The Violence of Erasure and the Significance of Excavating the Histories of the Oppressed

The paper will present different theories of violence to illustrate how structural violence sustains itself through cultural practices that erase bodies deemed insignificant. The paper centers its argument on the stories and histories of especially Black women. The central argument of the paper is that erasure denies the oppressed agency and that to reclaim this agency these narratives need to be excavated and shared in ways that restores the agency and humanness of the oppressed.