Women Mobilizing Memory 9780231549974

Citation preview

WOM E N M OB I L I Z I N G M EM O RY

Susan Meiselas, “Family members wear the photographs of Peshmerga martyrs, Saiwan Hill cemetery,” Northern Iraq, December 1991, from the series Kurdistan, Courtesy of the artist.

Women Mobilizing Memory EDITED BY

Ayߞe Gül Altınay and María José Contreras, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Banu Karaca, and Alisa Solomon

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press gratefully acknowledges the generous contributions to this book provided by the Leonard Hastings Schoff Publication Fund, University Seminars, Sarah Cole, the Center for the Study of Social Difference Publication Fund, and the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics.

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2019 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Altınay, Ayߞe Gül, 1971- editor. Title: Women mobilizing memory / edited by Ayߞe Gül Altınay [and five others]. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018057995 (print) | LCCN 2019001271 (e-book) | ISBN 9780231549974 (e-book) | ISBN 9780231191845 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231191852 (paperback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Feminism. | Women—Violence against. | Women—Crimes against. | Collective memory. Classification: LCC HQ1155 (e-book) | LCC HQ1155 .W673 2019 (print) | DDC 305.42—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018057995

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee Cover image: Detail of Freundschaft (installation, 2011). Silvina Der-Meguerditchian. Photo: Vivi Abelson.

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Practicing Feminism, Practicing Memory Marianne Hirsch 1 PART I

Disrupting Sites

i Stadium Memories: The Estadio Nacional de Chile and the Reshaping of Space through Women’s Memory Katherine Hite and Marita Sturken 27 i i The Metamorphosis of the Museal: From Exhibitionary to Experiential Complex and Beyond Andreas Huyssen 47 i i i Kara Walker: The Memory of Sugar Carol Becker 65

[ V ]

iv Curious Steps: Mobilizing Memory Through Collective Walking and Storytelling in Istanbul Bürge Abiral, Ayߞe Gül Altınay, Dilara Çalıߞkan, and Armanc Yıldız 84 v

Pilgrimage As/Or Resistance Nancy Kricorian 105

PART II

Performing Protest

vi Traumatic Memes Diana Taylor 113 vi i Memory as Encounter: The Saturday Mothers in Turkey Meltem Ahıska 133 vi i i Aquí: Performing Mapping Practices in Santiago de Chile María José Contreras Lorenzini 152 i x #NiUnaMenos (#NotOneWomanLess): Hashtag Performativity, Memory, and Direct Action against Gender Violence in Argentina Marcela A. Fuentes 172 x Mobilizing Academic Labor: The Graduate Workers of Columbia Unionization Campaign Andrea Crow and Alyssa Greene 192 xi

“Nobody Is Going To Let You Attend Your Own Funeral”: A Funeral for a Trans Woman and Naming the Unnamed Dilara Çalıߞkan 206 x i i Black Feminist Visions and the Politics of Healing in the Movement for Black Lives Deva Woodly 219 [ VI ]

CONTENTS

PART III

Interfering Images

xi i i Instilling Interference: Lorie Novak’s Frequencies in Traumatic Time Laura Wexler 241 x iv Siting Absence: Feminist Photography, State Violence, and the Limits of Representation Nicole Gervasio 258 xv Carrie Mae Weems: Rehistoricizing Visual Memory Deborah Willis 277 xvi

“When Everything Has Been Said Before . . .”: Art, Dispossession, and the Economies of Forgetting in Turkey Banu Karaca 285 xvi i Treasures Silvina Der-Meguerditchian and Marianne Hirsch 305 xvi i i Blank: An Attempt at a Conversation Susan Meiselas and Iߞın Önol 316 PART IV

Staging Resistance

xi x Interventionist Theater: Challenging Regimes of Slow Violence Jean E. Howard 329 xx Making Memory: Patricia Ariza’s and Teresa Ralli’s Antígonas Leticia Robles-Moreno 346

CONTENTS

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xx i Theater of the Mothers: Three Political Plays by Marie NDiaye Noémie Ndiaye 363 xxi i Who Knows Where or When?: AIDS and Theatrical Memory in Queer Time Alisa Solomon 381 PART V

Rewriting Lives

xx iii El Edificio de los Chilenos (The Building of the Chileans): Heroic Memory Revisited by a Post-Revolutionary Daughter Milena Grass Kleiner 407 xxiv Remembering “Possibility”: Postmemory and Apocalyptic Hope in Recent Turkish Coup Narratives Sibel Irzık 424 xxv Müfide Ferit Tek’s Aydemir Meets Neߞide K. Demir, or How Women in Mourning Impede Gendered Memories of a Genocidal Past Hülya Adak 441 xxvi Hilando en la Memoria: Weaving Songs of Resistance in Contemporary Mapuche Political Cultural Activism María Soledad Falabella Luco 459 List of Contributors 479 Index 487

[ VIII ]

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

A

book that takes shape over a number of years across three continents incurs many debts. As editors, we are grateful to the many people and institutions who have helped provide the conditions that made this book possible. First, we wish to thank Women Creating Change at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference, which hosted our working group and fostered a dynamic transnational feminist collaboration.Vina Tran, Laura Ciolkowski, and Terence Roethlein provided invaluable administrative support along the way. Safwan Masri, Columbia’s executive vice president for global centers and global development, supported the Women Mobilizing Memory project from its inception and introduced us to Karen Poniatchik, director of the Columbia Global Center, Santiago, Chile, and to ԭpek Cem Taha, director of the Columbia Global Center, Istanbul,Turkey. Both were wonderful hosts when our working groups convened at their Centers in 2013 and 2014. Associate Directors Rana Zincir Celal and Gisele Feldman, and their staff, were extraordinary in their efforts to make every aspect of our complicated visits rich and meaningful. The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University, its director, Diana Taylor, and associate director Marcial Godoy, were invaluable partners in conceiving and realizing our project. Together, we expanded our Women Mobilizing Memory working

