that follow, but that I believe is not significant in this instance, is a difference in gender: the two women on the panel, María José Contreras Lorenzini and Ananya Kabir, speak about specific works of art that involve or invoke the human body—whether actual or virtual—in performing acts of mourning and memorialization. The two men, Michael Rothberg and Andreas Huyssen, speak in more general and abstract terms—about implication and responsibility, about memory and its relation to human rights discourse. A stereotypical division, one could say—but one would be wrong, because these particular men have written eloquently and in great detail about specific artistic works in addition to theorizing, and these particular women have done important theoretical work in addition to thinking about the body and performance. So we can safely lower our feminist-critical antennae and consider instead the commonalities among the four essays.

What seems to me most striking is that all these reflections on trauma and memory are framed in collective and political terms rather than in terms of individual psychology. Historically, as we know, the concept of psychic trauma—which was from the very beginning linked to issues of remembering or forgetting—was elaborated by theorists who, even though they often discussed traumatic events that affected more than one person at a time, did not consider trauma in collective, let alone political, terms. Freud, in his most sustained discussion of trauma and memory (in Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920]), gave as his two examples of trauma the “war neurosis” suffered by soldiers in the First World War (what we now call PTSD) and a train accident, both of which involved groups rather than single persons (6–8). But his theorization in this essay remained exclusively on the individual level; right after those two examples, he moved on to his now famous discussion of the fort-da game, which involved a young child’s successful attempt to overcome the trauma of separation from his mother (8–11). Similarly, later theorists like Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott, as well as others who worked on traumas related to collective historical events (such as Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok or Robert Jay Lifton), spoke mainly about the effects of trauma and survival on individuals rather than on groups or nations.

This would seem to make obvious sense, since psychoanalysis is first of all concerned with the individual psyche. But a number of psychoanalysts, including Lifton in his work on Vietnam War veterans, have sought to place individual trauma within a larger historical and political context. Freud, as we know, was deeply interested in the possible application of psychoanalytic concepts to collective phenomena and devoted major works to it between the two world wars, from the 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego to his last book, Moses and Monotheism (1939). In the latter, he proposed an extended “analogy” between individual and collective trauma with his speculations on the historical development of monotheistic Judaism (the “trauma” of the collective murder of Moses was, Freud speculated, followed by a period of “latency” and then the reemergence of Mosaic ideas).

Freud’s conceptual move to project individual psychology onto the collective level provided inspiration for a number of influential works in the decades after World War II, starting with Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich’s psychohistorical study of postwar Germany, The Inability to Mourn (published in German in 1967). The book’s subtitle indicated its broad theoretical aim: Principles of Collective Behavior. Twenty years later, the French historian Henry Rousso published his now classic study of the evolution of public memory of the Vichy regime in France, The Vichy Syndrome, in which he similarly applied the psychoanalytic categories of trauma and mourning to the level of the nation. This work went hand in hand with the so-called memory boom in historical studies, inaugurated in the 1980s by Pierre Nora’s collective project on “sites of memory” (lieux de mémoire), a concept that is firmly linked (certainly for Nora) to the nation. The historical memory boom also revived the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs’s earlier work on collective memory, which has influenced the field of memory studies in literature and other disciplines.

Contemporary trauma studies, as suggested by these four very distinct but in many ways overlapping essays, carries the concepts of trauma and memory several steps further. It is no longer a question of finding analogies between individual and collective trauma, where the former acts as a template for the latter, but rather of constructing models that start with the collective. The concept of systemic trauma or slow trauma—produced by ongoing economic exploitation, political repression, or climate change—obviously affects individuals, but it does not start with them; furthermore, it is not based on the traditional definition of trauma as a single catastrophic event and thus constitutes an important innovation in trauma theory. Also important is the attempt to think through the relation of vulnerability and the body to political action, which Judith Butler has been working on for several years and to which all these essays refer in more or less direct ways. I believe that further work needs to be done in this area, to try to understand more clearly the interactions between the individual and the collective. The extension of trauma theory to areas of the world that have not traditionally been the subjects of such discussion is yet another new, and I think very promising, development suggested—indeed, confirmed—by these contributions.

Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1961. Print.

———. Moses and Monotheism. Trans. Katherine Jones. New York: Vintage, 1967. Print.

Hirsch, Marianne. “2014 Presidential Theme: Vulnerable Times.” MLA Commons. MLA, 14 Feb. 2013. Web. 3 Apr. 2014.

Mitscherlich, Alexander, and Margarete Mitscherlich. The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior. Trans. Beverley R. Placzek. Pref. Robert Jay Lifton. New York: Grove, 1975. Print.

Nora, Pierre, ed. Les lieux de mémoire. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1984–92. Print.

Rousso, Henry. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. Print.

Susan Rubin Suleiman is C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and professor of comparative literature at Harvard University. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.

Posted May 2014

I would like to shift from vulnerabilities and catastrophes in the past and from the subsequent move into trauma theory to the politics of prevention. As humanists and readers engaged in memory studies, we are legitimately involved in reading extant texts, testimonies, art projects, museum sites, performances. Much of my own work has been in this vein. In recent years, however, I have become increasingly skeptical about the future of memory studies—or, better said, about the role of the future in memory studies. I have begun to ask myself what kind of cognitive and political gain could be made if one reflected on the relation of memory and human rights. We all recognize that there is an intimate link. And yet memory discourse in the humanities has remained largely separate from human rights discourse in law and political theory. To be sure, the critics of the current status of human rights are as vociferous as those of memory studies. No doubt, to some the coupling of these two afflicted and contested bedfellows may exacerbate the problem instead of opening up new venues. And yet it may be worth the effort.

Memory takes its subject matter from the past but is, as we know, of the present. In certain political discourses, memory of the past is meant to guide us in the present and guarantee the future: never again. In the breakup of Yugoslavia, this laudable goal led to military intervention by NATO. Other memory discourses mobilize the past to legitimize violence, ethnic cleansing, genocide. The case of Yugoslavia is one among many: memory of past violence generated violence to stop violence in response to violence generated by memory. We’re not the first ones to discover the political dark side of memory.

But as we recognize that the effects of memory in the present can be deleterious and destructive, memory discourse might want to establish a closer reciprocal relation to human rights, which articulate struggles in the present oriented toward the future even if they are energized by injustices suffered in the past. Memory without justice can lead to revenge. Justice without memory will remain a dull tool. At the same time, a universalist understanding of human rights is no panacea, as long as we don’t acknowledge our own position as beneficiaries and “implicated subjects,” as Michael Rothberg suggests in his essay.

Today both memory studies and human rights politics are vulnerable. Samuel Moyn has called human rights the last utopia. As such it was often naively oriented to an alternative, imagined future. The reproaches to human rights, some of them legitimate, others blatantly self-interested, are legion: abstraction, Eurocentrism, universalism, lack of historical understanding of different cultures and traditions. Memory studies are equally vulnerable where they seek redemption or homeopathic healing through remembrance of the past. The wave of public apologies has shown how absurd this can get. Memory studies are also in danger of getting stuck in trauma. Even the new multidirectionality of trauma studies, valuable as it is in that it moves beyond the limitations of Pierre Nora’s always national lieux de mémoire, may not entirely escape this trap. Traumatic effects are always after, belated. Rights struggles and the securing of rights should prevent trauma from happening. But what rights and what trauma? We are still too used to thinking of trauma in terms of major events and shock experience: massacres, genocide, terror. We forget the slow and simmering trauma of poverty, colonial and postcolonial subjection, the sometimes endless detention of immigrants, untreated disease, radiation, climate change. How can the humanities contribute to trauma prevention? How can we create more robust conceptual and practical links between memory studies and reflections on human rights, links that may benefit both projects?

So far there have been only a few publications that discuss the relation of memory and human rights in a substantive way. W. James Booth, Joachim Savelsberg and Ryan King, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider are some recent examples in political theory and sociology. Recent books by the political theorist Jean Cohen and the legal scholar Ruti Teitel have greatly expanded our horizon regarding international law and human rights in such a way that links with memory studies can be established. The key issue here is state sovereignty and its relation to human rights. In this debate, scholars distinguish two opposing positions: statists insist on national and state sovereignty in a traditional sense, and liberal cosmopolitans celebrate the waning of state sovereignty and the emergence of an international human rights regime. Cohen, in Globalization and Sovereignty, and Teitel, in Humanity’s Law, articulate more complex positions, drawing on both these extremes and transforming them along the way.

Both Cohen and Teitel acknowledge the shift in international relations from sovereign impunity to a responsibility of states to the international community. Perpetrators of war crimes, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and state terror may be held liable in international courts and tribunals, however incomplete and politically deficient this new regime still is. But Cohen and Teitel differ in their assessment of this development for human rights.

In my reflection on memory and rights, I’m particularly struck by Cohen’s political argument that we need to disaggregate the new guarantees of international human security law (e.g., the UN’s adopted norm of a Responsibility to Protect, or R2P) from human rights law proper. It is precisely the shift toward legitimizing humanitarian interventions in the name of security rights and democracy that has Cohen worried about new political, if not neo-imperial, hierarchies of power and a new potentially hegemonic international law. Instead of speaking of a blend of national and international dimensions, as Teitel does, Cohen insists on a dualistic structure that separates the politics of international humanitarian intervention from the pursuit of human rights within the confines of the sovereign national state. Cohen recognizes the Janus face of national law as both authorizing and limiting public power. Her argument, finally, is in favor of two political conceptions. One refers to those human security rights violations, specified by the international community, that can legitimately and legally suspend the sovereignty argument against forceful intervention and other forms of international enforcement; the other refers to international human rights that “function as public standards of critique to which citizens and denizens, domestic rights activists, and social movement actors can refer in their political struggles against domestic oppression, injustice, and arbitrariness” (16). Cohen’s disaggregation of international security law and national struggles for rights in the context of local social movements suggests that memory studies needs to distinguish more clearly among different scales of memory, vulnerability, and violence. This would not require that we give up on the notion of migrating and multidirectional memory discourses across the globe or on cross-regional political alliances and networks. But it would require us to pay more attention to the slow and simmering effects of poverty, migration, and oppressive gender regimes and labor conditions being generated at the local levels where basic rights are denied or not even recognized. Clearly the struggle for such rights cannot be waged in an international forum at this time. It remains subject to local—that is, national—politics, which provide discursive and electoral parameters for social movement actors and the securing or even expansion of rights. There are no transnational multitudes here as political agents, even if successful struggles in one country may nurture similar movements in another (e.g., Occupy Wall Street, the Indignez-vous! campaign in Spain and France, the Bangladesh clothing factories labor movement). A careful look at the scale of vulnerabilities, violations, and disempowerment would, it seems to me, also have to affect trauma studies and perhaps lead to different language when it comes to the injuries of poverty, migration, and other forms of everyday subjection.

Let me conclude with a brief remark on the aesthetic. More than ever, we need artistic works that challenge the perpetuation of racialized and displaced colonial practices in the metropole itself, works that in their aesthetic figuration can break through the second nature of common belief systems, disavowals, and oblivion. One powerful example is Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth, a 2008 installation in London’s Tate Modern. In this work, the theme of immigration enforcement as exclusion and denial of rights is articulated in relation to language and visuality as a widening crack in the floor all along the Tate’s old Turbine Hall. The concrete walls of the crevice are ruptured by a steel-mesh fence—not the barbed wire of the Nazi or Bosnian camps but the steel mesh of today’s border fortifications and the concrete of the walls intended to keep the barbarians outside, whether in Israel or at the Mexican-American border. Shibboleth is the biblical word that cannot be pronounced correctly by the foreigners and that divides the world into friend and foe with deadly consequence. The biblical past and the contemporary present clash in this work that reflects in powerful visual and architectural language on the continuities among colonialism, racism, and immigration. The arc leads not only from the Holocaust and colonialism to Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur but also to migration and the practices of a denial of dignity, if not rights. It points to those fundamental asymmetries of power among human beings in our present that will perhaps one day become part of a politics of memory. One wishes it were that already now.

Works Cited

Booth, W. James. Communities of Memory: On Witness, Identity, and Justice. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006. Print.

Cohen, Jean L. Globalization and Sovereignty: Rethinking Legality, Legitimacy, and Constitutionalism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. Print.

Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. Trans. Assenka Oksiloff. Philadelphia: Temple U, 2006. Print.

Moyn, Samuel. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010. Print.

Salcedo, Doris. Shibboleth. 9 Oct. 2007–6 Apr. 2008. Art installation. Tate Modern, London. Unilever Ser.

Savelsberg, Joachim J., and Ryan D. King. American Memories: Atrocities and the Law. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011. Print.

Teitel, Ruti G. Humanity’s Law. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Print.

