Founding Violence Research Articles

Sargūn Būluṣ: Writing Iraq baʿd al-qiyāmah

Abstract This paper explores how the poetry of the late Iraqi poet, Sargūn Būluṣ (1944–2007), responds to the material and epistemic violence inflicted on Iraq and Iraqis in recent decades. While Būluṣ was vehemently against podium poetry, he was never detached from politics. He believed that poetry could shelter the voices of those displaced and wounded by history. By reading several representative poems, this paper identifies the configuration of the aesthetic and the political in his poetic discourse. It explores the following questions: What are the strategies and tropes the poet deploys to mark and mourn the destruction and disintegration of a home/land? How does he do so without eliding the foundational violence of the nation-state or resorting to nationalisms? Which of the many Iraqs, real and imagined, does Būluṣ mourn, and how does he excavate the country’s history?

Navigating the Paradox of Repair: Indigenous Genocide and Public Education in Minnesota and Manitoba

This paper examines how educational institutions and individual educators in Manitoba, Canada, and Minnesota, United States (US), understand and enact reparation in their respective fields of practice. The basic principle of restorative or reparative justice is that wrongs are set right by giving back to the injured party that which restores equality, dignity, and rights. However, educational reforms reveal a structural challenge in societies reckoning with the legacies of foundational violence perpetrated against Indigenous populations. Coupling an analysis of state / provincial social studies standards with key informant interviews, we try to untangle the paradox that the public education system, including non-formal education offered in state museums or historical societies are now tasked with addressing and repairing an injustice they were- and, to a large degree, continue to be - a part of. Findings show that sometimes dissonant visions of a reparative future and conflicting attempts to seek and promote justice in public history, the curriculum, and pedagogy are negotiated in the educational arena, resulting in complementary forms of specific practices. These constitute a growing stock of knowledge and models of engagement that shed light on how institutions and individual actors navigate the project and paradox of repair.

Communal Minute Books: Writing, Ethnography, and History of the War in Peru in the 1980s

Abstract This article addresses how Peruvian highland society constructed a local history of the Shining Path war through its responses as well as the recording (and non-recording) of events in communal minute books. Through three case studies of communities in the mid-1980s in Ayacucho, it assesses the cultural and political reach of writing in the production of communal historical knowledge, narratives of the past, and collective identity. The writing of and in community minute books configures the boundaries of the war narrative within these locales, particularly during the crucial period referred to in Quechua as tikrakuy, when communities changed their allegiance and went from supporting the insurgency to fighting it. During and after tikrakuy, a great part of the civilian population openly chose a side and intervened in the war, engaging in acts of violence. This article studies how the foundational violence of tikrakuy led to the emergence of a new political formation and social order. It also broadens the discussion on the participation of the civilian population in the war and its place in wartime collective violence.

Mutual Futurity: Rethinking Incommensurability between Indigenous Sovereignty and Black Freedom

Engaging feminist and queer of color theory as well as work emerging from social movements, this piece critically examines narratives of impasse between Black Studies and Native Studies in the US, particularly assertions of incommensurability between the goals of Black freedom and Native sovereignty. The article outlines some of the theoretical debates between Black and Indigenous Studies that have calcified into impasses, focusing particularly on Afropessimist and Settler Colonial Studies’ framings of either slavery/anti-Blackness or settler colonialism as the foundational violence around which a racist/settler modernity is structured. This article argues that approaches that emphasize relationality and the co-determination of settler colonialism and anti-Black racism can help us to think beyond a Black/Native impasse and towards a mutual futurity for both Black and Indigenous people in living in the place we currently call the United States.

Red Power, white narrative: founding violence & the invalidation of Indigenous rights

ABSTRACT The disavowal of ‘founding violence’ remains a core proposition of settler colonial theory. This paper expands our theoretical understanding of the concept to account for the strategic invocation of founding violence to legitimate settler colonial racial orders. Drawing from a sample of in-depth interviews (n = 27) with settlers who have historical connections to the American Indian Movement’s (AIM) confrontational activism in the 1970s, I show how non-Indigenous territoriality is affirmed through the narrative displacement of founding violence onto Indigenous peoples. Across the U.S. state of South Dakota, where AIM’s ‘Red Power’ activism was most pronounced, interviewees routinely delegitimize movement grievances through historicized narratives of incessant inter-tribal conflict and Indigenous violence. Thus, in addition to justifying settler society’s bloody origins, the invocation of founding violence remains a powerful discursive mechanism for delegitimizing contemporary Indigenous rights.