[ IX ]

group at the Hemi Encuentro in Montreal, Canada in 2014. Sabancı University Gender and Women’s Studies Center (SU Gender, formerly Gender Forum) was a creative partner and host of our 2014 workshop and public panel in Istanbul, and Sabancı University provided generous support for both the 2014 (Istanbul) and 2015 (New York) workshops. We thank the Depo Gallery in Istanbul, the Kunstgalerie Exnergasse in Vienna, and the LeRoy Neiman Gallery at Columbia for hosting art exhibits emerging from our work, on Mobilizing Memory: Women Witnessing, and Women Mobilizing Memory: Collaboration and Co-Resistance, our wonderful curators Iߞın Önol, Ayߞe Gül Altınay, and Katherine Cohn, as well as the extraordinary international group of artists who contributed their work. This project owes a great deal to discussions at Columbia’s University Seminar on Cultural Memory. We are grateful to the University Seminars for supporting our New York conference and to its Leonard Hastings Schoff publication fund for its financial assistance. We remain grateful to President Lee Bollinger, who has generously sustained Women Creating Change and this project from its inception, and to Jean Magnano Bollinger, who joined our events. Ann Kaplan saw the promise of Women Creating Change and has helped us realize our vision. Carol Becker, Dean of the School of the Arts, has been both a member of our group and a creative partner in our work. We thank her and Dean of Humanities Sarah Cole, for invaluable support.The Blinken European Institute at Columbia helped support our meeting in Turkey. Teresa Anativia Lopez was the most gentle guide through the sites of Chile’s violent past. She inspired those who were there to witness her openness and courage to continue working together for a better future. Andrea Crow was both a member of our group and served as our extremely capable graduate and editorial assistant on the project. Mary Childers provided crucial editorial support at key moments. Ayߞe Yüksel, Olcay Özer, and Armanc Yıldız of SU Gender helped us organize the workshop, public panel, and memory walk in Istanbul. Women Mobilizing Memory working group members Rüstem ErtuО Altınay, Henry Castillo, Zeynep Gambetti, Marcial Godoy, Ximena Goecke, Özlem Kaya, Leo Spitzer, and Kate Trebuss as well as participants and audiences in our conferences and roundtables in Santiago, Istanbul, and New York contributed creatively to the evolution of the project and we thank them all.

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A C K N OW L E D G M E N T S

Finally, we wish to thank Columbia University Press and its director, Jennifer Crewe, for supporting us so magnificently through the publication process, and to the two anonymous readers secured by the press who gave us crucial and incisive feedback as we were bringing the project to completion. The image on the cover of this volume was generously provided by artist and contributor Silvina Der-Meguerditchian. Drawn from her 2013 installation Freundschaft (Friendship), it illustrates the delicate and fragile web of connections in which this volume engages, as well as its critical feminist exposure and reframing of national and transnational histories of power, violence, and repair. The portraits, postcards, and photographs that Der-Meguerditchian has woven together depict protagonists, artifacts, and places that refer to the oft-forgotten history of what has been termed the “special friendship” between the German Kaiserreich and the Ottoman Empire. Enveloped in crochet and connected by thin red thread, they tell the fraught story of an intimate and unsettling alliance propelled by Germany’s imperial aspirations, heightened by its late arrival to “the scramble for colonies,” and the Ottomans’ desire for foreign influence and investment. The incongruity between the work’s beautiful crochetwork and its troubling subject matter highlights the violent complicity between these geo-histories and the spider web of power structures that joins them. With her deceptively beautiful crochet web, the artist courageously exposes and captures not only the entangled histories of a distant past—Germany’s complicity in the Armenian Genocide1 and the role that some of these protagonists played in the Third Reich and the Holocaust—but also alludes to the present characterized by the history of labor migration and the trajectory of political refugees from Turkey to Germany from the 1960s onwards, as well as the structures of Orientalism and racism that persist in the host country. We can find here ways in which the distant past is nefariously mobilized in even more recent complicities, such as the “refugee deal” brokered by Chancellor Angela Merkel in which ErdoОan’s Turkey emerged as the guardian of “Fortress Europe,” keeping those who seek safe passage at bay and at ever greater risk. On the cover of our volume, this work serves as a reminder of what is at stake in the different scales of power that feminist practices aim to unveil and work against. Our narratives about the past are never more than provisional, this work suggests: they can be mobilized for different futures. Like the volume as a whole, it provokes us

A C K N OW L E D G M E N T S

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to think further about how placing histories of violence and resistance in relation to each other might inspire the work of co-resistance and a fight for livable lives.

Note 1. The German Parliament did not recognize the Armenian Genocide until 2016.

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A C K N OW L E D G M E N T S

WOM E N M OB I L I Z I N G M EM O RY

Introduction Practicing Feminism, Practicing Memory MARIANNE HIRSCH

“Something about the past reminds us of what the future might look like.” WANGE CHI MUTU

This Book: Practicing Feminism, Practicing Memory

T

his book emerges from a multiyear feminist collaboration. A shifting group of us—scholars, artists, and activists from the United States, Europe, and Latin America—have been meeting in person, working together online, and producing this book to consider how the memories of violent histories that we had either personally experienced or studied in our work could be mobilized for more progressive and hopeful futures. The working group on Women Mobilizing Memory brings feminism and memory studies together to connect the afterlives of political violence in various parts of the globe.1 Under the auspices of Columbia’s Center for the Study of Social Difference and its Women Creating Change initiative, some of us met first in Santiago, Chile in 2013, later in Istanbul, Turkey in 2014, and then in New York in 2015. Others joined us as we envisioned publication. Over the course of our collaboration, the group, as well as the questions and the challenges we faced, expanded and shifted. The rise of right-wing populism in many parts of the globe, the alarming restrictions on freedom in Turkey, and the election of Donald Trump in the United States, as well as continuing wars and a growing refugee population, have energized resistance movements committed to social justice. Specifically feminist mobilizations such as the global #MeToo movement; the fights for abortion rights in Ireland, Chile, [1]

and Argentina; and the feminist student movement in Chile have given our work renewed urgency and inspiration. Responding to the ways in which collective memory has, in recent years, been weaponized for conservative and even violent ends, our project seeks to explore alternative practices for mobilizing the memory of past inequities to spur progressive change. Yet “mobilizing,” one of the key words in our title, is often used for military mobilization and reactionary agendas. Authoritarian regimes routinely aim to mobilize collectivities in the service of vengeance and destruction. And they often do so precisely by invoking another of our key terms, “memories,” of perceived injuries and injustices that occurred in the past and that shape group identities. In our work, however, to mobilize memory means to find in it a dynamic potential for transformation that counters backward-looking movements that attempt to restore a legendary or mythic past, or, worse, that serve nationalist and divisive ends. We welcome the associations of “mobilizing” with activating, setting in motion, moving. The association of mobilizing with rallying or gathering helps define the value of collectivity in surviving the present to open future possibility. Yet, this volume asks, what makes the difference in mobilizing memory for justice? Is it a matter of different political ends, the nature of what is being remembered, the strategies and techniques of protest and intervention being employed, or all of the above? Our third key term, “women,” is also in need of definition here. We certainly do not suggest that all those who identify as women stand and act for politically progressive ends, nor do we mean in any way to essentialize femininity. Even as our authors foreground and analyze race and gender-based violence and traditions of activism invented by and associated with women, “women,” in this volume, stand in for an expanded range of progressive political subjects and actors, defined quite differently by different authors in this book. Committed to feminist practices and values, we make clear that these are not the property of people who identify as women. And feminism itself, we recognize, has a variety of meanings in different cultural and historical contexts. Eschewing the pressure to agree, this book is shaped by this multiplicity. We hope that Women Mobilizing Memory will be read as the product of the ongoing encounters, collaborative scholarly inquiry, activism, and creative work that inform its pages. The study of memory has been slow to integrate the analysis of gender and sexuality as markers of social difference.This book makes a unique contribution in building on what is only slowly beginning to emerge as practice-based feminist memory studies.2 In our transnational [ 2 ]