Andreas Huyssen is Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature and founding director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.

Posted May 2014

The dominant scene of trauma theory has been one of victimization, and the figures who most frequently populate its landscape have been victims and perpetrators. This is no surprise: human-created trauma often involves the infliction of violence by a perpetrator or group of perpetrators on a victim or group of victims. Trauma, victims, and perpetrators are necessary categories for thinking about violence, suffering, and vulnerability, but they are not sufficient. Trauma theory’s victim-perpetrator imaginary comes with several interconnected risks: it tends to polarize and purify the relationship between victims and perpetrators, evacuate the field of other crucial subject positions, and model violence on a small-scale, decontextualized scene, even when it takes on large-scale historical events such as the Holocaust or transatlantic slavery. To avoid these pitfalls, we need to supplement our familiar categories with concepts of implication and implicated subjects that help us better capture the conditions of possibility of violence and suggest different routes for opposing it.

The first limitation of trauma theory’s dominant imaginary is that scenes of violence—especially the collective, political violence that concerns me here—rarely permit clean distinctions between traumatized victims and traumatizing perpetrators. From the beginning, some of the most famous subjects of trauma—say, soldiers of World War I or Vietnam—have been perpetrators at the same time they suffered from the conditions of violence they helped produce. Recognizing this complexity of subject positions in the field of violence is one of the rarely remarked and, perhaps, unintentional insights afforded by Cathy Caruth’s now canonical theory of trauma (Trauma; Unclaimed Experience). Ruth Leys and others have criticized Caruth for mobilizing the figure of the accidental murderer Tancred as the emblematic subject of trauma in Unclaimed Experience, but the confusion of subject positions in Caruth’s scene of trauma indexes real, pressing dilemmas (see Rothberg). It also suggests that we need to distinguish between the diagnostic category of trauma and the legal or moral categories of the victim and perpetrator.

The second limitation of trauma theory’s imaginary is that it radically simplifies the field of violence by ignoring subject positions beyond victims and perpetrators, however complexly conceived. Indeed, it leaves out of the picture a large and heterogeneous collection of subjects who enable and benefit from traumatic violence without taking part in it directly. I call these missing figures implicated subjects, and I hold that they are essential to the production of much of the traumatic violence that concerns us. The category of implicated subjects emerges in relation to both historical and contemporary scenarios of violence: that is, it describes the indirect responsibility of subjects situated at temporal or geographic distance from the production of social suffering. It helps direct our attention to the conditions of possibility of violence as well as its lingering impact and suggests new routes of opposition. Like the proximate term complicity (see Sanders), but with more conceptual flexibility, implication draws attention to how we are entwined with and folded into (“im-pli-cated in”) histories and situations that surpass our agency as individual subjects. The distinctions between forms of diachronic and synchronic responsibility—between, say, contemporary United States citizens’ responsibility for transatlantic slavery, on the one hand, and contemporary imperial wars, on the other—are significant. But, I venture, we also need a general category to describe modes of responsibility beyond the criminal guilt of the perpetrator—a project Karl Jaspers inaugurated with The Question of German Guilt in the wake of National Socialism—if only because such indirect modes of responsibility frequently overlap and interact.

The third limitation of a trauma theory oriented around a victim-perpetrator imaginary is that it tends to circumscribe the forms of violence at the center of analysis. Feminist, Marxist, queer, and postcolonial critics, including Laura Brown, Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, Rob Nixon, and Stef Craps, have faulted recent versions of trauma theory for their focus on extraordinary catastrophes at the expense of insidious, structural, everyday, and slow forms of violence. Here, too, a theory of implication and implicated subjects proves necessary for making sense of and resisting violence. As one moves from the punctual and event-like violence that concerned early theorists of trauma, who were influenced by psychoanalysis, to more structural forms of damage, the field of violence becomes exponentially more complex and the need to fill in other subject positions more pressing. Consider how both capitalist globalization and climate change reconfigure agency, for instance. The suffering produced in the circuits between spaces of consumption and spaces of production in globalization or between human beings’ “geological agency” and the climate chaos that ensues in the Anthropocene cannot be grasped through the linear causality of the victim-perpetrator model (Chakrabarty; see also Nixon; Rothberg). Neither simply perpetrators nor victims, though potentially either or both at other moments, implicated subjects are participants in and beneficiaries of a system that generates dispersed and uneven experiences of trauma and well-being simultaneously.

Besides providing a new footing for trauma theory, the concept of implication can help us reflect as well on one of the other key words of this forum: vulnerability. In a series of texts over the last decade, Judith Butler has sought to “reimagin[e] the possibility of community on the basis of vulnerability and loss” (Precarious Life 20). “Each of us,” she writes, “is constituted politically by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies. . . . Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure” (20). Theorizing from the site of loss, as Butler so powerfully does, makes vulnerability and precariousness the bases for a critique of violence and the construction of solidarity. But what if our relation to others is characterized by excess in addition to loss? By a capacity to wound as well as a fundamental vulnerability? Might this starting point provide an alternative perspective on the uneven distribution of precariousness that concerns Butler and ought to concern us all? The concept of implication asks us to think how we are enmeshed in histories and actualities beyond our apparent and immediate reach, how we help produce history through impersonal participation rather than direct perpetration. It shifts attention to the other side of precariousness: to complicity and privilege. In calling for this change of course, my argument is not that we should do away with the concepts of vulnerability and precariousness (nor of trauma, victimization, and perpetration), but rather that a shift of focus to implication and implicated subjects may help us address pressing political issues, including climate change, globalization, and the transgenerational legacies of slavery, genocide, and indigenous dispossession.

Such a shift can also help illuminate another case that has challenged easy solutions: Israel/Palestine. The endemic conflict between Israel and the Palestinians certainly has identifiable victims and perpetrators (even if consensus about who those victims and perpetrators are might be hard to reach). Yet, as recent debates about the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS; http://www.usacbi.org) among scholars in professional associations like the MLA indicate, the conflict also involves a panoply of subjects beyond the most immediate participants. Proponents of the BDS movement might be seen as arguing that academics—both in and beyond Israel—are implicated subjects who participate in the conflict at a distance. In response, opponents of BDS deny the kinds of links between the academy and the occupation that would entail implication or responsibility at a distance. Yet American (and other non-Israeli) supporters of Israel also act out of a sense of implication in the situation in the Middle East; they simply draw opposite conclusions about the meaning of that implication. Although an approach based on implication and implicated subjects does not provide simple or direct answers, it can help illuminate the stakes and background assumptions of the BDS debate.

In recent writings and public appearances, Butler has been one of the most visible unofficial spokespeople for BDS in the United States (see Butler, “Academic Freedom”). Her engagement with the question of Israel/Palestine strikes me as better explained through the concept of implication, however, than through the concepts of vulnerability and precariousness that she has been elaborating in recent writings. For instance, in Parting Ways, her most significant scholarly contribution to the debate about Israel/Palestine, Butler writes that if we are “to depart from [the] communitarian moorings” that undergird the project of political Zionism, we also need “to depart from a concern only with the vulnerability and fate of the Jewish people” (27). While Butler’s formulation implies the need to recognize the vulnerability of Palestinians (and others) alongside that of Jews—certainly a necessary project—it can also be read as a call to explore Zionism from the perspective of indirect responsibility and implication rather than vulnerability. Indeed, it is as an implicated subject that Butler approaches the conflict, and, to my mind, this is one of the most important features of her approach: instead of mobilizing a critique on universal, “objective” grounds, she attempts to work through her subjective formation as a Jew to break with those aspects of Jewishness that might support an ethnically absolutist ideology. She draws on the resources of Jewish (as well as Palestinian and other) philosophy, art, and political theory to think a non-Zionist, diasporic Jewishness that is inseparable from the conditions of Palestinian life and death and that opens onto a binational, post-Zionist future. Butler’s point is not that a critique of political Zionism must come from an attempt to work through the formation of Jewish subjects or can only come from such an attempt; rather, the fact that she pursues her critique along this path demonstrates a recognition of the philosopher and activist as implicated subject. In her writings on Israel/Palestine, it seems to me, her wager has been that working from and through implication carries moral weight and opens up political possibilities.

Bruce Robbins’s affecting film Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists offers similar insights. Some of My Best Friends consists of interviews with Jewish American intellectuals (including Butler) about how they came to change their minds about Israel and play a more critical role in the American Jewish community. The film’s interviews make palpable both the production of implication—in the stories of how Jewish Americans are inculcated into unquestioning support for Israel—and the recognition that such implication produces, in turn, long-distance responsibility. Not all the interviewees in Robbins’s film have the prominence of Butler or of the playwright Tony Kushner, who is also featured, but they have all decided to confront their uncomfortable implication as diaspora subjects in a state project of occupation they have come to see as unjust.

The attention to one’s own position as implicated subject fostered by Butler and Robbins can provoke more robust and politically efficacious forms of self-reflection than a sole focus on trauma and victimization, which—at least in the case of Israel/Palestine—can feed the dynamics of violent conflict. Such attention also serves to caution us against self-righteousness and to encourage us to acknowledge how we are caught up in the very policies we oppose. For Butler and Robbins, as for me, our implication as diaspora subjects needs to be placed within our even more consequential location as citizens of the United States. We are implicated not just because Israel sometimes claims to speak for all Jews but also because our own country makes the occupation possible through military aid and other forms of material and ideological support. As the examples of Butler and Robbins demonstrate, accounting for implication brings the scholar of trauma back into the picture and highlights the uneven but consequential relation between privilege and the production of suffering.

We live in vulnerable times, to be sure, as Marianne Hirsch has suggested in choosing the presidential theme of the 2014 MLA convention. If we want to understand the unequal distribution of vulnerability both locally and globally, we need to track the silent participation of implicated subjects. And we need to remember that we too are implicated.

Works Cited

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print.

Brown, Laura. “Not outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma.” Caruth, Trauma 100–12.

Butler, Judith. “Academic Freedom and the ASA’s Boycott of Israel: A Response to Michelle Goldberg.” The Nation. The Nation, 8 Dec. 2013. Web. 3 Apr. 2014. <http://www.thenation.com/article/177512/academic-freedom-and-asas-boycott-israel-response-michelle-goldberg#>.

———. Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. New York: Columbia UP, 2012. Print.

———. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso, 2004. Print.

Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Print.

———. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Print.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 197–222. Print.

Craps, Stef. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds. New York: Palgrave, 2013. Print.

Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print.

Jaspers, Karl. The Question of German Guilt. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: Fordham UP, 2000. Print.

Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A Genealogy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. Print.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009. Print.

Robbins, Bruce, dir. Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists. Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists, 2013. Web. 3 Apr. 2014. <http://www.bestfriendsfilm.com>.

Rothberg, Michael. “Beyond Tancred and Clorinda: Trauma Studies for Implicated Subjects.” The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. Ed. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone. New York: Routledge, 2013. xi–xviii. Print.

Sanders, Mark. Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. Print.

Michael Rothberg is professor and head of the Department of English and director of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.

Posted May 2014

In a recent lecture that explored the connections among bodily vulnerability, coalitions, and the politics of the street, Judith Butler reminded us that “it is not just that this or that body is bound up in a network of relations, but that the body, despite its clear boundaries, or perhaps precisely by virtue of those very boundaries, is defined by the relations that makes its own life and action possible . . . we cannot understand bodily vulnerability outside of this conception of relations.” I want to juxtapose this quotation with a comment made in the very specific context of a long-term conflict zone: “[T]wo moments seem to have entered history. Kashmiris creating a hollow grave as a mausoleum to memory and resistance and India making a craven declaration: that a Kashmiri corpse can be seditious. It must remain in prison” (Waheed, “India’s Message”). These words are of the Kashmiri intellectual Mirza Waheed, writing in the aftermath of the Indian state’s surreptitious hanging of the Kashmiri activist Afzal Guru on 9 February 2013, on the grounds of his involvement in the attack on India’s parliament in 2001, in which nine people were killed (Roy; Haksar). The hanging was conducted inside Delhi’s Tihar Jail, where Guru had been imprisoned, without a fair trial, since 2001. What can these two statements, in conjunction, tell us about the 2014 MLA convention’s presidential theme, Vulnerable Times?

Butler’s words remind us that we cannot analyze vulnerability outside the network of social relations that the body is suspended in. Waheed’s commentary on Afzal Guru’s empty grave illustrates how such vulnerability is tied up with collective trauma and its memorialization. Together, they frame my contribution to our collective consideration of vulnerable times as a reconsideration of the body—specifically, the body as bound up in networks of mutual dependency. While Butler talks of bodies in physical spaces primarily to problematize the “street,” I focus on the virtual realm of social networks. My reconsideration of the body in the (social) network turns to emergent strategies of resistance in Indian Kashmir, a conflict zone since the moment of South Asia’s decolonization in 1947 but with roots in the relationship between colonial modernity and fantasy that formed during the late nineteenth century, a key moment being the entry of the camera into the geographic space of the Valley of Kashmir (Kabir, Territory). In recent years, however, this tenacious history of Kashmir’s being represented to the world primarily through the camera as a space of idealized natural beauty—a “territory of desire”—is increasingly being challenged by a micropolitics of counterrepresentation that is heavily reliant on various forms of social media.

This micropolitics thrives on the disembodiment enabled by the Internet. Simultaneously, it chooses to remain entangled with the body in the landscape that forms the center of the Kashmiri struggle for dignity and self-determination. In the words of the late Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali:

I won’t tell your father you have died, Rizwan,

but where has your shadow fallen, like cloth

on the tomb of which saint, or the body

of which unburied boy in the mountains,

bullet-torn, like you, his blood sheer rubies

on Himalayan snow?

As this address to a young Kashmiri man who was tortured by Indian security forces reveals, this micropolitics has long turned on the body that celebrates its own vulnerability. In shedding its blood through the violence enacted on it by biopolitical regimes, the body reclaims the contested landscape as its own. In the process, it is sanctified through the heuristics of an indigenous sacrality (the tomb of the saint), apotheosized into an esoteric, translucent, and lapidary durability (rubies). The point I wish to make in this essay is that this tradition of “cryptopolitics” now enters into dialogue with a new “cyberpoetics.” Embracing its vulnerability, the Kashmiri body passes through memory portals to pose new challenges to the political status quo and generate possibilities of a collective posttraumatic existence.

Cryptopolitics and the New Pastoral

In Territory of Desire, on desire and resistance in Indian Kashmir, I noted contemporary Kashmiri literature’s propensity for graves, gravediggers, funeral processions, and phantoms—all symptoms of a “living death,” a suspended condition of uncertainty provoked by the machinations of the state. Finding resonances between this propensity and Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics (itself a step up from Foucault’s biopolitics), I nevertheless found it necessary to distinguish the Kashmiri trope as an example of cryptopolitics. This concept also owed to Derrida’s distinction between the crypt and the forum. The labyrinthine crypt subtending the public forum, which Derrida invoked in his introduction to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, manifests itself in the complex and highly militarized urban geography of Srinagar, the capital of Indian Kashmir. Through cryptopolitics, the Kashmiri creative intellectual critiqued the Indian state’s paranoid and excessive control over his or her subjectivity through the exercise of power on the Kashmiri body. This body’s surreptitious movement between the crypt and the forum recalibrates its relation to the desiring machines that, through the fantasy of the pastoral, anesthetize citizens to the democratic state’s unacceptable regime of terror that masks its own “nervous system” (Taussig).

The fantasy of the pastoral reiterates and reifies a long-standing discourse on the Kashmir Valley. The valley has been celebrated in precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods alike as exemplary in its natural beauty and, from urban plains dwellers to Mughal emperors and British imperial administrators to domestic tourists in independent India, as a place to refresh and reimagine the self. I have demonstrated in detail that the discursive processes that thereby evolved, and their relation to the genesis and prolongation of political conflict, were the conditions and consequences of the valley’s being a “territory of desire” (Territory). In that context I noted that attempts to reclaim Kashmiri landscape by Kashmiris have been a powerful way to rethink the much used but not often clarified concept of azadi (“sovereignty,” “freedom”). Cryptopolitics, as evidenced in the quotation from Ali’s poem, often carried with it an implicit resistance to the pastoral mode, which nevertheless encoded a strategic essentialism (rather than rejection) of the landscape as the autochthon’s birthright. Since 2010, however, we can glimpse a new pastoralism in conjunction with an evolving cryptopolitics of the body, through which cultural producers from the Kashmir Valley now stake their claims anew to a much praised, much fought-over space. Two striking examples of this emergent counterdiscourse are Waheed’s fictional depiction of a nomadic shepherd community in his novel The Collaborator and the Kashmiri cartoonist Sajad Malik’s iconographic use of the endangered Hangul deer in the graphic novellas disseminated through his Web site, Kashmir in Black and White.¹

Doubling back on the pastoralization of Kashmir, these and other texts participate in a movement that asserts both the constructed nature of Kashmir’s desirability and the need to reclaim Kashmir for collective healing. This new phase within Kashmiri resistance emerged by 2010 through the combined stimuli of unfolding events in the Arab world and increased recourse to Internet resources. Facebook, YouTube, blogs, and online journals proliferated, enabling a new generation of Kashmiris to talk relatively freely among themselves, to engage in dialogue with older generations and Kashmiris in diaspora, and to invite the world to eavesdrop on the conversation. This conversational “multidirectionality” (Rothberg) was engendered by Facebook, in particular its comments and sharing functions. Facebook profile pages of individual Kashmiris as well as event pages began functioning as memory portals, or interfaces between users and new forms of collective memory. Suffused with the memory of earlier modes of memorialization (the repetition is deliberate on my part), these portals open into concurrent digital and print forms: books that anthologize online essays, essays uploaded to online journals, YouTube videos of soldiers cracking down on youth and essays about those videos, Kashmiri protest rap and documentaries on Kashmiri rappers, and planned events on the ground whose ability to take place remained dependent on the daily political situation but whose Facebook existence exhaled a fragile hope of change.

Bodies, behind the Canvas

These developments of “Facebook Kashmir” (as some have called it—fittingly—on Facebook) are stunningly visualized by the veteran Kashmiri artist Masood Hussain’s mixed-media work Behind the Canvas. Hussain calls his piece a “demonstration work” for the Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Barmahani’s documentary, Look behind the Canvas, shot on location in Kashmir during Barmahani’s two visits to the valley and subsequently produced by Al Jazeera. As its YouTube promotional video reveals (“Look”), the film splices scenes of the work’s making with scenes of curfew, stone throwing by Kashmiri youth, and military shooting. The artist painting on the canvas in the secluded studio is contrasted with long sequences in which his daughter navigates delicately the troubled lanes of downtown Srinagar. The scene is set during the days of the kaani jung (“stone-throwing war”) that erupted in 2010, when Kashmiri youth and the Indian army were once again pitted against each other in a volatile and unequal pitched battle. Yet daily life must go on. Through the eye of the artist, looking through the house’s windows to follow his daughter’s journey through the streets as far as his eyes can see, the enclosed house becomes endowed with an aura of vulnerability that connects it to the persona and body of his daughter. This vulnerability also seeps back into the body of the artist as father.

The painting’s commentary on the transmission of vulnerability and memory brings together three generations of women. The oldest, Mugli, “was found dead in 2010, in her house in a sitting position, with her eyes open looking towards the door” waiting for her disappeared son.² Represented as a “black-and-white portrait,” which, as a “representation within a representation,” draws attention to her hypericonicity, she “still awaits her missing son.” The second woman, Rafiqa, waits with her own young son for her disappeared husband, whose ID photograph she holds. Finally, Mehvash, Hussain’s daughter, “who grew up in the period of turmoil . . . look(s) towards the sky at the dove which is carrying an electronic gadget in her beak, represent[ing] the age of technology” and the hope of a “better and peaceful future.” The electronic gadget is not defined, but its small size points to its probably representing a smartphone. These negotiations between iconicity and the real short-circuit the painting’s status as “mere representation” and charge it with talismanic power. Newspaper cuttings pasted on the lower edge of the painting and dating to the time of its making forge a further link among the indexical, the iconic, and the talismanic.

This oscillation between metonymy and mimesis defines the entire painting. The clock “signifies endless waiting,” but a tear in the canvas conveys Hussain’s anguish. “I feel that this work of mine is not really complete and I am really trying to find somebody who will heal our wounds; I am not signing this painting; I am just tearing it.” This self-inflicted wound is also a cry for help: “I have put a needle here with the hope that somebody will come and stitch this painting for me.” Meaning seeps out to the obverse, hidden from the casual eye: “I will write something here (behind the painting). . . . This is ‘The Paradise Lost.’” Hussain has been using this work as his Facebook profile picture, whose frame grants new significance to the depicted window (an old leitmotif of his). Instead of having to travel to Delhi and Srinagar to view Hussain’s work, as I did several times between 2006 and 2008, I could now access this image and discuss it with him on Facebook. Yet this new ability to communicate and converse across time and space cannot forget the body. Indeed, in the case of Kashmir, it continues to focus on the disappeared body—represented in Hussain’s artwork by the son of Mugli and the husband of Rafiqa.

Afzal Guru’s Empty Grave

The new cryptopolitics of “Facebook Kashmir” has been best literalized by the crystallization of commentary around the empty grave of Afzal Guru. Guru’s was a special category of disappeared body: Guru was hanged in prison by the state, without notice given to his family in Srinagar. In uncanny populist response in Srinagar, an empty grave in the memorial site known as the Martyrs’ Graveyard spontaneously appeared (Fayyaz). This empty grave mimicked one created a generation earlier for the original Kashmiri martyr, Maqbool Bhat. Waheed reports:

[T]he text of the epitaph was the same as that of another epitaph, erected in memory of Maqbool Bhat, the founder of Kashmir’s main pro-independence militant group turned political formation the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, who was hanged in the same jail 29 years ago. The epitaph reads, “The martyr of the nation, Mohammad Afzal Guru, Date of Martyrdom: 9th February 2013, Saturday, whose mortal remains are lying in the custody of the Government of India. The nation is awaiting its return.” (“India’s Message”)

The triangulation of embodiment, disembodiment, and reembodiment through entangled online and offline modes continued. On 13 February, continues Waheed, “Kashmiri news websites reported that the police had removed and destroyed the tombstone and then, after the news spread via Twitter and Facebook, a replacement tombstone mysteriously reappeared.”

The viral transmission of the news through social media took overwhelmingly, and swiftly, the form of poetry. One of the first poems to be written, on the day of the hanging, 9 February, was “Epistolary Multitudes,” published on 19 February on the blog of a Kashmiri writer bearing the nom de plume Pharmakon. “We are yet undelivered,” it declared, “[b]ut your letter, little late though, reached safely.” The reference here is to the last letter written by Guru to his family, which was posted to arrive after the news of his death (“Revealed: Last Letter”). This belatedness took on portentous status for Kashmiris and became a foundational trope for subsequent poems—many bad in literary terms, some good, all emotionally taut and angry. Most were written in English (hence addressed to multiple non-Kashmiri audiences); even when a Kashmiri poem appeared, it was swiftly translated, often within the same day. Poems, translations, and commentaries were thus shared, reposted, commented on, and linked in various ways to the scandal of the prisoner’s hushed-up hanging and the corollary scandal of the belated letter. By 17 February 2013, Guru’s last letter had gained the status of a cyberrelic: links multiplied on Facebook to its scanned and uploaded photograph, along with transliterations of the original Urdu and translations into English. A stream of poems acknowledging the letter continued to circulate; the ones that attracted multiple “likes” were always reshared.

Afzal Guru’s letter, in fact, allowed copious citation of Ali’s foundational poetry anthology, The Country without a Post Office. Facebook pages often began resembling an oral poetry recitation session, where not merely poems but also comments on poems cited, alluded to, and riffed on central ideas from Ali’s poetry concerning letters, graves, disappeared bodies, and eternally waiting mothers. Guru’s last letter began to function metonymically as his corpse being ritually prepared for Muslim burial—the memory portals through which this letter-corpse passed became, accordingly, the grave that was no longer empty. Through this chain of substitutions, the cyberpoetics of “Facebook Kashmir” augmented an established cryptopolitics, even troping users of Facebook as mothers and lovers. The memory portal function of Facebook and its multiplying functions lent themselves particularly well to this inherited cryptopolitics, which ultimately is shaped by a particular nexus of affect, body, and place in this part of the world—a nexus that in turn is deeply contoured by a long-standing mythopoesis of Sufi love, unrequited and leading to self-annihilation (see Kabir, “Affect”).

It is of interest to me to bring to memory studies, or whatever form this scholarly work is transforming into, an awareness of this layering of affective resources, vernacular and global, persistent and newly emergent, by individuals in conflict zones such as Kashmir, who forge ways to move themselves and their communities toward posttrauma. Hussain’s gadget-carrying dove signifies his hope of “a better and peaceful future” for his daughter’s generation through new and unpredictable lines of communication. New instabilities of memory also arise thanks to our lack of precedent for storing, accessing, and destroying Facebook data (Parmar). We need to find ways to conceptualize as well as mobilize these developments, which mesh virtual and real through a porousness of embodiment and disembodiment. I have elsewhere analyzed how molecular change in contemporary Kashmir is proceeding through rhizomes and small platforms that involve the body in quotidian acts of labor, pleasure, and collective reclaiming of the Kashmiri environment, while using Facebook as a memorializing and mobilizing facility (“‘You’”). Thinking anew about memory, trauma, and vulnerability must attend to the transformation of our bodies by social networks that are daily generating new archives, repertoires, and poetries of resistance and solidarities.

Notes

1. Malik’s Web site is currently under construction. ↩
2. All quotations about the painting in this and subsequent paragraphs are taken from personal communication between Hussain and the author on Facebook in January 2013. ↩

Works Cited

Ali, Agha Shahid. “I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight.” The Country without a Post Office: Poems. New York: Norton, 1997. 25–26. Print.

Barmahani, Mohsen, dir. Look behind the Canvas. Documentary and Experimental Film Center; Al Jazeera Documentary, 2013. Film.

Butler, Judith. “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics.” Univ. of Cambridge. May 2013. Address.

Derrida, Jacques. “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.” Foreword. Trans. Barbara Johnson. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy. By Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. Trans. Nicholas Rand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. xi–xlviii. Print. Theory and History of Lit. 37.

“Epistolary Multitudes: Dated 09/02/2013.” Pharmakon. N.p., 18 Feb. 2013. Web. 3 Apr. 2014. <http://pharmakeusmuzammil.blogspot.in/2013/02/epistolary-multitudes-dated-09022013.html>.

Fayyaz, Ahmed Ali. “An Epitaph for Afzal Guru at Martyrs’ Graveyard.” The Hindu. The Hindu, 13 Feb. 2013. Web. 3 Apr. 2014. <http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/an-epitaph-for-afzal-guru-at-martyrs-graveyard/article4408383.ece>.

Haksar, Nandita. Framing Geelani, Hanging Afzal: Patriotism in the Time of Terror. New Delhi: Promilla, 2007. Print.

Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. “Affect, Body, Place: Trauma Theory in the World.” The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. Ed. Gert Buelens, Samuel Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone. New York: Routledge, 2014. 63–75. Print.

———. Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009. Print.

———. “‘You Can Only Appreciate Kashmir through the Cycle Pace’: Reclaiming Kasheer through Zalgur.” Kashmir Lit: An Online Journal of Kashmiri and Diasporic Writing (2013): n. pag. Web. 3 Apr. 2014. <http://www.kashmirlit.org/category/archive/2013-summer/>.

“Look behind the Canvas—Documentary—Promotion.” Dir. Mohsen Barmahani. YouTube. YouTube, 3 Apr. 2011. Web. 3 Apr. 2014. <www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DHriKaUlRI>.

Malik, Sajad. Kashmir in Black and White. N.p., n.d. Web. Sept. 2012. <http://kashmirblackandwhite.com>.

Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11–40. Print.

Parmar, Maya. “Memorialising Forty Years since Idi Amin’s Expulsion: Digital ‘Memory Mania’ to the ‘Right to Be Forgotten.’” South Asian Popular Culture 12 (2014): 1–14. Print.

“Revealed: Last Letter of Afzal Guru to His Family.” The Vox Kashmir. The Vox Kashmir, 17 Feb. 2013. Web. 3 Apr. 2014. <http://www.thevoxkashmir.com/2013/02/17/revealed-last-letter-of-afzal-guru-to-his-family/>.

Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. Print.

Roy, Arundhati. 13 Dec., a Reader: The Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament. New York, 2006. Print.

Taussig, Michael. The Nervous System. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print.

Waheed, Mirza. The Collaborator. New Delhi: Penguin, 2012. Print.

———. “India’s Message to Kashmir: The Noose Can Extend beyond the Gallows.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 15 Feb. 2013. Web. 3 Apr. 2014. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/15/india-kashmir-afzal-guru-hanging>.

Ananya Jahanara Kabir is professor of English literature at King’s College London. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.

Posted May 2014

10 December 2013. The streets of Santiago in Chile are crowded, as they are every day. Only some police detachments distributed along the streets are evidence that this is not a usual Tuesday. You can breathe the tension in the city. It’s just one day before the fortieth anniversary of the state coup in Chile that occurred on 11 September 1973. The government and police forces are alert to possible demonstrations or protests. At 8:49 a.m., twelve hundred people interrupt their walk and lie down on the streets, creating a two-kilometer line running through the main street of the city from Palacio de La Moneda (the government building that was bombed by military forces during the state coup) to Plaza Italia (one of the main squares in the city). People lie down for eleven minutes, evoking “the 11th,” as Chileans typically refer to the date of the coup. Present bodies (or should we say a present collective assembled body) conjure the missing bodies of the twelve hundred detenidos desaparecidos during the dictatorship in Chile. Hundreds of bodies mobilize to expose what Chilean society insists on forgetting. The city stops for a minute. Police forces are perplexed; they don’t know how to proceed. The line is too long—there are too many prone bodies. People don’t know what is happening. Silence. At 9:00 a.m., the hundreds of people rise and continue on their way through the city. This performance is called #quererNOver, and I’m its “author.”¹

In what follows I attempt to draw preliminary links between #quererNOver and the notions of trauma, memory, and vulnerability. I named this performance #quererNOver since it seemed to me that it could somehow mirror the attitude of Chileans regarding the desaparecidos: forty years later, some people stop and observe the performance, trying to understand what this is about (as many people still battle to establish the meaning of the missing), whereas others decide to continue on their way, refusing to see.²

During September 2013 there was a saturation of images of and discourses on the dictatorship. The politics of memory raised in the fortieth anniversary of the state coup in Chile was profoundly tricky and perverse. Chilean society was tempted to think that some kind of disclosure was occurring after forty years. To my view, this was just an illusion. The sudden explosion of memorial gestures was actually creating a sort of fog effect to heighten the idea that everything that happened was already the past. These images and discourses promoted the idea of a new Chile that could look backward to a terrible but concluded and closed past. While open-access television almost obsessively broadcasted documentaries, soap operas, and reportages about the dictatorship, many politicians tried to advance the idea that after forty years Chilean society was ready to move forward. The polemical (but necessary) gesture of President Sebastián Piñera’s decision to close Penal Cordillera (an absurd prison with a spa-like infrastructure [it included individual cottages and tennis courts, among other luxurious privileges] for those condemned for violations of human rights) contributed to the illusion of closure. This narrative raised the fortieth anniversary as a milestone that could change the way we thought and confronted our past.

To my view, this explosion of memorializing gestures responded to a sort of compulsion of repetition typical of trauma. As Cathy Caruth describes, the traumatized “carry an impossible history within them or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely process” (108). All the images, TV programs, and political discourses were other ways of iterating trauma, symptoms of an “impossible history.” This saturation didn’t contribute to reparation but remained in a reiterative loop where we all could see what happened but were unable to learn about our past. In Chile, this loop is exacerbated by the lack of justice that impedes any sort of closure.³

Few people in the media spoke about the fact that we still don’t know the whereabouts of twelve hundred Chileans. Some right-wing politicians and ex-collaborators with the regime took the commemoration as an opportunity to insist that the desaparecidos were products of a few radical military forces that acted on their own initiative. Many generals have sworn during these years that they were not aware of the violations of human rights at the time—inconceivable, considering the hierarchical structure of the armed forces. This unacceptable minimization and cover-up motivated me to create and promote #quererNOver as a way of contesting denial. A two-kilometer line of bodies displayed in the city intended to challenge the narrative of desaparecidos as a marginal effect, to give evidence that the missing were the result of a clear state policy. The name of the performance is provocative: if you claim you didn’t know about the desaparecidos forty years ago, then you just didn’t want to see.

#quererNOver intended to advance a way to overtake the vulnerability produced by the community’s diminished sense of agency since the state terror, a vulnerability that persists to some degree in our society. For eleven minutes, bodies assembled to remark, remember, and resist these echoes of the regime. For eleven minutes, a new body arose, one that allowed a new sense of collective agency: we can do something about our past; we can construct (other) memories together.

The line was made up of unknown people that united under a political scope. This assembled body somehow dismantled vulnerability, understood as the isolation of a singular body. #quererNOver reclaimed that condition of dependency of the body to other bodies. As Judith Butler points out, “despite its clear boundaries, or perhaps precisely by virtue of those very boundaries, the body is defined by the relations that makes its own life and action possible.” In the context of the performance, the dependency on other bodies offers the possibility of political agency and the empowerment of individuals.

#quererNOver also restituted the street as a political and aesthetic arena. One of Pinochet’s first bandos (“proclamations”) prohibited gatherings of more than three people in public spaces. Thus this collective action not only occupied the current street but also symbolically occupied the street that forty years ago was out of bounds. Even if we’ve witnessed many massive demonstrations in Chile in recent years (e.g., the Revolución de los Pinguinos in 2006 and the enormous student protests in 2011), the echo of the dictatorship is still somehow present. While I was organizing #quererNOver, many people asked me whether we had permission to be on the streets. Some didn’t participate since they were afraid of the police reaction. The official authorization was an issue I discussed with my collaborators. At last, I decided that we wouldn’t ask for permission. Many reasons supported this decision. First, I defended the political gesture to recuperate the right to occupy the streets. Second, I wanted the action to provoke a surprise effect and to be ephemeral. Since the action lasted only eleven minutes, the television channels and many journalists couldn’t arrive in time to tape or photograph it. This inability to capture the event produced a phantasmagoric presence that somehow mirrored the situation of detenidos desaparecidos who are “not-present”—that is, who are part of what I think of as the “no-presence,” a liminal state between presence and absence. Detenidos desaparecidos are not absent; to be absent, you have to be somewhere else. The crucial fact is that the missing bodies are nowhere, they have no place, a paradoxical condition that makes it hard to talk, write, stage, and represent them. As Diana Taylor points out in Disappearing Acts, thinking and representing the desaparecidos implies traps and complexities that require us to question, “[H]ow to think and write about these bodies? What do these invisible bodies mean? Who determines the meaning?” (147).

#quererNOver was an attempt to mirror this paradoxical condition: the action constructed a presence in the city that immediately disappeared. The performance intended to articulate the material presence of the here and now with the nonpresence of the desaparecidos. The twelve hundred bodies lying in the streets were not representing the missing; rather, they exemplified and communicated the nonpresence of the desaparecidos and the strategies that supported their oblivion.

The performativity of #quererNOver allowed a disruption at many levels. It disrupted the material scenario of the city, which, as one participant said, “stopped for eleven minutes to remember.” Materially and symbolically a new city was created, one that could include the memory of a painful past. Something that called my attention that day was the opposition between the noise of the city and the silence of our action. People walking by could choose to continue in the city’s noise (and thus #quererNOver), to stop and observe, or even to stop and join the line. In any of these cases the line of persons lying down disrupted and dislocated the normal functioning of the city.

#quererNOver also disrupted the way in which the memory of the state coup was being produced at the moment. It stood up to the apparent closure and served to remind people and reinforce the idea that some injuries are still open, that justice has not been done, and that there are still hundreds of Chileans missing. It implicitly posed the questions, Can we still talk about reconciliation? What kind of reconciliation is possible?

The modality by which this disruption took place was performativity, which Butler defines as “a chiastic relation between body and language.” The efficacy of the action, its impact in Chile and overseas, is due, to my mind, to this alternative embodied way to remember and to resist hegemonic narratives. The twelve hundred bodies resisted the power of words that naturalized indifference and oblivion. #quererNOver was sustained by bodily performativity as an alternative to the verbal and visual disposition that predominated in the commemoration of the state coup, and this other way of remembering and commemorating resulted in an alternative politics of memory.

In addition, #quererNOver gave citizens the opportunity to manifest their resistance to the way the memorialization process was being carried out. Many participants declared after the action that they were willing to participate in the reconstruction of memory but didn’t know how. The fortieth anniversary reduced the space of participation to social media, where people could, in tweet-length reflections, make their opinions known. This outlet proved to be insufficient; people felt the need to participate more actively in the reconstruction of their own past. #quererNOver encountered the desire to participate in the memorialization process not only virtually but also corporeally. Participation functioned at various stages: beforehand, in collaborating on the project and recruiting participants; during, in the material action of lying down; and afterward, in the spreading of thousands of pictures and videos made by the participants that expanded the life of the performance. Participants were very heterogeneous in terms of age, gender, and origin, which means that the desire to participate transcended Chilean society. As the author of #quererNOver, I saw my most important contribution as that of interpreting this need and drive.

The bodily performance of #quererNOver allowed participants, to some extent, to surpass the vulnerability of a traumatic (present) past. The performance drew a scar in the city, one that is not always visible but that persists, haunting our present. That day, twelve hundred people resisted the narrative that intended to bury the bodies of the desaparecidos in a fictional past and stood up, or should we say lay down, to bring into presence the nonpresence of the missing bodies. #quererNOver resisted vulnerability and, by assembling and mobilizing bodies, empowered subjects to regain the possibility to construct an alternative memory of the past.

The gesture not only obliged society to remember but also allowed participants to connect with the terrifying experience of disappearance. As one of the participants wrote:

Lying in the cold pavement looking at the sky made me think about all those people, how they lived their last days and how they died. I never thought about that before. Feeling the indifference of some people in the streets who didn’t even stop to look at us, I was able to feel in my own body the painful crusade that the relatives of the missing have passed during the last forty years while pleading for some information that may reveal where the bodies of their beloved are. (my trans.)

Notes

1. #quererNOver can be translated as “wanting not to see.” You can visit the performance blog (www.querernover.wordpress.com) or my Web site (www.mariajosecontreras.com) for more information. The problem of authorship is particularly relevant in this performance. Even if I had the original idea, the performance was constructed and produced by the participation and collaboration of many people. I would like to acknowledge my close collaborators, Andrea Pelegri, Pablo Dubott, and Ivan Smirnow; the social media ambassadors who helped spread the call; and of course everyone who participated that day.↩
2. The denial of the violations of human rights during the dictatorship is strong in Chilean society, as many scholars have noted (see, e.g., Stern; Demaria; Nicholls). ↩
3. According to a report from the Universidad Diego Portales, as of May 2012, just seventy-six ex-agents of Pinochet’s regime were condemned, and of those only sixty-eight were in prison (Informe). ↩

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics.” Digital file.

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and Culture. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1996. Print.

Demaria, Cristina. Semiotica e memoria. Analisi del post-conflitto. Roma: Carocci, 2006. Print.

Informe anual sobre derechos humanos en Chile: 2013. Centro de Derechos Humanos. Centro de Derechos Humanos, U Diego Portales, 2013. Web. 4 Apr. 2014.

Nicholls, Nancy. “Chile: Las paradojas de la memoria entre el boom y la negación.” Puentes 22 (2007): 34–39. Print.

Stern, Steve J. “De la memoria suelta a la memoria emblemática: Hacia el recordar y el olvidar como proceso histórico (Chile, 1973–1998).” Memoria para un nuevo siglo. Chile, miradas a la segunda mitad del sigo XX. Comp. Mario Garcés et al. Santiago: Lom, 2000. 11–33. Print.

Taylor, Diana. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War.” Durham: Duke, 1997. Print.

María José Contreras Lorenzini is a performance artist and theater director and assistant professor at the Escuela de Teatro at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.

Posted May 2014

“When are you going to stop considering that the weakness and the mistakes of others [condone and] account for your own prerogatives?”

—Ghassan Khanafani, “Returning to Haifa”

Qualifying Times

Qualifying times—for example, as “vulnerable times”—implies, among other things, an effort to demarcate an era, our era, from a previous one, but also to call our attention to the era’s duration. Epochal vulnerability, although often unendurable, is produced simultaneously as durable and endurable. Making the unendurable both durable and endurable is the essence of regime-made disasters.1 The framework of our conversation today, as I understand it, is an expression of the effort to point to a state of affairs that is overwhelmingly and rapidly deteriorating, as well as an effort to instill a sense of urgency, by qualifying a historical time with the same adjective that for the last decade and a half has been applied to so many things in our lives—from workers’ living conditions to the environment.

Two configurations of time are implied here, both anticipating the future:

• constant escalation: predicting that the future emanates from the present; that, in comparison with it, the morrow can only be worse; and that intervention in the course of that morrow is doomed to fail
• terminability of the actual present and insistence on the structural openness of the future, on its indeterminability and malleability, as a way to valorize human agency and the capacity to generate change and imagine a different state of affairs

If we consider that such hope for change is no less recursive than this type of qualifying times2—a recurring eruption of hope that mirrors the recurring failure to bring about change—the two configurations of time may not be that different. Both are expressions of a dead end for action under the current political regimes. The anticipated future, the desired new beginning that may or may not be achieved, traps us in a sovereign time, the temporality of a new, self-constituted beginning that institutes its power and authority as a fait accompli by making the past experiences of the governed population politically obsolete. The necessary—though insufficient—condition for change is the reversal of the arrow of time to make the past a point of departure for any discussion of the present, as a way to address the outcomes of modern times and modern sovereignty that were shaped by colonialism and made possible by the legalized theft of land, property, bodies, and the past of the governed population.

When we ask whether our times really are more vulnerable now than they were before, the answer is not evident. A few years ago, challenged by Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, I tried to analyze and frame separately many of the elements of the political regimes Arendt described, and then I reassembled them for display in a museum. The result was the Museum of Regime-Made Disasters.

Every object in it was in fact a record of vulnerability. The abundance of precedents coming from many corners of the colonial world and their recurrence outside and independent of the political regime that first used them demonstrate that all those regimes have a blueprint in common, a blueprint that should be sought and understood. It consists, I believe, of the existence and reproduction of a differential body politic that is made up of distinct groups that are ruled differently and creates differential vulnerability among the governed population.

The differential body politic has lasted long enough to make us forget its historical contingency and the fact that it reflects not the nature of a political regime but rather a specific historical formation of it. The only way to imagine an escape from the dead end created by those omnipresent differential sovereign regimes is to open the past and reclaim past experiences shut off by the temporality of the “new beginning” imposed by the sovereign power. Sovereign temporality has excluded forms of slowing down, redistribution, reparation, amendment, compensation, and restructuring of the discrete body politic and its relation with others.

Such opening and the potential histories it enables would help us imagine a new civil contract with all those who fell victim to—or are descendants of victims of—the great colonial theft. That theft is so often ignored today, along with the vulnerable bodies and precarious lives of past generations whose consent was never sought and whose ruin we have inherited.

Perpetrators and Victims

Pointing the arrow of time back does not mean looking for a single origin of the many kinds of sovereign regimes that practice differential ruling. It is rather a search for several historical moments in which violence was used to rule people differentially and oppress their resistance, in which violence was politically consolidated or reconsolidated, reaffirmed, and acknowledged as legitimate rule. In the past few years, I have been working on two such moments: the French Revolution and the transformation of Palestine into Israel. Different as they may be, these are two moments of constitutive violence in which a regime of differential rule was established. My first assumption has been that in both moments, dispossession and the creation of new subjects of oppression were accompanied by the shaping of other subjects as perpetrators. Thus the formation of a class of victims went with the formation of a class of perpetrators. My second assumption, implied by the first, is that perpetrators are not born but made. Isolating victims and their vulnerability is therefore problematic, not because it is the history of others that we are not allowed to narrate so as to give a voice to the oppressed but because the oppressed do not have a history apart from our own—apart from my own. In this history, we citizens—and I—are perpetrators, descendants and heirs of perpetrators; in this history, we—and I—were made perpetrators, inherited, naturalized, and transmitted modes of perpetration.

I articulate this with the help of Olympe de Gouges, an eighteenth-century French philosopher, and Ghassan Khanafani, a modern-day Palestinian writer. Almost four years after Louis XVI was dethroned, the men elected to the General Assembly decided to vote on executing the king. The General Assembly was the product of a new form of differential body politic, from which women, the poor, and the black were excluded already in August 1789. Shortly before the vote, de Gouges published a speech in defense of the king. She acknowledged his crimes but argued that the fault of monarchy should not be attributed solely to the monarch: “His ancestors served a draught of ills to France; unfortunately for him, the cup broke in his hands and spilled onto his head.” The fault of monarchy lies also with “our ancestors,” who for centuries recognized monarchy as legitimate power. “We should not punish him, for the ignorance of our ancestors and the crimes of his ancestors. . . . Beheading a king does not suffice to kill him—he lives long after his death, but if he survives the downfall of monarchy, he is truly dead.”3 Understanding that even monarchy is a political regime that should be understood as a complex of relations among the entire body politic, she proposed a different social contract, one that would reject sovereignty’s right to take lives and close off the past. In this civil contract, the king would be allowed to live and have the chance to learn how to live among his people without occupying further the position of a perpetrator, while the recently emancipated, though free to take his life, would have the chance not to become perpetrators themselves.

Khanafani’s novella “Returning to Haifa” is set in 1967, when Palestinian refugees living in the territories newly occupied by Israel were allowed to visit the places from which they had been expelled in 1948. Sa’id and Safiyya, a Palestinian couple, visit the home in Haifa that had been theirs. Miriam, a Holocaust survivor and now a Jewish Israeli citizen who lives in their house, lets them in. She moved there with her husband shortly after the Palestinian couple was uprooted and expelled. Sa’id and Safiyya have come to Haifa hoping to learn about their child, Khaldun, whom they left at home that April morning in 1948, not realizing that neither of them would be able to return. The abandoned baby was adopted by Miriam and her husband, who gave him a Hebrew name—Dov. Toward midnight, Dov enters the house, wearing his Israeli army uniform. When he is told that these unexpected guests are his biological parents, he responds with anger. He blames them for leaving Haifa and being responsible for their own plight: “You’re all weak! Weak! You’re bound by heavy chains of backwardness and paralysis!” (185).

After a moment of shock, his biological father collects himself and speaks to Dov, not to refute the accusation that the Palestinians are weak but to resist a civil contract founded on abuse of the weak by the strong. Sa’id urges Dov to recognize the right not to abuse others, the right not to become a perpetrator, even if becoming a perpetrator is precisely what is being expected of him. Sa’id says:

My wife asks if the fact that we’re cowards gives you the right to be this way. As you can see, she innocently recognizes that we were cowards. From that standpoint you are correct. But that doesn’t justify anything for you. Two wrongs do not make a right. If that were the case, then what happened to Iphrat and Miriam in Auschwitz was right. When are you4 going to stop considering that the weakness and the mistakes of others [condone and] account for your own prerogatives? . . . I know that one day you will realize these things, and you’ll realize that the greatest crime any human being can commit, whoever he may be, is to believe even for one moment that the weakness and mistakes of others give him the right to exist at their expense and justify his own mistakes and crimes. (185–86)

Had Dov exercised the right not to become a perpetrator, he would have renewed the failed efforts of his adoptive Jewish mother to do the same in 1948, when, for a brief moment, she tried to abstain from taking part in the dispossession and expulsion of her Palestinian neighbors.

Although failed, these moments are part of what has prevented sovereigns from totally consolidating the past as a fait accompli. They should be read as a legacy that we today can use, and should use, to exercise the right not to be perpetrators.

Notes

1. On regime-made disaster, see Azoulay. ↩

2. As an earlier example, see Arendt’s use of the notion “dark times” (Men). It is parallel to her constant effort to imagine the human capacity to bring about a new beginning and to act even though theoreticians of revolutions speak about the decreasing chances of revolution as the “destructive capacities of weapons at the unique disposition of governments” (On Violence 47). ↩

3. These quotations are from an unpublished translation by Michael Sawyer. For the original text, see Gouges 191–94. ↩

4. Karen E. Riley, the translator of Khanafani’s novella into English, emphasizes that the “you” in this sentence is in the plural. Thus, she argues, Sa’id addresses here not only Dov but also the Israeli Jews as a group (Khanafani 196). ↩

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. Men in Dark Times. New York: Mariner, 1970. Print.

———. On Violence. San Diego: Harcourt, 1969. Print.

———. The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego: Harcourt, 1976. Print.

Azoulay, Ariella. “A Tour of the Museum of Regime-Made Disasters.” Trans. Tal Haran. Humanity 4.3 (2013): 345–63. Print.

Gouges, Olympe de. Écrits politiques, 1792–1793. Paris: Indigo, 2007. Print. Des femmes dans l’histoire.

Khanafani, Ghassan. Palestine’s Children: “Returning to Haifa” and Other Stories. Trans. Barbara Harlow and Karen E. Riley. Boulder: Rienner, 2000. Print.

Ariella Azoulay is assistant professor at Brown University. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.

Posted March 2014

In August 2013, a few months before the twentieth anniversary of their armed uprising against the Mexican government on 1 January 1994, the Zapatistas decided to throw a party. Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés sent out word via the Zapatista Web site to “quienes se hayan sentido convocados” (“those who feel summoned”) to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the five caracoles (“autonomous municipalities”—literally, “snail shells”), each with its own rotating governing organization of women and men, the Council of Good Government (Junta de Buen Gobierno [JBG]) (“Fechas”).