Constitutions and their foundational discontents: Studying the process of constitution-making in Jammu and Kashmir

AbstractThis article studies the process of constitution-making in Jammu and Kashmir as a hegemonic process dominated by, and an ideological reflection of, the dominant political party of Jammu and Kashmir, the National Conference led by the popular leader Sheikh Abdullah. The Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir emerged as an outcome of their ideas. Though the process itself was punctuated by the exclusionary violence against diverse communities present in the state at that time, very little attention has been paid to the idea of a constitution as an exclusivist text that embeds ‘foundational violence’ within it, and that eliminates dissenting groups and prevents the inclusion of plural conceptions of politics by actualizing a monopolistic discourse in favour of the dominant party. This article locates the violence that went into constitution-making and further employs hermeneutical interpretation of the Constituent Assembly Debates of Jammu and Kashmir to locate the differing viewpoints that existed in the State Constituent Assembly. It also takes the surrounding political and ideological context into account. In doing so, it constructs an alternative and ‘unofficial’ version of the constitution-making process, which helps challenge the dominant historical narrative that the constitution-making in Jammu and Kashmir was a successful experiment in Indian federal democracy.

Layered Maps: Carceral and Fugitive Archipelagos in Walter Mosley’s Down the River Unto the Sea

This essay offers an archipelagic reading of Walter Mosley’s detective novel Down the River Unto the Sea (2018). I argue that the spatial imaginary of the novel constitutes a layered map of the Americas that registers continental visions of the US nation-state but cognitively remaps and breaks up this space into various archipelagic constellations. I read the novel as contributing to a specifically African American mode of the archipelagic, which I trace along two trajectories: a focus on carceral archipelagos and im/mobilities, and a negotiation between what David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh have called “interstitial” geographies, which focus on relationality, and “abyssal” geographies, which posit and critique antiblackness as the world’s foundational violence. In my reading, both trajectories sit firmly within the concerns of archipelagic studies but significantly extend the paradigm’s scope. The first trajectory depicts the US nation-state both as imperial continent and as racialized carceral archipelago and sets these layers off against visions of fugitive archipelagos that afford Mosley’s characters temporary islands of safety or respite, but never grant them the contiguity that undergirds Western fantasies of nation-state sovereignty. The second trajectory employs both interstitial and abyssal analytics to address the question what an "imagined community" can mean in a starkly antiblack world. Via the intertwined stories of two protagonists, the detective Joe King Oliver and the prisoner A Free Man, Mosley’s novel envisions African American responses to systemic betrayal within the US—being sold Down the River—and pushes, geographically and ideologically, beyond constellations of the nation-state and citizenship—Unto the Sea.

The stakes of abyssal geography. Response to commentaries on David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh's ‘Abyssal geography’.

The stakes of abyssal geography. Response to commentaries on David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh's ‘Abyssal geography’.

Entangled Archives

In this essay, I explore the founding violence that the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts can be said to rest on. I propose to view the building of Charlottenborg Castle which houses the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts as a “material witness” (Schuppli) to colonial history. I suggest that the building forms part of a material “cultural archive” (Wekker) of colonialism that can be seen as an entangled archive, that is simultaneously an entanglement of overlapping histories, and an instrument that disentangled and disconnected communities affected by colonialism by producing a radical cut between the colonized communities and their creative expression. By juxtaposing paintings from the colonial era with contemporary art works the essay explores the following questions: What does it mean to conduct art education on such contested grounds? What are the ramifications of colonial-modernity within the art institutions today? And how does it continue (indirectly or directly) to distribute and determine what counts as a work of art and who counts as a subject?