I N T RO D U C T I O N

collaborative work, we developed a process based in solidarity, constructive critique, and a willingness to learn from one another in ways that challenge the insularity of particular disciplines and geopolitical contexts. Certainly, feminism has different meanings and priorities in the parts of the world where we each work, and feminists committed to doing transnational or global feminist work have encountered different barriers and challenges. This book testifies to some of these differences: while all the essays are attuned to the workings of gender and other forms of social difference, only some explicitly foreground gender and sexuality in their analysis. Others exhibit feminist concerns in less explicit, though equally significant, ways. All stringently query received histories and work to bring suppressed or unspoken memories of violence to light. These include violence caused by genocide and war, state violence under authoritarianism and dictatorship and even democracy, dispossession, social death, and more intimate forms of gender-based violence. The authors and artists included here find newly engaged ways of telling the stories of such violence, past and present, assuming the responsibility to intervene by seeking paths toward repair and redress. At the same time, they are vigilant about their own complicity and implication in social structures of inequality. A commitment to a shared feminist practice does not preclude continued debate on how best to promote progressive social change in local and global arenas. Collectively, by highlighting small acts of resistance and everyday practices of refusal, and by bridging disciplinary boundaries and their occlusions, this practice builds on feminist modes of engagement and knowing. For us, thinking, analyzing, performing, writing, and editing were conceived as part of a collective critical practice. Practicing memory by listening, building solidarity, embracing unknowing, accepting failure—all these enable us to invite proximate and distant others into the affective experiences that acts of mobilizing memory can elicit. Performances of protest and art practices are an integral part of our inquiry into how the past can be opened up and its debilitating legacies transformed. We ask, what strategies can disrupt, disturb, engage, move, mobilize a larger public to counter forgetting and to confront and dislodge entrenched beliefs? What role do the arts play in combating the erasure of past violence from current memory and in creating new visions and new histories for future generations? In particular, what unique strategies have women devised to reveal and attempt to redress the violence directed at women and at other disenfranchised social groups? What does a progressive feminist mobilization look like? I N T RO D U C T I O N

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The sites of our inquiry—North and South America, Europe, and Turkey in particular—determine some of our methods and strategies. Distant yet not dissimilar, Chile and Turkey, specifically, share histories of authoritarian rule, dictatorship, genocide, and troubled transitions to neoliberalism. Each has experienced forced migration and diasporic movements, silence and forgetting. Together, they illustrate the cultural and political effects of West European and U.S. foreign policy, inflected by legacies of imperialism and colonialism; and they demonstrate the devastating consequences of a politics of repression based on silence and denial. At the same time, in both places, literature, art, and other memory practices have not only flourished but have become crucial forms of political action. In fact, they have emerged as central ways of mobilizing other forms of knowledge and alternative ways of intervention in national narratives and imaginaries. These transnational encounters of vastly divergent yet related histories have led us all to think about the vicissitudes of mobility itself and our own freedom of movement. Carrie Mae Weems’s photographic “Roman Series,” discussed in this volume by Deborah Willis, reflects on the contradictory instabilities introduced by forced migration, on the one hand, and the lack of mobility resulting from enslavement and incarceration, on the other. The artist’s own freedom and her resulting presence at the sites of imperial power activate memory and reveal the invisible human costs of state and imperial power. Judith Butler has recently argued that our mobility as social subjects depends on support and material conditions, on architecture and infrastructure. Her work on public assembly and mobilization stipulates that “freedom can be exercised only if there is enough support for the exercise of freedom.”3 In the course and the aftermath of genocide, war, political repression and massive individual and communal losses, these conditions are necessarily compromised, creating the need for compensatory gestures, like some of the monumental memorial practices our volume explicitly critiques. Through its critical feminist lens, this volume focuses instead on embodied acts of protest and transformation that are more fleeting and on aesthetic acts that support the exercise of freedom on a more intimate scale, activating unofficial, nonhegemonic collections, archives, and behaviors as well as alternative feminist circuits of connectivity. The memory acts and narratives that we have found most inspiring mobilize personal and cultural injury enabling us to envision potential alternative historical trajectories. The ideas exchanged in the academic talks, public roundtables, workshop discussions, exchanged manuscripts, and collaborative editing in which [ 4 ]

I N T RO D U C T I O N

many of our authors participated, and the disagreements we attempted to address there, shape much of this volume. Less measurable are the effects of the memory work we performed in smaller and larger groups, which is reflected in the volume and also helps to define its activist feminism and commitment to change. Accompanied and sometimes guided by survivors of detention and torture under the Pinochet regime, some of us visited the former torture center Villa Grimaldi, and the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago. We visited the Santiago football stadium where thousands of victims of the Pinochet dictatorship, many of them women, were held and tortured, a site discussed in this volume by Katherine Hite and Marita Sturken. We engaged in a memory walk in Istanbul to bear witness to gender and ethnic violence that remains largely unmarked on site. This walk, which has been developed and expanded by members of our group and which is analyzed in the essay on “Curious Steps” by Bürge Abiral, Ayߞe Gül Altınay, Dilara Çalıߞkan, and Armanc Yıldız, inspired a number of New York-based graduate students in our group to take us for a walk through Harlem. Researching and learning about a rich African American history that is strikingly undocumented by the plaques and architectural preservation projects that are so prominent in other parts of the urban landscape, they built on the gendered memory work of their colleagues in Istanbul. A group visit to the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York, moreover, occasioned a discussion of the politics of this museum’s monumental staging of the memory of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the exclusionary and nationalistic responses this monumentality seems designed to provoke in its visitors. As individuals and as a group, we were compelled to reflect on our own stakes as witnesses to past and present violence and injustice at these different memory sites. Thus, we analyzed not only the effect these visits had on us but also the potentially disruptive effect our own appearance could have on the sites themselves and on local protocols for engaging with them. “Disrupting Sites,” the first section in this book, emerges from these conversations about mobility and intervention, presence and absence, memory and place. The rally celebrating the second election of Michelle Bachelet in Chile in 2013 and the weekly vigil of the Saturday Mothers/People in which some of us took part in Istanbul in 2014, and the demonstration addressing Turkish state violence against Kurdish-dominated cities we staged in New York in 2015—all these inspired the second part of the volume, “Performing I N T RO D U C T I O N

