Geocorpographies of Commemoration, Repression and Resistance

Abstract

The contributions in this special issue expose the connections between somatechnics and geocorpographies: the ongoing permutations of geopolitical and geographical influences on conceptions of personhood and bodies, whether on the level of the individual, the community, the nation-state and/or the transnational. This issue aims to link the geocorpographies of violence and resistance to the somatechnics processes through which bodies become calibrated as social subjects. In his essay ‘Geocorpographies of Torture’, Joseph Pugliese coined the term geocorpographies to express ‘that the body, in any of its manifestations, is always geopolitically situated and graphically inscribed by signs, discourses, regimes of visuality and so on. Its geopolitical markings can only be abstracted to the process of symbolic and political violence’ (2007: 12). Through his rigorous approach in examining the intimate borders of the body within racialised zones of war and terror, Pugliese demonstrates that within particular spaces ‘bodies become coextensive with space as such: they are the ground upon which military operations of occupation are performed through which control of the colonized country is secured’ (2007: 12). Drawing on examples of the acts of torture by American soldiers inflicted upon inmates of the Abu Ghraib prison complex in Iraq, Pugliese stages a critical examination of how ‘conquered Arab men’ (2007: 5) become coextensive with the spaces of the prison complex, as well as the