The caracoles provide basic services to the Zapatista communities, who are predominantly Mayan and receive nothing but trouble from the Mexican government. On the rainy night of the party, vans, trucks, and cars lined up far along the road that goes past Oventic, the caracol closest to San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. A sign on the road said:

ESTA USTED EN TERRITORIO

ZAPATISTA EN REBELDIA

“Aquí manda el pueblo

y el gobierno obedece”

 

YOU ARE IN ZAPATISTA REBEL TERRITORY:

“Here the people decide, and the government obeys.”

Past the unassuming metal gates that separate Oventic from the rest of Mexico, music reverberated from the loudspeakers. Standing in the pouring rain, the Zapatista men and women wearing ski masks and paliacates (“scarves”) asked people for their IDs. We, the visitors, waited under the tarp outside the Che Guevara gift shop and snack bar that bridges the caracol and the highway. Families and groups of indigenous peoples steadily entered. Some bought soft drinks and food at the entrance before moving past us toward the party. Alcohol is prohibited in all Zapatista communities. While some Mayans wore Western clothing—pants and sweatshirts—many were dressed in the native clothing of their various villages. The women from Chamula wore, against the cold and rain, their local thick black lambskin skirts and lovely embroidered tops under thin acrylic sweaters in all colors. Those from Zinacantán wore the beautiful blue-and-purple tops of their village. There were many other patterns from other regions, but I could not identify them (see Morris). To this day, the embroidery communicates meaning among indigenous peoples capable of deciphering them—“hidden transcripts,” as James C. Scott calls them (4–5), but in textiles. Bodily practices and the aesthetics of the everyday, for the Zapatistas, are never removed from politics. Sartorial style, especially the ski mask or the paliacate, the red bandana they wear, identified them all as Zapatista.

On view, from where I waited, were the contradictions and promise of the globalization and alter-globalization moments. Those who enjoy the economic and social mobility to travel come to visit those who fight to stay on their lands; Mayans in traditional clothing buy Coca-Cola in the Che Guevara snack bar while we Westerners buy their embroideries. The man who took our information wanted to know where we were from and why we wanted to be there. “To celebrate,” I said.

Indigenous resistance strategies have changed and adapted over the decades, some would say centuries, since the resisters started down el camino largo (“long road”) to autonomy. The Zapatistas have tried and experienced everything: the grassroots organizing of the 1980s; the armed warfare of early 1994; negotiations with the “bad” government, which produced the San Andrés Accords in 1996 (San Andres Accords), guaranteeing autonomy and rights to indigenous peoples; loss of faith in the Mexican government when it failed to honor the accords; the formation of an alternative “good” government and autonomous administrative centers in 2003; national marches throughout the country to make visible the Zapatista claims to justice and dignity (Otro jugador); closing the caracoles off from the world; opening them to national and international supporters; and now the invitation to celebrate and attend their escuelitas (“little schools”). Thousands of visitors came to Chiapas that August to live in the caracoles for a week and learn the Zapatista ways of living and thinking.1 The resistance movement works both on the macro and micro political levels: the celebration testified to the years of armed resistance against the Mexican government while the escuelitas worked in the micro arena of everyday politics in people’s homes.

Having finally been admitted, we walked down a slippery road to the official ceremony. A long line of civic representatives from the various Zapatista communities walked through the rain and stepped onto the platform—about thirty or forty men and women in traditional indigenous dress. Several young Zapatistas marched with the Mexican and EZLN flags (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional [“Zapatista Army of National Liberation”]) around the courtyard and stood at attentipon. The national anthem came over the loudspeakers, and young Zapatistas raised their arms in military salute. They too are “mexicanos al grito de guerra” (“Mexicans at the cry of war,” Mexico’s belligerent national anthem). The opening ceremony was all about military gestures. The Zapatistas, vulnerable not only as predominantly indigenous people but also as people living in active opposition to the national government, know that they need to be ready.

I focus here on vulnerability not as a condition or state of being but rather as a doing and a relationship of power. The Zapatistas’ vulnerability has been structurally imposed and economically organized from colonial times until the present. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was simply the last straw. But they adapt, they say, “para no dejar de ser” (“in order not to cease to be”) historical beings (“Nosotros”). The bottom line, using John Holloway’s terminology, is that indigenous communities’ “power-to” live, work, and flourish has been under constant attack by the government’s “power-over” their life, work, and well-being (12). How can resistance counter this making vulnerable?

The Zapatista’s political project, I saw for the first time, was not indigenous in form or content; it was the age-old struggle for good government. The entrance to the rebel territory marks the line between two interconnected political systems—both performative, both masked. One, the bad neoliberal government (I agree with the Zapatistas that it is bad), is characterized by violence, corruption, and greed. The other is good in that it examines the basic mechanisms of existing power—power not as a thing one has but as a practice of social relations—and asks, Who exerts the power? Who decides? Who gets left out? They then transform those practices and relationships into their core principles:

• • participatory assemblies: “The people decide.”
  • nondiscrimination: Zapatismo is nonnormative. Although the Zapatistas were long exploited as indígenas, their strategy refuses identity politics, be it ethnic, religious, gender, sexual, class, or linguistic. Their goal, again, is not about being but about doing, about joining the struggle for indigenous rights.

• • collaboration: “Para todos, todo. Para nosotros, nada” (“For everyone, everything. For us, nothing”). Zapatismo values individual rights but acknowledges that individuals cannot do it alone and must exist as part of a collective: “Solos no podemos” (“Alone we can do nothing”).

Resistance here does not mean a rejection of government or a proposed outside to the political. It is a durational performance, and the Zapatistas are masters of the genre. By durational, I mean that the Maya, like many other Native American groups, have weathered attacks for hundreds of years. Durational is also the defining feature of the Zapatista resistance. Many sporadic uprisings and acts of contestation by indigenous peoples take place constantly throughout the Americas—we can think of the Idle No More movement in Canada, the ongoing Mapuche conflict in the southern tip of Chile and Argentina—but the Zapatistas have led an armed uprising and created their own communities and governing structures. Their struggle has eclipsed, as scholars belonging to other Native groups have acknowledged (e.g., Rivera Cusicanqui), other movements both in terms of scale and length of rebellion. The Zapatistas refuse to cede both the mechanics and the idea of state to self-serving political parties (Abrams). They will not be othered. They acknowledge the historical-political causes of their marginalization but manage its effects and affects. The anonymity imposed on them is performed powerfully through their masks; the silencing enforced on them is enacted through their massive silent marches. They call attention to their mask as one more in a complex system of masking, where politicians disguise themselves and their deeds behind imperatives of the state. When delegates from the Mexican government refused to negotiate with the Zapatistas unless they removed their masks, the Zapatistas answered, “But the state is always masked.” At least, the Zapatistas said, the Zapatistas knew that they were masked (Taussig 246).

That the performative force of these gestures resonates nationally and internationally is the only reason most of them are alive today.

Zapatistas have taken over the functions associated with state systems (Abrams 58): health care, education, management of resources, self-defense and control of the territory. They claim the strategy, the proper (propre), the space and time that belong to them, which as de Certeau puts it, “[serve] as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it” (xix). They decide who enters their territory, when, and under what circumstances. They control the entrances and the exits. Having handed over our papers, we wait for permission to proceed. We are entering their time zone.

Although the struggle to form a good government is not indigenous, the value system through which that struggle takes place most certainly is. Zapatistas inhabit an age-old Mayan system of equivalences, deep-rooted connectivity, and mutual recognition. Human beings, corn, snails, mountains, rain, and all else have their ch’ulel, the animation and interconnectedness of all things, human and nonhuman. A Zapatista who met with me during those days put it this way: “Ch’ulel refers to the life in everything. It’s the presence that constructs and completes everything that exists in the universe and that gives it its importance,” its dignity and “grandeur.” Mesoamericans started developing corn ten thousand years ago, and as a consequence they are the people of corn.

Monsanto wants to grow, not kill, corn, the transnational corporation claims, but it will kill corn’s ch’ulel. Genetically modified corn will become one more dead thing in the capitalist production of dead things. The challenge is “how to create a world based on mutual recognition of human dignity, on the formation of social relations which are not power relations” (Holloway 8). One way has been through the affirmation of an inclusive we, a nosotros that dialogues with other nosotros, other groups of people able to represent themselves. In our meaning-making systems we might imagine this communication as a discussion of occupiers from Occupy Wall Street with other Occupy groups that have organized themselves autonomously.

The caracol, as a social formation, enacts the system of equivalences. The paintings and sayings of each caracol encapsulate an entire worldview. Images of snails, often wearing humorous Zapatista masks, make their way into most of the murals, paintings, and textiles. Not only do the Zapatistas honor the slow and steady pace of the snail, the patience and expenditure required for all doing, but the snail shell serves as the design layout for their communal lands that spiral open from tight administrative centers. The unassuming snail also represents war in the classical Mayan glyphs,2 the war the Maya have long waged against colonial and imperialist masters and now with the bankers of those masters (Chase Manhattan made the elimination of the Zapatistas a precondition for a bailout after the economic disaster precipitated by NAFTA in 1995).3

At the celebration, a woman identified only as a member of the JBG addressed the crowd in Spanish: “Compañeras, compañeros, hermanas y hermanos de la sociedad civil, nacional e internacional” (“Companions, brothers and sisters of the national and international community”).4 Gender parity has been central to the movement even before the Revolutionary Law for Women passed in 1993. This parity is reflected not only in all governing roles, official positions, and educational practices but also in the very language: no word with a masculine ending for a person stands without its feminine counterpart, so hermanas (“sisters”) accompanies hermanos (“brothers”). The compañera from the JBG spoke of the struggles the movement has endured over the years: “It hasn’t been easy, these ten years of practice and building our autonomy. . . . It hasn’t been easy for many reasons, such as the lack of experience or lack of training in governing and self-governing.” But the need for resistance continues, she made clear, confronted as the Zapatistas are by a government that continues to deny them rights and liberty and that wants to take their lands. She said that they continue to learn how to resist and work for democracy, though the fruits of the struggle will not be reaped in their lifetime. She asked people of good heart and goodwill that compose civil society to support their struggle.

Was she referring to us, the visitors?

After the compañera finished speaking, another member of the JBG from another region took the microphone and delivered the same speech in Tzeltal. When he was done, another delivered it in Tzotzil. The speeches seemed interminable to me in the downpour, and I looked down at my ruined shoes in dismay.

Soon the speeches were over, and the flags were marched ceremoniously out of the central space. The next few minutes were all “¡Viva!,” “Long live the Escuelita Zapatista!,” “Long live national and international civil society!,” “Viva the grassroots communities!,” “¡Viva el subcomandante insurgente Marcos!,” “¡Viva el subcomandante insurgente Moysés!,” “¡Viva el comite clandestino revolucionario indígena!” (“Viva the clandestine indigenous revolutionary committee!”), “¡Viva el Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional!,” “¡Viva Chiapas!,” “¡Viva México!” The vivas got louder and louder. Joyous music started up and was followed by clapping. Soon all the representatives had marched off the podium, a long line of women and men walking single file, one after another, in their fine indigenous clothing. They moved quickly, though formally, through the pouring rain up the long road to the entrance of the caracol. The music, very tinny and brassy corridos (“ballads”) set to polka-type beats, sang of heroic opponents to bad governments.

Then music came on over the speakers and an emcee called people onto the basketball court, now a dance floor. Couples came forward with black plastic tarps over their heads, ski masks covering their faces, and moved slowly, rhythmically to the music. The people I had come with joined in, dancing raucously and happily in the company.

To return to the Zapatista’s question: What were we doing there? Were we tourists? Maybe some of us there were wannabe revolutionaries. Another way to put it is that the party brought together a broad range of people, many of them from other activist networks and grassroots movements. Those accepting Moises’s invitation became a WE by attending.5 This performative gesture initiated a dialogue among these WE, a dialogue that protected the Zapatistas from extermination but that inspired us as well. Activists from decolonial, antiglobalization, environmental, and other movements continue to be inspired by the Zapatistas. WE also serves as a vital addition, a third part, to the binary established by the good and bad governments, in the creation of the civil society that determines who lives and who dies. Systems produce vulnerability, and other systems, networks, and equivalencies can be mobilized to offset some of the debilitating effects and affects. I came to “listen and learn,” as Subcomandante Marcos good-naturedly asked of us (Subcomandante Marcos), but I know too how much I have to unlearn in order to listen.