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Protest.” The essays included here address embodied performances of protest in both intimate and public spaces, focusing, through the lens of feminism and social difference, on the strategies used by social movements to bring together (and produce) resistant political subjects. They reflect on the modalities of dissent, critique, and memorialization that feminist forms of protest advance, illuminating surprising interconnections between individual and collective, embodied and virtual, intimate and public forms of protest. The essays bring together mothers’ movements, movements for Black Lives, movements memorializing state-sponsored gender-based violence, and movements for justice in the workplace. Through modes of performance—such as public assembly, testimony, digital action, walking tours, site-marking, public funerals, dialogic analysis, and vigils—direct action groups and individuals strategically unearth and represent traumatic memories in order to demand not only recognition of what has been officially forgotten—a demand too easily dismissed with a symbolic monument or official proclamation—but justice and redress. The two art exhibits “Mobilizing Memory:Women Witnessing” in Istanbul in 2014 and Vienna in 2015, curated by Iߞın Önol and Ayߞe Gül Altınay, and “Women Mobilizing Memory: Collaboration and Co-Resistance” in New York in 2015, curated by Iߞın Önol and Katherine Cohn, presented works by visual artists conceptualizing the parameters of an aesthetics of witness and intervention. The feminist artwork displayed in these exhibits imagines memory as part of a larger politics of resistance. Bringing together women artists, some of whom were themselves direct witnesses to oppression and terror, the exhibits also revealed moments of resilience, resistance, and creative survival. The artists foreground unofficial acts of witness and forms of commemoration that provide alternative histories and different political imaginaries than do many official archives, memorials, museums, and state commemorations. They made visible not only violent crimes and their gendered dimensions but also the intimate texture of lives and communities that have survived or are fighting to survive immense destruction. In honoring those lives, they also reclaim traditional women’s practices— dance, song, and embroidery, for example—and show their political resonances.4 Some of the artists featured in these exhibits, along with others whose work inspired similar questions in different cultural and historical contexts, are represented in this book’s first and third parts, “Disrupting Sites” and “Interfering Images,” both through their own essays and images and in interpretative essays about their work. [ 6 ]

I N T RO D U C T I O N

Theater and performance formed an integral part of our work both in Santiago and Istanbul. For example, Habeas Corpus by working group member and theater artist María José Contreras was the first public theater performance to be held in Santiago’s Palace of Justice, an event that was specifically staged for our international “Women Mobilizing Memory” group in 2013.5 The performance commemorated the more than 10,000 habeas corpus briefs presented to the court during the Pinochet dictatorship on behalf of the disappeared, only to be ignored. As Contreras walked through the formidable lobby of the court, blindfolded, dressed in white and showing her pregnant belly, she incarnated both blind justice and the responsibility to transmit the story of its failure to future generations. To that end, she read a letter given to her by her father before his death with the request to destroy it. Instead, she revealed its contents, exposing her uncle’s complicity in the failed judicial proceedings during the dictatorship, his effort to exonerate himself, and the burden of family memories that he passed on to her and her generation. Sharing that burden with her, as active spectators and co-witnesses, on the very site of the crime, we sought ways to shift its knowledge and meaning for the future. In this book’s fourth part, “Staging Resistance,” we include essays that theorize the power, as well as the limitations, of embodied performance to provoke resistance and open horizons of change for actors and spectators alike. Part V, “Rewriting Lives,” includes feminist theoretical essays on Chilean and Turkish literary and cinematic works that specifically engage the political violence of the last century in these two dictatorial and postdictatorial regimes. How can the stories of ordinary lives under dictatorship be told, and how do personal, public, and political narratives intersect? Many of the accounts written in the wake of authoritarianism and state violence document how cultural memory is mobilized for conservative and reactionary as well as progressive political purposes. A feminist reading practice attuned to the relationship of gender and power can help show what is at stake in using the past for present and future ends, and how those stakes change in shifting political climates. One of this book’s contributions is to assemble a broad and distinctive archive of works that mobilize memory for progressive change and intervene against daily acts of forgetting. Visual and conceptual artists Silvina DerMeguerditchian, Lorie Novak, Doris Salcedo, Aylin Tekiner, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Dilek Winchester; as well as Kurdish artists Bilal, Zarife Bitim, Leyla Demir, Nejbir Erkol, Elif Kaya, Zeynep Öztap; playwrights and I N T RO D U C T I O N

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performance artists Patricia Ariza, Caryl Churchill, Marie NDiaye, Teresa Ralli, Jeff Weiss; writers Halide Edib, Birgül OОuz, Murat Uyurkulak, Zabel Yesayan; Mapuche poets Elicura Chihuailaf, Maribel Mora Curriao, Karla Guaquin, María Huenuñir, Graciela Huinao, María Teresa Panchillo, and other Mapuche women poets included in the Hilando en la Memoria project; filmmakers Macarena Aguiló and Susana Foxley and others contribute to an archive of works that perform forward-looking acts of memory in different cultural contexts. Connecting these works with each other—whether in our group encounters, in individual essays, in the book’s subsections, or the book as a whole—this volume creates a platform in which to think, theoretically, about feminist connectivity and co-resistance.

The Context: Memory Practices, Memory Studies Now The acts of memory represented in this book offer urgent and at times hopeful responses to our current era of monumental memory that supports nationalist, ethnocentric, and masculinist imaginaries. Over the last decade, impressive commemorations have marked momentous anniversaries of histories of conflict, armed struggle, and military victory. The hundredth anniversary of the beginning of World War I, for example, was commemorated by a sea of ceramic red poppies surrounding the Tower of London, one for each of the 888,246 soldiers from Britain and its colonies who lost his or her life in the war. Inspired by the wartime poem “The Blood-Stained Lands and Seas of Red,” written by an anonymous soldier, as well as by the widespread use of the poppy as a symbol of remembrance, the installation was visited by millions. Recent anniversaries marking the end of the Second World War, the liberation of Paris, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Rwandan genocide, the Easter Rising in Ireland, the 1967 War in Israel, were all observed in similarly monumental ways, highlighting nationalism and militarism, on the one hand, victimization and suffering, on the other—all distinctly gendered. These punctual and fleeting commemorations have been occurring in tandem with the opening of new monuments and monumental memorial museums dedicated to national catastrophes or to persecuted or injured minority populations across the globe—from sites like the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York and the memorial to the victims of the German occupation in Budapest, to the Polin Museum of [ 8 ]

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the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, the National Memorial to Peace and Justice dedicated to the memory of lynching in Montgomery Alabama, the Palestinian Museum in Ramallah, the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace in Japan, the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum in South Korea, and the Women’s Museum Istanbul, to name just a few. New Holocaust museums are being planned in London, Rome, Amsterdam, and Santiago, older memorial museums like the Anne Frank House and the Jewish Museum in Berlin, and many sites of concentration, detention, torture, and forced labor across the globe are undergoing massive renovation to tell more inclusive stories for new generations. What is the function of these proliferating memorial institutions, what cultural work do they perform, and what kind of memory practices do they perpetuate? How can they shift national imaginaries to accommodate multiple narratives, even incongruent and competing ones? Of course, the stakes of these institutions vary greatly. Some of them are state-sponsored, consolidating nationalist narratives, while others are the result of years, even decades, of progressive memory activism with the goal of telling inclusive histories, building archives, combatting amnesia, and imagining justice. At the very same time that these memorial structures are going up, however, shocking displays of nationalist and ethnic violence have created new occasions for massive mourning and for future acts of commemoration. Sadly, there may not be a contradiction here. I would argue that, whether celebrating moments of patriotism or using the occasion for a national reckoning and an attempt at redress, the monumentality of some of these structures and rituals actually risks strengthening rather than contesting the ethnic, racialized, and national barriers that are responsible for the violent histories they are recognizing. Monuments to a lost past risk enhancing foundational myths, confirming hegemonic versions of history, denying national complicity, and neglecting more complex historical explanations.6 While many nations still have no museums marking their fractured pasts, others, like the United States, are urgently debating the meaning of memorials to contested aspects of their histories, such as the confederacy. In Chile, official memory projects are only slowly taking shape after a postdictatorship pact of silence. Memory sites outside the capital and those involving women and gender-based violence during the dictatorship, in particular, are only recently being shaped for and opened to the public. The official I N T RO D U C T I O N

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denial of the Armenian genocide and the state-sponsored amnesia about state violence in Turkey, on the other hand, leave the memory work and the creation of a memorial culture to oppositional subaltern groups struggling for recognition. The predominance of memorials and museums as media of popular memory risks overlooking alternative media and more temporary interventions, as in the public memory projects of Colombian artist Doris Salcedo, discussed in this volume by Andreas Huyssen, that critically expose and thus challenge hegemonic national and transnational memory tropes. Salcedo’s engaged feminist art practice, attuned to the effects of repression on individual and communal lives, brings people together to question and reflect rather than consume a pregiven history. Salcedo’s work, like Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety,” discussed in this book by Carol Becker, appropriates the monumentality of current memory practices, but the ephemeral nature of these works, and the materials they use—shirts, dresses, sugar—qualify that monumentality. Specifically citing the grandeur and size of recent monuments in the form of gendered and racialized mimicry, Walker sends up self-serving monumentality to provoke an uncomfortable recognition of her visitors’ deep complicity with the violence of capitalism and a history of slave labor. Sometimes, also, a memory institution, like the nascent Women’s Museum Istanbul, can inspire alternative activist memory practices that are more fleeting and contingent, such as the gender memory walk “Curious Steps.” Sensitive to how easily memory can be activated for conservative and reactionary political ends, scholars of memory have been inspired by critical public memory practices such as Salcedo’s and Walker’s—in other words, by countermonuments and by public acts of counter-memory.7 In our present moment, however, such practices are fewer, often re- rather than proactive. As Andreas Huyssen argued in his book Present Pasts, the evolution of memory culture in the 1990s was marked by antimonumentalism, precisely out of suspicion about the monument’s nineteenth-century association with nationalism.8 The preference, during that period, for an architecture of trauma, consisting of voids and gaps, in large part inspired by the antimonumentality of Maya Lin’s 1982 Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington D.C., is reflected in structures as diverse as Daniel Libeskind’s addition to the Jewish Museum in Berlin, highlighting voids and disorientation, as do the works of Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz, Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock’s work in Germany, the Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires, and Villa Grimaldi in Santiago, consisting of multiple often incongruous [ 10 ]

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elements. As these examples show, the architecture of voids can still be monumental even while calling monumentality into question. Along with these critical memory structures, the smaller and more modest memory practices so creatively developed during the 1990s spawned a new public memory culture that inspired new theories of cultural memory.9 The now widespread Stolpersteine project initiated in Germany by artist Gunter Demnig, for example, installs small memorial plaques into the pavement in front of the homes of victims of National Socialism. More than 50,000 Stolpersteine have been placed in numerous sites in formerly Nazi-occupied Europe since the project’s inception in 1996 (http://www.stolpersteine.eu/en). They intervene in the present with uncomfortable reminders of daily persecution that occurred in that very place, ensuring that former inhabitants will not be forgotten. The transitory night-time projections onto monuments, buildings, or the night sky by artists like Shimon Attie in Berlin and New York; Kristof Wodiszcko in London and Charlestown, Massachusetts; Ruth Beckermann in Vienna; or the “Tribute in Light” to the twin towers in New York, were all designed to contest monumental nationalist memory and call forth ghosts of a past that has yet to be worked through.10 Like these earlier public projects suspicious of the reification of national memory, the interdisciplinary field of memory studies has struggled to evolve from its nation-centered beginnings in the work of scholars like Pierre Nora or its immersion in singular traumatic histories like the Holocaust. The reliance on paradigms based on European histories, such as trauma and psychoanalysis, has been critiqued from global and postcolonial perspectives, even as they continue to be invoked to describe injury and survival from South Africa and Rwanda to postdictatorship Latin America.11 In the 2000’s, Memory Studies as a field has come to conceive memory as transnational and transcultural, building on the assumption that cultures and nations themselves are not static or clearly circumscribed but in constant active contact with one another. It looks at mnemonic itineraries, at travel and traffic, and at mobility, working against nationalism and ethnocentrism.12 Our working group on Women Mobilizing Memory and this volume join a number of recent conferences, journal issues, books, articles, and multi-year research projects that—with titles such as “Gendered Memories of War and Political Violence,” “Memory Unbound,” “Transnational Memory of the Holocaust,” Transnational Memory in Europe,” “Memories on the Move,” “Cosmopolitanism and Transcultural Memories,” “Memory Without Borders,” “Entanglements and Aftermaths”—have addressed the I N T RO D U C T I O N

