With Palestine In Mind. What Erasure Reveals about Political Violence: Reflecting on the Relationship between Erasure and (Modes of) Presence

There are prescribed erasures that are visible and authoritarian, etc., while others are indirect and indeterminate. This panel focuses on erasure in the aftermath of political violence, and in times of conflict and war. While erasure can be violent and brutal, as it is in genocides and wars, its forms also unfold silently over long timeframes, mis-recognise and deny its effects, mobilize legal frameworks, and interconnect with national and supranational political stances. Political erasure also intersects with responses from civil society and grassroots citizen movements. The objective of this panel is to problematize how the state/official erasure of abuses against individuals and groups, and their environments produces new realities. Conversely, it analyses how these forms are received, and how the subtle staging of erasure is quietly and laterally unveiled and transformed into an object of re-creation and re-presentation—whether in the form of art (performance, installation, visual art, music...), or moments of commemoration.

This panel is open to abstracts on the processes of non-recognition at the heart of erasure, including gender (bodies, rape, and abductions); law (adjustments and misalignments of the law); politics (paradigm shifts from national to international law and vice versa; policies of denial, direct violence, retributive measures, etc.); discursive mechanisms (words used or silenced, justifications targeting a group as inhuman or inferior); substitute practices and the actions they provoke (altering and concealing a region’s landscape, displacing population). Finally, it seeks to understand the production of new non-dominant knowledges that emerge in response and in resistance to erasure.