Indebted Impunity and Violence in a Lesser State: Ethno-Racial Capitalism in Sri Lanka

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between colonialism, capitalism, and violence in Sri Lanka through the combined lenses of international economic law (IEL) and transitional justice. We argue that colonialism instantiates vicious cycles in the histories of violence of ethno-racial capitalism through the creation of states with debts that can never be repaid. This system of ‘indebted impunity’ persists even under ‘new’ Southern sovereigns. We illustrate how IEL and transitional justice are co-constitutive in maintaining international law’s racial hierarchies, while pursuing the construction of racial hierarchies that precipitate ethno-racial capitalist formations, and violence, in Sri Lanka. We first attend to the emergence of international law with racial capitalism as a story of sustained violence, where offshoots like IEL and transitional justice remain tied to the foundational violence in ways that cannot be reformed away. The final section examines the colonial transformation of Sri Lanka, focusing on the British Empire’s role in configuring ethno-racial communities, to consider how IEL and transitional justice work together to maintain this cycle. We observe that indebted impunity persists as a structural condition even when the ‘white’ colonial masters have formally departed, and ‘brown’ differentially racialized compatriots become the ones in charge.

Spatialising antagonism: A post-foundational analysis of the spatial dynamics of violence in nineteenth century Derry

This article offers a post-foundational analysis of the spatial dynamics of inter-communal violence in nineteenth-century Derry city. In doing so, the theoretical category of ‘antagonism’ is mobilised to develop a post-foundational view of the spatial, one that is well-placed to shed an innovative theoretical light on conflict in divided societies and contested spaces. It has recently been recognised that antagonism not only offers a route towards a truly post-foundational approach to the political, but also a consciously post-foundational spatial analysis. Spatialising antagonism at both a theoretical and empirical level helps to bring into further relief the imbrications of space, the political and various modes of violence. Specifically, thinking antagonism spatially in the context of contested spaces such as Derry, underlines the ways through which ontological or foundational violence can be concretised through spatial practices, thereby structuring and driving the spatial dynamics of violence.

Subimperialism and Perpetual Necropower: Foundational Violence and Mnemonic Self-killing on Jeju Island, 1947–Present

ABSTRACT Centering on a case of genocide that occurred on Jeju Island, 1947–onward, and the resulting memory politics that unfolded alongside the Jeju Truth and Reconciliation (TR) process in the 2000s, this article provides a novel critique of state-sanctioned reparatory processes in response to state violence. Adopting and revising the subimperialism framework, I challenge the prevalent teleological grammar in representing South Korean history. Rather than assuming a remedial function of the TR, I approach the TR as an epitome of subimperial and necropolitical interplay of power. Subimperialism is primary and perpetual, based upon foundational violence and is concomitant with perpetual death, physical and spiritual in form. I show, drawing from Mbembe, the perpetual operations of necropower (i.e. the destruction of the other’s humanity and simultaneous construction of the imperial selfhood), killing the other physically in 1947–1954 and then killing the other in themselves in collective memory in the 2000s. In the first body section, I delineate how foundational the Jeju Genocide was for South Korean subimperialism. I illustrate the way in which necropolitical self-making (of “South” Korean peoplehood) sustained concatenated developments of disciplinary, biopolitical, and sovereign power. The right-wing faction’s necropolitics was the centerpiece of the formation of “South” Korean peoplehood, preceding the state’s exercise of the aforementioned forms of power. In the second body section, I show how the necropower was embodied by genocide survivors committing mnemonic self-killing in rendering their own history. Under the perpetual necropower, many of the survivors refrained from archiving their own history, despite the Jeju TR programme intended to include the Jeju Islanders’ voice. Moreover, even those testifying for the TR reproduced a formulaic anticommunist taxonomy (“communist anti-nationals” versus “anticommunist patriots”) that has long excruciated the Jeju Islanders themselves.

