Genocidal Violence in the Americas
Date and time
Fri, March 4, 2022
4:00 PM – 6:00 PM EST
Speakers: Dr. Silvia Posocco and Dr. Jen Rinaldi with commentator Dr. Shannon Speed
About this event
Welcome to the Series Event of the 5th Annual Racial Violence Hub Workshop: Feminist Approaches to Theorizing Genocidal Violence, Wars and Occupations, a series of The Racial Violence Hub and Penny Kanner Endowed Chair in Gender Studies.
In this series, we discuss the genocidal violence of everyday life. On the first Friday of each month from November to April (six sessions), in the spirit of collaboration, feminist scholars will gather to present virtually on works in progress on the theme of genocidal violence.
Paper Title: “Sepur Zarco, Guatemala: “Bodying Forth” and forensic aesthetics of witnessing in the courtroom and beyond”
Presenter: Dr. Silvia Posocco
Abstract: Drawing on long-term anthropological research in Guatemala, the article examines the case of sexual and labor slavery in armed conflict known as ‘Sepur Zarco’. Focusing on the scene of selected court hearings related to events that took place in a military base near the village of Sepur Zarco, Izabal, between 1982 and 1986, the analysis focuses on ‘bodying forth’ (Das 2007), as a process of witnessing, materialization and subjectification that emerges in the declarations of the different parties, as they conjure up Dominga Cuc Coc, a local Maya Q’eqchi’ woman, on the riverbank washing army uniforms under duress, or as the body of the forensic exhumation. ‘Bodying forth’ is tied to performative forensic imaginaries and forensic aesthetics in the courtroom, the broader Guatemalan body politic, and beyond. It challenges the epistemologies underpinnings of law and science to re-center the necessary differential and differentiated accounts of the witnesses and their appeals to justice.
Paper Title: “The Slow and Sudden Carceral Violences of the Canadian Colonial Project”
Presenter: Dr. Jen Rinaldi
Abstract: This presentation engages with an archive of prisoner writing and visual art to show how the Canadian correctional system functions as a tool of settler colonial governance. Specifically, Canada’s mass incarceration of Indigenous and racialized diasporic populations continues the longstanding colonial project of geographic reorganization in the service of white supremacy. Then those confined to carceral space are marked for death. The carceral techniques that shape and blunt the lives of people kept in federal prisons include force, a readily recognizable form of violence. Potentially more insidious, though, are techniques of abandonment where prisoners are left to die, signaling they are not worth saving. This presentation will unpack prisoner experiences of these varied techniques.
Presenter Bios
Dr. Silvia Posocco is Reader in Social Anthropology in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. Dr. Posocco’s interdisciplinary research interests are in gender and sexuality studies and violence, conflict and genocide studies. Dr. Posocco has studied ethnographically insurgent movements in Guatemala, the archives of transnational adoption across sites and temporalities, and most recently, forensic archives, bioinformation and cultures of evidence.
Dr. Jen Rinaldi is an Associate Professor in Legal Studies at Ontario Tech University. Her research takes up how non-normative bodies are read, marked, and produced in and through socio-legal discourse. Her work documenting survivors’ oral histories of a Canadian institution that housed persons with intellectual disability diagnoses resulted in a book co-authored with Kate Rossiter titled Institutional Violence and Disability: Punishing Conditions. Currently, Rinaldi is focused on research and activism related to deinstitutionalization, prison and police abolition, and migrant justice.
Commentator Bio
Dr. Shannon Speed is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. She is Director of the American Indian Studies Center (AISC) and Professor of Gender Studies and Anthropology at UCLA. Dr. Speed has worked for the last two decades in Mexico and in the United States on issues of indigenous autonomy, sovereignty, gender, neoliberalism, violence, migration, social justice, and activist research. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters in English and Spanish, as well as published six books and edited volumes, including her most recent, Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants in the Settler Capitalist State. Dr. Speed currently serves as the Past President of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA).