Oct 29, 2017 | 10:45 AM - 12:15 PM | Studio Theatre

David Mongor-Lizarrabengoa, MA

An Awful Homecoming: Argentina and Its Returning Exiles

During the 20th century, most Latin American nations experienced dictatorships, resulting from military coups that ruled with an iron fist. Consequently, innocent civilians were imprisoned, tortured, or murdered. Others, to avoid execution, fled into exile. Argentine citizens faced two brutal dictatorships in 1966 and 1976, forcing them into hiding or exile as the future was uncertain. In her memoir Estado de memoria, well known Argentine author Tununa Mercado documents her struggles to adjust to life while in exile in Europe and Mexico. After her return to Argentina following the dictatorships, she continued to face great challenges. She claims, “The sense of foreignness hurls itself at the returning exile; it is as if the entire person, their body and psyche, were swaddled in a membrane separating them from the world.”  She was engulfed in a “membrane” comprised of guilt for having departed, dissatisfaction from others for not comprehending the reasons for going into exile, and sorrow for realizing that everything had been lost upon returning home. Mercado and other Argentine exiles were denied a joyful homecoming.  She explains, “For those who return, the country is not an open container, and it is futile for them to try to lose themselves within the existing structures; there are no cubby holes to slip into, no houses in which to hide”. Thus, the returning exiles felt rather alien and foreign within their own country. By losing one’s context during and following exile, a person was effectively “disappeared” along with the thousands of unfortunate Argentinians who were kidnapped, tormented, and executed during the military coups. Thus, life after exile was as much of a struggle to survive as to feel belonged, I argue that Estado de memoria reveals how different exiles failed to readjust to their pre-exile lives and how, through her writing, Mercado re-inhabits and re-imagines pieces of her former life after returning home. Consequently, the psychological trauma faced by the returning exiles was just as great as the physical punishment felt by those who stand and were targeted by the military regime.

Praveen Sewgobind, MA

‘We Will Now Remove this Roadblock !’: Collective Action Combating State Terrorism in Palestine

In this paper I explore how an internationally supported and locally organised disruption of Israeli state terrorist activity operates as an incentive to continue resistance against the imposition of travel restrictions for Palestinians. I analyse how an attempt to physically remove a roadblock between the village of Yabad and the city of Jenin serves as a way to critically assess, bring into dialogue, and innovate theories of border regimes, issues of vulnerability, and resistance discourse. In 2004, at the height of the so-called non-violent direct action movement seeking to counter the military occupation of Palestine, hundreds of villagers in Yabad, supported by dozens of Israeli and international solidarity activists, organised a mass direct action to remove a huge earth mound that blocked the main access road to the nearby city of Jenin. The restrictive measure was constructed by the Israeli army as a form of collective punishment, in response to resistance against the construction of the Apartheid Wall and the illegal military occupation of Palestine. Villagers had to travel three times longer to get to the city of Jenin, to reach hospitals, higher education, and administrative services. The concerted action to remove the blocked road will be analysed in light of a long tradition of confronting Israeli state terrorism: the military presence, their practice of extra-judicial killings, and the ensuing terror regime is supported by an intricate and all-encompassing system of walls, fences, roadblocks, and surveillance and repression apparatuses. Despite the daily oppression, resistance is being organised that manages to counter - albeit temporarily – the totalising technologies of security. Theories formulated by Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Chris Hedges will serve as a means to come to terms with the specific forging of a collective agency and resilience (sumud) that could be a productive tool to counter state terrorism in general.

Nicholas Abrams, BA

Post Apartheid Development and the Racial Politics of Structural Anthropology and Cultural Translation

Official World Health Organization policy calls for development strategies within the global south to work to further the “rational use” of therapeutically sound” practices associated with “Traditional Religion.” And yet, previous research has shown the manner by which professionals working within the biomedical sector look to discursively position themselves as "more professional” than their traditional health practitioner counterparts, with whom they claim to desire to collaborate. In this piece, I turn to Frantz Fanon’s, Jean-Paul Sartre’s, and Robert Bernasconi’s discussions on racialization and the medical service in colonial Algeria to think about the construction of so-called “parallel” and “complementary” “systems of healthcare” as predicated on a form of racialization. In this, I ask what this form of racialization means for postcolonial criticisms of humanism and “religion” in the context of South Africa’s own biopolitical formation.