‘Pathology without Pathos’: Transvaluating Blackness and Metaphors of Disease

In this article, I diagnose anti-black determinants that link and delink black populations to the discourse of disease, focusing on the AIDS crisis and epidemiological genealogies of causation. Against the pathologizing of black cultural choices, the liberal-Left has disaggregated the conjunction of blackness with disease. In implying an extra-social element to race, however, such a strategy runs the risk of conceptually and politically removing race from the conditions of its emergence: the violent global abstractive forces of slavery that experimentally deployed blackness as disease, infection, virus, risk, and contaminant in the first instance. Drawing from Saidiya Hartman’s theorization of ‘fungibility’ and Sylvia Wynter’s reading of ‘bios’, I propose an alternative to de-pathologizing. If race does not precede its cohabitation with slavery’s herculean experiment in human sorting, then a more explanatory starting point might be forged by diagnosing the circular causal mechanisms by which blackness causes its own pathology. I close with a call to explore ways the disease metaphor has been activated for black revolutionary struggle—how slavery’s biological experiment in controlling human reproduction (life, death, and sexuality) is always also turned against its founding violence as an emancipatory biological weapon.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s New National History Curriculum and Histories of Mourning

From 2022, New Zealand schools are teaching a new compulsory history curriculum that aims to teach diverse New Zealand histories, while foregrounding the centrality of Māori histories and the impacts of colonisation. The new curriculum will upend a long history of ‘forgetting’ the nation’s contentious and conflictual past, and in particular the nineteenth century ‘wars for New Zealand’ (O’Malley, 2016) that secured settler hegemony over the nation-state. In this paper, we focus on the roles of remembering and forgetting in the narration of national histories to explore what might be a productive orientation to take to this contentious and unsettling past. We argue that the new history curriculum inaugurates a new phase of narrating the nation, replacing earlier phases of monocultural and bicultural nationhood that depended on this past being ‘forgotten’. And we argue for the productive value of a histories of critical mourning approach to remembering this founding violence.

Emergent Axioms of Violence: Toward an Anthropology of Post-Liberal Modernity

ABSTRACT This collection highlights the diverse and complicated ways that violence becomes axiomatic, namely through political rhetoric, epistemological impositions, and colonial legacies. Considering how axiomatic violence emerges from events of rupture as well as slow-moving structural inequalities, authors interrogate both the novelty and mundane quality of the current political moment. Approaching violence as axiomatic expands the conceptual lexicon for discussing how rhetorics, metaphors, and prescriptive assumptions can be inherently violent and become normalised, losing their event-like status. Through the routinisation of the extraordinary, truths become indisputable. Axioms combine neoteric and foundational violence to lend legitimacy to apparently incontestable categories of domination, disenfranchisement, and epistemological governance.

“To Speak the Law”: Contested Jurisdictions, Legal Legibility, and Sovereignty in Guatemala

AbstractIndigenous claims “to speak the law” in Guatemala extend far beyond late twentieth‐century statist proposals for multicultural legal orders based on recognition of legal pluralism. Drawing on collaborative research with the Indigenous Mayoralty of Santa Cruz del Quiché and examination of public debates in the media, this article analyzes attempts to ensure the legibility of Indigenous law, including disputes over constitutional reforms in 2016 and 2017. It suggests how different conceptual framings shape methodological approaches and representations of law. While opponents of Indigenous jurisdiction frame Mayan law as violent and illegal, and thus radically incommensurable with the national legal order, for Indigenous authorities “speaking the law” is not about seeking recognition from the nation‐state. Rather, “speaking the law” is about communitarian forms of sovereignty and legality rooted in Mayan languages and cosmologies. Countering racialized tropes, Mayan authorities’ representations allude to understandings of justice and forms of legitimacy that existed prior to the sovereign state and national and international laws. In this way they highlight not only the historical violence of the Guatemalan state but also the foundational violence of law itself, pointing to temporalities and ontologies of justice beyond modernist legal frames.