The rain, the mud, the poverty does not seem to quell or diminish the pride or determination of the Zapatistas. According to accounts they cite, Zapatista communities have achieved higher standards of health and education than other indigenous communities in Mexico. But Chiapas is still, twenty years after the uprising, one of the poorest states in the nation. It has more inequality now than then and higher rates of illiteracy (Ríos). Carlos Monsiváis, writing as he accompanied the Zapatistas on their 2001 march for dignity, noted that given the discrimination in Mexico, the obvious and indisputable call for education, food, health, and land seems utopian.6 The more the Zapatistas move forward, the farther the ideals of social justice seem to get away from them. But they keep moving. My experience in the caracol near San Cristobal de las Casas suggests to me that the sense of dignity palpable in the Zapatistas offsets many hardships. As they showed us, they make their own decisions and rules. Those who seek to interact with them need to abide by those decisions and rules. When the Zapatistas allow or invite us to enter their territory, they are hoping that we will act as witnesses and transmitters of their existence, their resistance, and their worldview. I say worldview rather than ideology because they are pragmatists, not ideologues. The evening celebration demonstrated that all indigenous peoples committed to resistance against bad government are welcome, regardless of the religious, linguistic, and regional tensions that often separate groups. Indigenous Catholics, Evangelicals, and even Muslims may fight one another throughout the state, but here they danced together.

And all night and throughout the week, the Mexican air force buzzed the caracoles, just in case we had forgotten that they could.

(Painted on the wall in Oventic, Chiapas)

Avanzo un metro, se aleja un metro

Avanzo dos metros, se aleja dos metros

Avanzo diez metros, se aleja diez metros

Sé que nunca lo alcanzaré

Sé que es una utopía

Que es un sueño

Entonces…

¿Para qué sirven, los sueños, las utopías?

¡Para avanzar!

 

I advance a meter and it advances a meter

I advance two meters, and it advances two meters.

I advance ten meters, and it advances ten meters

I know I will never catch up

I know it’s a utopia

That it’s a dream

So

What good are dreams? utopias?

To keep us advancing! (my trans.)

Notes

This essay is dedicated to José Esteban Muñoz, friend, colleague, and a cruiser of utopias.

1. The Zapatista Web site is http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2013/03/17/fechas-y-otras-cosas-para-la-escuelita-zapatista/. For more background information on the Zapatista movement, see Womack; Saldaña-Portillo. ↩

2. Stross notes the importance of the land and water snails in Mayan glyphs and the significance in their association with the earth and also with war: “Because both land snails and water snails are found in the Maya area and have different names, one cannot be sure whether we are dealing with the snail as earth or as underworld, but the ‘war’ expression probably indicates a land snail” (105). ↩

3. “The [Mexican] government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate [its] effective control of the national territory and of security policy” (Roett). ↩

4. I translated this statement from a video of the event; see also Gil and Mandujano. ↩

5. The Zapatistas and the artists working with them refer to these collectivities as WE. ↩

6. “Reconocimiento de los derechos a la educación, la vivienda, la salud, la tierra (a fuerza de discriminación, lo obvio, lo indiscutible, se vuelvo lo utópico)” (34). ↩

Works Cited

Abrams, Philip. “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State.” 1977. Journal of Historical Sociology 1.1 (1988): 58–89. Print.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Randall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Print.

“Fechas y otras cosas para la escuelita zapatista.” Enlace Zapatista. Enlace Zapatista, n.d. Web. 21 Feb. 2014.

Gil, José, and Isaín Mandujano. “Una década de caracoles.” Proceso 25 Aug. 2013: 34–36. Print.

Holloway, John. Change the World without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today. London: Pluto, 2002. Print.

Monsiváis, Carlos. EZLN: Documentos y comunicados 5. Círculo Ometeotl. Círculo Ometeotl, 2000–01. Web. 22 Feb. 2014. Colección problemas de México.

Morris, Walter. A Textile Guide to the Highlands of Chiapas / Guia textil de los altos de Chiapas. Chicago: Independent Publishers Group, 2012. Print.

“Nosotros: Interview with a Zapatista.” Interview by Diana Taylor and Jacques Servan. San Cristobal de las Casas, Aug. 2013.

El otro jugador: La caravana de la dignidad indígena. Ed. Ramón Vera Herrera. Mexico: La Jornada, 2001. Print.

Ríos, Viridiana. “Chiapas, peor que ayer.” Nexos. Nexos, 1 Jan. 2014. Web. 22 Feb. 2014.

Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. “Micropolítica y zonas de autonomía en los Andes.” Andrés Bello Chair Lecture, King Juan Carlos of Spain Center, New York U, Feb. 2014. Address.

Roett, Riordan. “The Chase Manhattan Memo—Feb 9, 1995.” New Stuff. The Thing, n.d. Web. 3 Mar. 2014.

Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina. The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print.

San Andres Accords, January 18, 1996. Trans. Rosalva Bermudez-Ballin. The Struggle Site. Flag.blackened.net, n.d. Web. 21 Feb. 2014.

Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990. Print.

Stross, Brian. “Classical Maya Directional Glyphs.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 1.1 (1991): 97–114. University of Texas. Web. 22 Feb. 2014. <http://www.utexas.edu/courses/stross/papers/DirectionalGlyphs.pdf>.

Subcomandante Marcos. “Malas y no tan malas noticias.” Enlace Zapatista. Enlace Zapatista, Nov. 2013. Web. 26 Feb. 2014. <http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2013/11/03/malas-y-no-tan-malas-noticias/>.

Taussig, Michael. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Print.

Womack, John, Jr. Rebellion in Chiapas: A Historical Reader. New York: New, 1999. Print.

Diana Taylor is University Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.

Posted March 2014

I want to approach the question of vulnerability from the perspective of two of the greatest crises of our time: the environmental crisis and the inequality crisis. And I want to do so under the sign of the Anthropocene. Why the Anthropocene? After Eugene Stoermer, an ecologist, and Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist, advanced the term in 2000 (Crutzen and Stoermer), it gave rise to an ascendant planetary story that has become influential across a panoply of disciplines. Now, in the twenty-first century’s second decade, we are witnessing the advent of the public Anthropocene, as the idea moves beyond academic journals and conferences and into museums, galleries, radio programs, and trade publications. For those of us in the environmental humanities, this development represents a critical opportunity to reflect on—and help shape—the direction of this public Anthropocene turn.

Stories matter—they matter immeasurably. Measurement, data, metrics, and modeling are the lucrative priorities of universities these days. In the face of this pressure to quantify, it is easy for humanities scholars to lose track of what they do best, like explaining why telling a story one way as opposed to another can have profound imaginative, ethical, and political consequences. In a world drowning in data, stories can play a vital role—for example, in the making of environmental publics and in the shaping of environmental policy.

I focus here on the question of how vulnerability is perceived and distributed under the sign of the Anthropocene. For a growing chorus of scientists, the Holocene is history: human beings, through their own actions, have jolted the planet into a new, unprecedented epoch and left the Holocene behind. For the first time in Earth’s history, a sentient species, Homo sapiens, has become a geomorphic force, an exceptional actor in the planet’s geophysical systems. According to the dominant Anthropocene script, collectively over the past two and a half centuries—since the onset of the Industrial Revolution—people have been laying down in stone a durable geological archive of human impacts. To reimagine humanity in this way, not just as a biological but also a geological force, means in the words of one paleontologist, Anthony Barnosky, that “we are the asteroid” (qtd. in “Leaving”).

In Nigel Clark’s phrase, the story of the Anthropocene links “earthly volatility” to “bodily vulnerability” (xx). But I would argue that the most influential Anthropocene intellectuals have sidestepped the question of unequal human agency, unequal human impacts, and unequal human vulnerabilities. If, by contrast, we take an environmental justice approach to Anthropocene storytelling, we can better acknowledge the way the geomorphic powers of human beings have involved unequal exposure to risk and unequal access to resources. In 2013, the world’s eighty-five richest people—a group small enough to fit into a double-decker bus, in the unlikely event that they would be inclined to take a bus—had a net worth equal to that of fifty percent of the planet’s population, the 3.5 billion poorest people (Wearden). To take a longer view on disparity, since 1751, a period that encompasses the entire Anthropocene to date, a mere ninety corporations, primarily oil and coal companies, have generated two-thirds of humanity’s CO₂ emissions. That’s a very high concentration of earth-altering power.

A crucial imaginative challenge facing us is this: How do we tell two large stories that seem in tension with each other, a convergent story and a divergent one? Set against the collective story about humanity’s geomorphic impacts that will be legible in the earth’s geophysical systems for millennia to come is the story of the human species, a much more fractured narrative. The species-centered Anthropocene meme has arisen in the twenty-first century, a period in which most societies have experienced a deepening schism between the überrich and the ultrapoor. In terms of the history of ideas, what does it mean that the Anthropocene as a grand explanatory species story has taken hold during a plutocratic age? How can we counter the centripetal force of that dominant story with centrifugal stories that acknowledge immense disparities in human agency, impacts, and vulnerability?

Most Anthropocene scholars date the new epoch to the late-eighteenth-century beginnings of industrialization. But there is a second phase to the Anthropocene, the so-called great acceleration, beginning circa 1950: an exponential increase in human-induced changes to the carbon cycle and nitrogen cycle and in ocean acidification, global trade, and consumerism, as well as the rise of international forms of governance like the World Bank and the IMF.

However, most accounts of the great acceleration fail to position it in relation to neoliberalism’s recent ascent, although most of the great acceleration has occurred during the neoliberal era. One marker of neoliberalism has been a widening chasm of inequality between the superrich and the ultrapoor: since the late 1970s, we have been living through what Timothy Noah calls “the great divergence.” Noah’s subject is the economic fracturing of America, the new American gilded age, but the great divergence has scarred most societies, from China and India to Indonesia, South Africa, Nigeria, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Australia, and Bangladesh.

My central problem with the dominant mode of Anthropocene storytelling is its failure to articulate the great acceleration to the great divergence. We need to acknowledge that the grand species narrative of the Anthropocene—this geomorphic “age of the human”—is gaining credence at a time when, in society after society, the idea of the human is breaking apart economically, as the distance between affluence and abandonment is increasing. It is time to remold the Anthropocene as a shared story about unshared resources. When we examine the geology of the human, let us also pay attention to the geopolitics of the new stratigraphy’s layered assumptions.

Neoliberalism loves watery metaphors: the trickle-down effect, global flows, how a rising tide lifts all boats. But talk of a rising tide raises other specters: the coastal poor, who will never get storm-surge barriers; Pacific Islanders in the front lines of inundation; Arctic peoples, whose livelihoods are melting away—all of them exposed to the fallout from Anthropocene histories of carbon extraction and consumption in which they played virtually no part.

There is a profound need for concerted action to secure a viable planetary future, and the Anthropocene idea might contribute to that action by disturbing widespread assumptions about human agency, environmental time, and planetary destiny. But let’s not pretend that we’re all in this boat together—unless the boat in question is some twenty-first-century reconstruction of the vessel that stars in Garrett Hardin’s 1974 parable on lifeboat ethics, in which the comfortable minority in the boat ponder how many of the drowning masses they can afford to take on board. As the Anthropocene story leaves academe and enters the popular domain, as we witness the current turn toward the public Anthropocene in museums and galleries and blogs, let’s make sure this story isn’t told only from the perspective of the comfortable, of those already in the boat. Otherwise, we’ll be complicit in a kind of Anthropocene lifeboat ethics that is enabled by a spurious species narrative and predicated on the privatization of survival. We need to speak out against adaptation by the rich for the rich, while humanity at large is left to flounder in waters made increasingly choppy by climate change and by the rising incidence of what insurance brokers call “extreme convective events.”

In Anthropocene metrics and modeling, we are seeing considerable attention directed at what kind of stratigraphic record drowned megacities will leave. As those cities are emerging today, they are distinguished less by trickle-down effects than by the walling off of resources and by splintering urbanism (Graham and Marvin), where those whom Ivan Vladislavić calls “the well-heeled” and “the well-wheeled” withdraw into semicelestial enclaves of vertical and horizontal segregation (155). In Mumbai, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Lagos, Johannesburg, Jakarta, São Paolo, Madrid, Shanghai, and beyond, clients clamor for up-to-the-minute fortress design, new ways to wall off, as elegantly as possible, the possessors from the dispossessed. In megacities, defensive architecture rises ever higher alongside indefensible inequities. All this injustice will be legible in the Anthropocene’s stratigraphic record for millennia to come, this Dickensian tale of two cities, one built from enduring materials, the other from improvised, impermanent scraps.

As I speak, another CEO takes to the air in his golden parachute, soaring above the planet of the slums. The distance between his gleaming parachute and the favela below poses a political challenge that is imaginative as well, for such distance intensifies the urgency of finding inventive, bridging testimony. As the Anthropocene goes public, we need stories that bear witness to the great divergence, stories that expose and oppose the divides segregating the plush plutocrats from the disposable people left to languish in the great acceleration’s vast shadowlands.

Works Cited

Clark, Nigel. Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet. Los Angeles: Sage, 2011. Print.

Crutzen, Paul, and Eugene Stoermer. “The Anthropocene.” Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18. Print.

Graham, Steve, and Simon Marvin. Splintering Urbanism. New York: Routledge, 2001. Print.

Hardin, Garrett. “Commentary: Living on a Lifeboat.” Bioscience 24.10 (1974): 561–68. Print.

“Leaving Our Mark: What Will Be Left of Our Cities?” BBC News. BBC, 31 Oct. 2012. Web. 11 Mar. 2014.

Noah, Timothy. The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do about It. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012. Print.

Vladislavić, Ivan. Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked. London: Portobello, 2007. Print.

Wearden, Graeme. “Oxfam: Eighty-Five Richest People as Wealthy as Poorest Half of World.” Guardian. Guardian News and Media Ltd., 20 Jan. 2014. Web. 11 Mar. 2014. <http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jan/20/oxfam-85-richest-people-half-of-the-world>.

Rob Nixon is the Rachel Carson and Elizabeth Ritzmann Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.

Posted March 2014

My remarks on vulnerable times are drawn from my forthcoming book, “Reparations and the Human,” which explores the politics of reparations, the human, and human rights in the context of Cold War Asia. The project is interdisciplinary: reparation is a key term in political theory, but it is also a central concept in psychoanalysis—in particular, object relations—though the two are rarely discussed together. The book investigates how political and psychic genealogies of reparation might supplement each other in the wake of changing conceptions of the human being after genocide and nuclear holocaust. I examine the concepts’ transnational significance in relation to a trans-Pacific archive. I bring together three interlocking events of World War II as well as their Cold War legacies and effects: first, the internment of Japanese Americans by the United States government during World War II; second, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended that war; and, third, contemporary legal claims by comfort women, girls and women conscripted by Japan’s imperial army into sexual slavery.

This essay derives from the afterword to my book, which investigates the history of uranium mining. Most of the world’s uranium supply is mined from indigenous lands. The uranium sourced for the creation of Little Boy, the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 by the United States military, was no exception: it was extracted in part from the lands of the Dene, an indigenous people inhabiting the Sahtu Region in the Northwest Territories of Canada.1 Many of the Sahtu Dene men who labored on behalf of this atomic initiative died of cancer (Nikiforuk). Their families and descendants all suffer from exorbitant rates of malignancy. The water and land on which the Sahtu Dene live are poisoned for tens of thousands of years. Ignorant at the time of how their mining efforts would be applied and of the destination of the ore, the Sahtu Dene nonetheless felt implicated once they learned of Hiroshima’s fate. In response to the atomic disaster, they sent a delegation to Hiroshima to apologize.

I would like to focus on this act of apology, which is recounted in Peter Blow’s 1999 documentary Village of Widows: The Story of the Sahtu Dene and the Atomic Bomb. The first half of Blow’s film relates the suffering of the Sahtu Dene and their failed attempts to gain either acknowledgment or relief from the Canadian government for what environmental scholars describe as new forms of “toxic” or “radioactive colonialism” in the atomic age (Masco 34; see also Kultez; Pasternak). The second half of the documentary follows the delegation’s journey to Japan. There, the Sahtu Dene group attends ceremonies at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park marking the anniversary of the bombing; they apologize to a group of community leaders for their role in the atomic disaster; and they visit a hospital devoted exclusively to Korean hibakusha (“survivors of the atomic bombing”), conscripted laborers from Japan’s colonial empire in East and Southeast Asia forced to work as part of the city’s enormous military industrial complex at the time of the bombing.

Building on Jacques Derrida’s notion of “absolute forgiveness,” I develop a corollary concept of absolute apology. In On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Derrida offers a counterintuitive notion of forgiveness, suggesting that the only thing worth forgiving is, in fact, the unforgivable.2 On the one hand, he suggests that what can be forgiven—what can be pardoned—is invariably tied to political calculation, to a set of intended political consequences and effects. For example, a perpetrator apologizes, and a victim, in the face of this performative demand, is inserted in a dialectic of apology and forgiveness, reparation and reconciliation, a dialectic that serves to underwrite narratives of progress and justice. “The language of forgiveness, at the service of determined finalities,” Derrida observes, is “anything but pure and disinterested. As always in the field of politics” (31). Reparation in this instance functions as a noun—as a political accounting of injury and harm, as a definitive moment of recognition and redress, and as a distinct event that writes a history of violence into the past. This perspective supports a history of reparations in political theory.

On the other hand, to forgive the unforgivable—to forgive in the absence of apology and political demand—shatters such narratives of completion and unity. The calculability of politics thus cleaves to the incalculability of justice. “Forgiveness is not, it should not be, normal, normative, normalizing,” Derrida writes. “It should remain exceptional and extraordinary, in the face of the impossible: as if it interrupted the ordinary course of historical temporality” (32). Dissociating forgiveness from apology, victim from perpetrator, and justice from law, absolute forgiveness functions outside the circuits of sovereign power, authority, and will. In the end, it indexes a “madness of the impossible,” he concludes. “It is even, perhaps, the only thing that arrives, that surprises, like a revolution, the ordinary course of history, politics, and law. Because that means that it remains heterogenous to the order of politics or of the juridical as they are ordinarily understood” (39).

If, as Derrida suggests, absolute forgiveness demands forgiving that which is unforgivable, I would propose that absolute apology involves apologizing for that which you are not (quite) responsible. The Sahtu Dene’s surprising act of apology interrupts, like uranium itself, the ordinary course of things. Dispossessed of their land through a long history of colonial settlement, targeted by enormous state violence and neglect, and suffering from unspeakable personal losses and long-term environmental devastation, the Sahtu Dene nonetheless apologize. They voluntarily assume the mantle of perpetrator and thus take responsibility for their role in the atomic disaster, for a violence that claims them as much as any other. What is at stake when those who might be considered the most vulnerable—the most dispossessed and victimized—in a long history of colonial violence nonetheless assume the mantle of perpetrator?

The Sahtu Dene, by cleaving to the victims of the atomic bombing, assent to a notion of history, to cite Cathy Caruth, as a phenomenon of being “implicated in each other’s traumas” (24). From another perspective, their act of apology blurs the line between victim and perpetrator. Indeed, it illustrates how one might be victim and perpetrator at once, and it illustrates the ethical stakes of claiming such a position. Those stakes are high, for the Sahtu Dene’s apology presents us with a different notion of responsibility and repair, one in which we must take account of, as well as respond to, events beyond clear notions of agency and will, linear concepts of cause and effect, and even the immediate consequences and results of decisions clearly made by others.3

In demonstrating how violence and responsibility are dissociated from conventional politics of reparation and reconciliation, the Sahtu Dene’s act works to loosen the dialectic of apology and forgiveness—perpetrator and victim—on which legal claims for reparations and human rights are typically predicated. I see the value of the Sahtu Dene’s apology as an ethical ideal at the very limits of the political, indexing “a madness of the impossible.” At the same time, I see the value of their act as a performative, pedagogical moment in which to imagine otherwise a politics of reparation, the human, and human rights. After all, legal claims for reparations and human rights are based on trauma not as a shared phenomenon, in which we are all implicated, but rather as a psychic injury arrogated by one group over another in the calculated politics of victimhood and recognition. If trauma is a thing to be monopolized in conventional understandings of reparations and human rights, the Sahtu Dene’s gesture underscores a notion of repair that encompasses not ownership but rather, in Peter van Wyck’s words, the “infinite character of responsibility” (172). It is an acknowledgment not of sovereign inviolability but of a common vulnerability, an unwilled susceptibility that connects all creatures and things.

Vulnerability from this perspective is neither victimhood nor weakness, as Marianne Hirsch suggests in her statement for this forum. In its embrace of responsibility, vulnerability is not opposed to agency either, emerging instead as a kind of ethical act. This is an act of solidarity, an act of acknowledgment and responsiveness toward unwilled others who have been harmed.

I conclude by suggesting that the history of uranium mining and toxic colonialism to which the Sahtu Dene respond has great resonance with recent scholarship on the Anthropocene and the radically uneven effects of environmental justice movements. Indeed, the story of the Sahtu Dene and the atomic bomb precludes, as Rob Nixon so incisively suggests in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, any temporal possibility of the post- in postcolonial (8). Moreover, it draws disconnected groups across the trans-Pacific into unexpected alignment. It offers, that is, a different narrative of the atomic bombing of Japan and the postwar politics of reparation after nuclear holocaust by connecting a longer history of Native dispossession in the New World with more recent colonial violence and militarism in Cold War Asia. I take these ideas of unanticipated solidarity, of slow violence and the temporal impossibility of the post-, as ones that shatter concepts of sovereignty and sovereign time, transporting us instead into the framework of vulnerable times.

If, as Elizabeth V. Spelman suggests, we repair only what is valuable to us, the Sahtu Dene’s apology marks a kind of unexpected receptivity and openness to the pain of the enemy, to the vulnerability of the devalued other (8). From this perspective, we might say it is those to whom repair can be offered who become the very sign of the human. The Sahtu Dene’s absolute apology, as well as Blow’s recounting of it in Village of Widows, offers an important insight not just into the political but also into the aesthetic. Despite their fictional nature, film and literature seek to represent yet can never definitively capture the role of either victim or perpetrator. In their proximity to the imaginary, they intersect with the logic of absolute apology, which blurs the line between victim and perpetrator as two entrenched positions. If, as I mentioned earlier, we think of reparation in political theory more as a noun—as a discrete historical event and definitive legal accounting of the past in the name of victims and perpetrators—in the conceptual grammar of psychoanalysis reparation functions more as a verb, as a continuous process of violence and repair subtending the subjective vicissitudes of love and hate that demand the constant retelling of their affective vagaries. Together with the imaginary peregrinations of the aesthetic, reparation as a verb thus facilitates new constellations of the injured to emerge and new atrocities to be apprehended. Such continuous openings of the future for the past might be described as vulnerability in process, another way to think about the political and social emergencies of vulnerable times.

Notes

1. In 2009, the worldwide production of uranium amounted to 50,572 tons. Kazakhstan, Canada, and Australia are the top three producers. Together, the three countries account for sixty-three percent of the world’s uranium production. Other important uranium producers are Namibia, Russia, Niger, Uzbekistan, and the United States. Each country produces over a thousand tons per year (see “Uranium Mining”). The uranium for the Manhattan Project, which constructed the two atomic bombs detonated over Japan, came from northwest Canada, the United States (the Colorado Plateau), and the Belgian Congo (see “Manhattan Project”). ↩

2. Derrida writes: “In order to approach now the very concept of forgiveness, logic and common sense agree for once with the paradox: it is necessary, it seems to me, to begin from the fact that, yes, there is the unforgivable. It this not, in truth, the only thing to forgive? The only thing that calls for forgiveness? If one is only prepared to forgive what appears forgivable, what the church calls ‘venal sin,’ then the very idea of forgiveness would disappear” (32). ↩

3. I derive this reading from Judith Butler’s Parting Ways. Commenting on Emmanuel Lévinas, Butler writes, “We do not take responsibility for the Other’s suffering only when it is clear that we have caused that suffering. In other words, we do not take responsibility only for the clear choices we have made and the effects they have had. Although, of course, such acts are important components of any account of responsibility, they do not indicate its most fundamental structure. According to Levinas, we affirm the unfreedom at the heart of our relations with others, and only by ceding in this way do we come to understand responsibility. In other words, I cannot disavow my relation to the Other, regardless of what the other does, regardless of what I might will. Indeed, responsibility is not a matter of cultivating a will (as it is for Kantians), but of recognizing an unwilled susceptibility as a resource for being responsive to the Other” (43). ↩

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. New York: Columbia UP, 2013. Print.

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print.

Kultez, Valerie L. The Tainted Desert: Environmental Ruin in the American West. New York: Routledge, 1998. Print.

“Manhattan Project.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia, n.d. Web. 25 Feb. 2014.

Masco, Joseph. The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. Print.

Nikiforuk, Andrew. “Echoes of the Atomic Age.” Calgary Herald 14 Mar. 1998: n. pag. Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility. Web. 25 Feb. 2014.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011. Print.

Pasternak, Judy. Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and People Betrayed. New York: Free, 2010. Print.

Spelman, Elizabeth V. Repair: The Impulse to Restore in a Fragile World. Boston: Beacon, 2003. Print.

“Uranium Mining.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia, n.d. Web. 25 Feb. 2014.

van Wyck, Peter C. “An Emphatic Geography: Notes on the Ethical Itinerary of Landscape.” Canadian Journal of Communication 33 (2008): 171–91. Print.

Village of Widows: The Story of the Sahtu Dene and the Atomic Bomb. Dir. Peter Blow. Lindum Films, 1999. Film.

David L. Eng is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.

Posted March 2014