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mobility of memory. In conversation and collaboration, memory scholars have been attempting to devise approaches that are suited to this mobility, playing with new terms that qualify memory as “cosmopolitan,” “multidirectional,” “global,” “globital,” “comparative,” or “connective.”13 The new Memory Studies Association, inaugurated in 2016, has given the journal Memory Studies, established in 2008, new energy and testifies to the global energy and ambition of the field. The transnational turn in memory studies builds on the field’s critical potential—its questioning and enlargement of the present, its contestation of official histories and its efforts to make space for forgotten and suppressed voices. Thinking about how memory travels and how it reflects cultural entanglements and connectivities presents particular methodological challenges, however. The historian Dirk Moses has called attention to the potential of comparative memory, and especially comparative memory of genocide, to relativize the violence perpetrated on specific populations. He criticizes, for example, Timothy Snyder’s comparison, in his massive book Bloodlands, of the crimes committed by Hitler to those committed by Stalin in the bloodlands between Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus. In response, Moses calls for an “ethics of transculturality” that would be sensitive to particularity and difference, even while embracing a transnational perspective.14 As feminists attuned both to difference and to the potentials of solidarity, the authors of this volume are especially sensitive to the need for such an ethics.

Women Mobilizing Memory: Feminist Memory Studies This book can help define the parameters of what we might think of as a feminist “ethics of transculturality.” Significantly, transnational feminist memory work as practiced here aims to document and commemorate daily injustice and slow violence, as experienced cumulatively and bodily, as well as by large-scale disaster.15 Rob Nixon’s notion of “slow violence,” in fact, comes up in a number of essays in this book, speaking specifically to feminist concerns with the vicissitudes of daily lives. While this volume as a whole is committed to placing violent histories as well as social movements demanding redress in relation to each other, rather than allowing them to stand separately and competitively as the exclusionary property of a single identity-based group, the artists and authors in this book are also acutely aware of the challenges of doing transnational feminist work. [ 12 ]

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In the last decades, global feminist conversations and collaborations like ours have become at once more widespread and more difficult. The increased availability of the internet, the growth of social media, and the pervasiveness of English as a lingua franca have facilitated these alliances, even when they originate in non-English-speaking countries. Yet this deceptive facility of communication threatens to reinstate old hierarchies between scholars who are Anglophone and those who are not, between those who have enjoyed U.S. or European education and privilege and others who have not. In attempting to practice a feminist “ethics of transculturality,” the authors in this volume, and the artists and activists they are discussing, are sensitive to the limits of translatability among different contexts and histories, however entangled. They refuse to collapse divergent experiences into false equivalences. In moving between the local and the transnational, they eschew the nationalism and ethnocentrism lurking within both and the tendency toward the monumental within the mobile and borderless. They make space for practices and strategies—sometimes unremarkable and unremarked— that contest hegemonic acts of memory. Comparison, as Moses warns, might easily become a competition over suffering, encouraged by the zero-sum economy of exclusionary identitarian politics. Instead of comparison, this volume suggests connectivity and entanglement as means of conceptualizing transnational circuits of trauma. For an example of such connectivity, we might think about the fraught role of mothers illustrated in several of the essays. The revolutionary mother blamed for maternal neglect in the Chilean film The Building of the Chileans discussed by Milena Grass Kleiner and the sacrificial mothers in the plays by Marie NDiaye analyzed by Noémie Ndiaye display similar cultural desires for female and maternal nurturance and care, inevitably resulting in the accusation of maternal neglect and the assumption of maternal guilt.The nationalist mothers in the novels discussed by Hülya Adak show maternal complicity in state structures that perpetuate violence. A contrary case is offered by the activist Saturday Mothers/People whose fight for justice is discussed by Meltem Ahıska and highlighted in the installations of Aylin Tekiner, analyzed by Nicole Gervasio. These cases are connected by gendered structures of oppression, but they can in no way be equated. To place these analyses in the same volume requires an attention to both specificity and commonality, as Diana Taylor argues in her essay on the “traumatic meme.” The complexity posed by the mobility of the global and the persistent untranslatability of the local can only be offset by slow, patient, and I N T RO D U C T I O N

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durational collaborative work, emanating from and reaching across different locations in both the global North and the global South.16 Through the work in our group, we have learned that for collaboration to be effective, it must be rooted in the historical circumstances of specific locations— locations themselves traversed by global political and economic forces, as well as in shared experiences of these locations by those in dialogue and collaboration. Thus, rather than identification, or even empathy with those most affected—practices that are open to the risk of appropriation or misunderstanding—the essays in this volume propose and perform responses of solidarity, accompaniment, and co-witnessing, or, even more powerfully, co-resistance.17 At the same time, we have also learned to pause and make space for the difficulties posed by an eagerness for collaboration and a smoothing over of difference. As the contribution of five blank pages by Susan Meiselas and Iߞın Önol so powerfully shows, we have had to learn to pay attention to, and to live with, refusal to communicate in pregiven registers, and with the failure of even the most well-intentioned efforts at transnational solidarity.18

Vulnerability and Resistance In practicing collaboration and solidarity across multiple borders, the feminist contributors to this volume make themselves vulnerable in multiple ways. Vulnerability is a key aspect of the feminist memory ethics and aesthetics that this book, and the practices that brought it about, help to define. But this is not a vulnerability that is manufactured to provoke fear or disavowal, not a vulnerability that produces monumental memorial museums that defend national boundaries. Instead, feminists have defined “vulnerability” as a space of interconnection in the face of entangled histories.19 As an embodied species, we share a common vulnerability emerging from the condition of living in bodies and in time. Importantly, however, vulnerability is also socially, politically, and economically created and differentially imposed and can be mobilized for divergent political aims. Such a conception of vulnerability can provide a way to expand and redirect discourses of trauma, circumventing the unforgiving temporality of catastrophe, the sense of inexorable repetition of the past in the present and future in which injury cannot be healed or repaired but lives on, shattering worlds in its wake. Redirecting the retrospective glance of trauma opens a [ 14 ]