Necessary violence, necessary pleasure: The common ground of literature and psychoanalysis

ABSTRACT The nature of the intersection between literature and psychoanalysis has been variously theorized since Freud first acknowledged his debt to the “poets and philosophers”. I propose that one way we might conceptualize the shared work of poetry and psychoanalysis is as the working-through of the founding violence of our initiation into language, a working-through sustained by a bonus of pleasure. A detailed reading of “In the village” by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop suggests that she and Piera Aulagnier may be read as parallel theorists of this necessity for a bonus of representational pleasure. Aulagnier’s concept of the pictogram, a primal psychic representation recording the affect present at the moment of the first encounter between mother and infant, places reciprocal pleasure at the origins of the infant’s capacity to invest in the activity of representing. Bishop’s text stages an initial trauma, a maternal scream, damaging her child’s linguistic functioning. It then charts the progressive revivifying of the child’s representational capacities as she hears a “beautiful sound”. This leads to a partial cure of her linguistic functioning, enabling her to metabolize the initial scream, to find metaphorical resonance within language and to delimit the impact of the initial trauma.

The application of a translational performance method using archival material, personal narrative, mythology and somatic practices: the making of Womb of Fire

The article offers a pragmatic investigation that addresses translation both as an embodied activity of recalling erased memory and as a recuperation of the dis-membered post-slave/post-colonial female body. Through reflecting on an example of personal performance practice, the study employs the performer and playwright's own post-slave/post-colonial body as the locus of intersection between the private and the political, the biological and archival/historical. The article focuses on Womb of Fire, a production that weaves the stories of three women: Draupadi from the Indian Epic, The Mahabarata, Catrijn (1631–1682), the first recorded female convict slave banished to the Dutch-occupied Cape of Good Hope, and Zara (1648–1671), a Khoikhoi woman, born in the Cape and employed as a servant from a young age. In Womb of Fire, the performer interrogates her own slave ancestry as well as her first indigenous peoples or Khoekhoen ancestry to examine the founding violence of Colonialism and it's continuing impact on the female body. The article weaves the reflections of Rehane Abrahams, co-conceptualiser, playwright and performer of Womb of Fire, and Sara Matchett, co-conceptualiser and director of the production. The study draws from Abrahams and Matchett's respective areas of research. Abrahams employs the archive, a syncretic spirituality and objects of cultural memory to translate and re-member an erased diasporic and Khoekhoen narrative continuity and recuperate embodied feminine agency. Matchett interrogates translation as an embodied process that explores the body as a site for generating images for purposes of performance-making. Her method of performance-making, in this context, addresses how the post-slave body practically translates the archival narratives, and in particular how these intersect with the biological/personal. Matchett interrogates the potential of breath to act as a catalyst for activating and translating memories, stories, and experiences held in the body of the performer.

Rethinking borders, violence, and conflict: From sovereign power to borderscapes as sites of struggles

This article advances the understanding of borders with respect to their epistemological, ontological, and empirical intersections with violence and conflict, which remain understudied within critical border studies. Specifically, the article explores the potential of recent interdisciplinary research on the border–migration nexus to find critical resources that might foster a better understanding of the complex relationships between borders, violence, and conflict. From this viewpoint, the border is not only a site of the founding violence of the sovereign power, but borders – reconceived as borderscapes – can also be regarded as a site of generative struggles where alternative subjectivities and agencies could be shaped. The article concludes with a call for an applied, committed, and engaged research capable of recovering its inherently political dimension moving towards a ‘politics of hope’ and beyond the simplistic yet dominant interpretations of the border–violence–conflict intersections, which are trapped in the ‘politics of fear’.

Concepts of narrative, founding violence, and multiculturalism in the Americas: Greimas, Girard, and Kymlicka

Abstract Greimas’s conception of narrative is based on a causality linked to basic paradigms establishing the deep meaning of a story; Girard’s conception of narrative is rooted in a universal mimetic desire which leads the “lynchers” to justify exclusion by producing mythical narratives demonstrating that the excluded was evil; Kymlicka’s perspective on cultural relationships is based on the necessity to create a socio-political framework helping people to cooperate in order to invent a better world. These three important thinkers analyze stories people tell themselves or believe in in order to organize a controlled and safer way of life for themselves. We compare the theoretical perspectives of these three thinkers in order to understand in what way contemporary writers of the Americas structure their narratives and explore encounters while aiming at fostering a vision of the world oriented towards multi and transculturalism.