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view toward alternate temporalities that might be more porous and futureoriented, situated on the threshold of alternate reimagined realities. Feminists are particularly attuned to the risks of claiming a gendered vulnerability, identifying women and other disadvantaged populations as especially vulnerable and in need of paternalistic protection. And yet, looking specifically at recent forms of public protest and assembly, the feminist volume on Vulnerability in Resistance claims that “vulnerability is part of resistance, made manifest by new forms of embodied political interventions and modes of alliance that are characterized by interdependency and public action.”20 As Judith Butler argues in her chapter in that collection, “[a]s a way of being related to what is not me and not fully masterable, vulnerability is a kind of relationship that belongs to that ambiguous region in which receptivity and responsiveness are not clearly separable from one another, and not distinguished as separate moments in a sequence; indeed where receptivity and responsiveness become the basis for mobilizing vulnerability rather than engaging in its destructive denial.”21 Vulnerability, in other terms, could be claimed as a platform of openness and connection and as a key aspect of political resistance. To think about how memory of past and ongoing atrocity can be activated in the interests of justice, the essays and artworks in this volume mobilize the archives not only of violence and catastrophe but also of different scales and formats of resistance: from small acts of repair mobilized by art practices to larger-scale performances of collective protest actions, local and global. Art, Mieke Bal writes in her work on migratory culture, “can enact small-scale resistances against the status quo in the social domain. These acts, which we call ‘little resistances,’ determine the limited yet potentially powerful political impact of art.”22 Similarly, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes what she calls “middle ranges of agency” that, as alternatives to grand reactive gestures, “offer space for effectual creativity and change.”23 Art, in its production and reception, enables the practice of receptivity by means of an acknowledgment of vulnerability, both shared and produced. Art can be a gesture of resistance and interference, as Laura Wexler shows in her analysis of Lorie Novak’s images and installations in this volume. It can open a space of interconnection as well as a platform for responsiveness and for “little resistances,” as we see in Silvina Der-Meguerditchian’s “Treasures,” remade by the artist for this volume. Art practices and aesthetic encounters enable us to see vulnerability as I N T RO D U C T I O N

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an openness toward surprising possibilities, enabling us to engage it more creatively—as a position to work from and not only as something to be overcome. As the responses practiced and analyzed in this volume— Habeas Corpus and Aquí in Santiago, performed by María José Contreras; memory walks in Istanbul and New York; journeys of return such as Nancy Kricorian’s; theater events by Caryl Churchill discussed as embodied evocations of slow violence by Jean Howard and by Teresa Ralli and Patricia Ariza, discussed by Leticia Robles-Moreno; or the poetic protest practices such as the Mapuche lyrics discussed by María Soledad Falabella Luco, to name just some examples—they can thus inspire an ethics and a politics of open-endedness and mobility, attuning us to the needs of the past in the present, as well as to the urgency for change in the future. The memory practices this book highlights engage in acts of repair that demand justice but do not aim at restitution. If they rebuild, they take up temporary, often virtual, spaces. They acknowledge the haunting imprecisions of memory, they perform its wounds but, at the same time, they enable us to imagine alternative histories and queer potentials that can reconfigure painful pasts. On a larger scale of resistance, the protest movements studied in this book create political subjects and collectivities. While some recall and reclaim earlier movements for justice and social change, others create new strategies of mobilization. While varying in scale and format, protests have always involved performance, as the Latin etymology of the word attests: pr‫گ‬testčrҸ—pr‫ گ‬+ testčrҸ—is to bear witness together, to testify publicly. Protest requires joint action and, importantly, addressees and an audience: those with the authority to satisfy the demand and those to observe the claim. From suffragist pageants to labor pickets, from guerilla graffiti teams to street theater troupes, from lunch counter sit-ins to sidewalk kiss-ins and die-ins, from fax zaps to hashtag activism, groups seeking justice have used their bodies, available technologies, and their collectivity to make their causes seen and heard. This volume attends specifically to powerful twenty-first century forms of public mobilization that both build upon and challenge the historic legacies of protest movements. In accessing this “usable past,” movements can simultaneously honor and dismiss the efforts that preceded them. Self-distinguishing slogans like one frequently expressed at Black Lives Matter demonstrations—“This is not your grandmother’s civil rights

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movement”—both call attention to prior civil rights activism and alter its terms and modes of protest. In her essay on healing justice, Deva Woodly finds affirmative antecedents to the Movement for Black Lives in the concept of négritude and in earlier assertions that “Black is Beautiful.” Some protest traditions, the “motherist” protests in Istanbul, Argentina, and Mexico, discussed by Hülya Adak, Meltem Ahıska, Nicole Gervasio, and Diana Taylor, for example, were earlier critiqued for assuming the universality of motherhood or its priority as a female identity, yet the astonishing persistence of protests based on the grief and anger of actual or symbolic mothers reveals how effective this strategic use of identity politics can be, even as feminist horizontal organizing practices defy top-down hierarchies of power. In their analysis of the graduate worker unionization movement at Columbia University, Andrea Crow and Alyssa Greene show the precarity of memory deprived of institutional structures and generational transmission. But they also show that twenty-first century forms of repression and injustice do sometimes require new tactics and can avail themselves of new tools and opportunities—and that old tactics encounter new challenges in our present context.The very act of assembling in parks or plazas has new meaning in the context of neoliberalism’s widespread privatization of public space. Public assembly brings public space into being by occupying it, and it stretches its shrinking boundaries. Those challenging the precarity of their lives—Latin American students, relatives of people disappeared by authoritarian regimes, women who endured political sexual violence, African Americans subjected to police brutality, artists who stage public performances—lay claim to a public platform typically denied them and make themselves vulnerable in the very act of protesting their vulnerability. They imagine and enact their collective power even as they place themselves at risk.24 What is more, digital technologies have changed the form and substance of contemporary protest, for organizers from all sides of the political spectrum. Do progressive movements use the digital in particular ways? Certainly this is a tool restricted to privileged organizers. Two cases discussed in this volume highlight the potential merits of such tools—digital mapping that calls attention to political erasure in Chile, discussed by María José Contreras Lorenzini in this volume, and the use of hashtags as accumulative memorialization in the campaign against femicide in Argentina, #NiUnaMenos (NotOneWomanLess), discussed by Marcela Fuentes. Both,

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importantly, emphasize connections rather than disconnections between on- and offline practices. Digitization has also effectively mobilized social movements by allowing for the instant documentation of repressive violence. The video filmed in New York in 2014 by a bystander that showed Eric Garner being driven to the ground through a chokehold by a police officer and then going limp is just one of many that has gone viral, igniting mass protests. His gasping plea for release—“I can’t breathe”—became a rallying cry in the national movement for police accountability. This accelerated democratic creation and dissemination of an archive of violence contrasts with the long, laborious, and officially thwarted efforts of activists in Turkey, Chile, and elsewhere to obtain records that document state atrocities long denied. And yet, videos of brutal state violence can also act as renewed weapons wielded against targeted bodies, such as those of black men in the United States, who are subjected to their viral repetition. Digital culture, which resists top-down hierarchies and favors fluid networks, has also fostered rapid and extensive connectivities among protesters across borders, especially at moments when public assembly is severely restricted, as is the case in Turkey today. Contemporary protests cannot be understood without paying attention to the role of a transnational contagion of memes, tactics and strategies, images and behaviors disseminated on the internet: for instance, the communications and cross-citations among occupiers of Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Wall Street’s Zuccotti Park, and Istanbul’s Gezi Park; the associations forged between activists in Missouri demonstrating against racist police violence and Palestinians resisting Israeli occupation; Istanbul’s Saturday Mothers/People adapting the methods and imagery of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. The citing, recuperation, and remixing of protest tactics produce solidarity and ideological connectivity across time and space. As Diana Taylor argues in her essay, “Traumatic Memes,” certain memes and rhetorics circulate globally, adapted to particular circumstances while symbolically claiming a place in the continuity of struggle through historical time and global geographies. And yet, of course, these repetitive, citational, accretive, and affective practices are just as readily utilized for reactionary as for progressive ends. Acknowledging these complexities, this volume considers the myriad ways in which grass-root protests intervene in the public sphere, transforming it with the intimacy of shared grief. Giving voice to silenced memories or reclaiming and reframing collective memories that have [ 18 ]

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been deliberately misrepresented in official narratives, this volume seeks to support the calls for justice embodied in collective action, whether they address state, patriarchal, academic, or domestic regimes. It seeks to affirm the possibility of change. Ariella Azoulay’s notion of “potential history,” inspired by Walter Benjamin’s idea of “incomplete history,” helps to theorize such an open-ended sense of possibility. “Potential history” is a sense not just of what was but of what might have been, and the act of encountering history in this way is, actively, to “potentialize” it—to revisit it so it yields different, perhaps incongruent, “unrealized possibilities”—eventualities that resonate across time and space. To “potentialize” history is to see what was from a different angle, through different eyes. The capacity to envision different potential, instead of one single linear history would mean the ability to accommodate conflicting truths that could lead to alternate futures, and, counter-intuitively perhaps, to alternate pasts as well.25 This kind of capacity can be developed through collaborative and connective practices that embrace commonality as well as difference. As Alisa Solomon demonstrates in her essay in this volume, queer theorists have redefined linear temporality in favor of lateral, contingent, nongenealogical forms of transmission that can also inform our thinking about memory and its conception of the past, the present, and the future. The demand for aparición con vida for those who were disappeared by repressive dictatorships reverses linear temporality in favor of counterfactual claims for a reappearance that would constitute justice. We see such alternative histories in the Turkish coup narratives analyzed by Sibel Irzık in this volume, narratives that “mourn” the “possibility” envisioned by activists organizing the revolutionary movements of the 1970s that were crushed by the military coup d’état of 1980. They are also present in the ambivalent memories of the MIR, the Revolutionary Left Movement in Chile, highlighted by Milena Grass Kleiner. They are visibly palpable in artist Dilek Winchester’s reconstructions of “what has been said before” in Turkey’s suppressed languages, discussed by Banu Karaca. And they suffuse the trans women funerals evoked by Dilara Çalıߞkan. The gestures of intervention performed by these and other artists and activists discussed in this book enable such contemplations of alternative trajectories. Even as they recognize the pitfalls of insisting on forward movement and progress as the horizons of political aspiration, they aim to envision a future that recalls past crimes without appropriating them, without I N T RO D U C T I O N

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being paralyzed by them, and without succumbing to nationalist or ethnocentric ideologies that perpetuate a culture of fear and denial. The ongoing collaboration that our interdisciplinary and transnational working group on Women Mobilizing Memory has practiced, our meetings in Chile, Turkey, and the United States, and the expanded collaboration represented by the work on this volume, provide no more than a promising beginning. The feminist ethics of transculturality it aims to enact provides a provocation to think further about how memory might inspire the work of co-resistance and a vision of livable lives.26

Notes 1. See https://www.socialdifference.columbia.edu/projects-/women-mobilizing -memory. 2. For volumes on gender and memory, see, for example, Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith, eds., “Gender and Cultural Memory,” Special Issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 1 (2002); Ayߞe Gül Altınay and Andrea Petö, eds., Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories: Feminist Conversations on War and Political Violence (New York: Routledge, 2016); Andrea Petö and Ayߞe Gül Altınay, eds., “Open Forum: Feminist Questions at the Centennial of the First World War,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 21, no. 3 (2014): 293–312; Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). For queer approaches to memory studies, see especially Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); David L. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 3. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, eds. Vulnerability in Resistance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 14. 4. https://www.socialdifference.columbia.edu/publications-1/mobilizing -memory-women-witnessing-exhibition-catalogue; https://www.socialdifference .columbia.edu/publications-1/collaborative-archives-connective-histories -exhibit-catalogue. 5. http://www.mariajosecontreras.com/habeas-corpus. 6. See, for example, Marita Sturken, “The 9/11 Memorial Museum and the Remaking of Ground Zero,” American Quarterly 67, no. 2 (2015): 471–90. 7. On countermonuments, see the generative essay by James Young, “The CounterMonument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (1992): 267–96. On counter-memory, see Michel Foucault, Language, [ 20 ]

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8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). See esp., James E. Young, The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016). http://shimonattie.net/portfolio/the-writing-on-the-wall/; http://culture.pl /en/artist/krzysztof-wodiczko#publ; http://www.ruthbeckermann.com/home .php?il=103&l=eng; https://www.911memorial.org/tribute-light. See especially Laura S. Brown, “Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012); Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, trans. Rachel Gomme (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); and Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). For the continued use and reinterpretation of psychoanalytic paradigms of trauma, see e.g., the work of Pumla GobodoMadikizela, most recently, What Does It Mean to Be Human in the Aftermath of Historical Trauma?: Re-envisioning the Sunflower and Why Hannah Arendt Was Wrong (Uppsala, Sweden: Nordic Africa Institute, 2016). See the special issue of Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011), ed. Richard Crownshaw, especially the essays by Astrid Erll, Anna Reading, Susannah Radstone, Dirk Moses, and Andrew Hoskins; Astrid Erll, “Traumatic Pasts, Literary Afterlives: New Directions of Literary and Media Memory Studies,” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 3, no. 1 (2011); Ann Rigney and Chiara de Chesari, eds., Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales (Amsterdam: De Gryuter, 2014); and the special issue of Memory Studies 11, no. 3 (2018) on “Cultural Memory After the Transnational Turn,” edited by Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney. On cosmopolitan memory, see Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in a Global Age: Politics, History, and Social Change (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006); Andreas Huyssen, “Transnationale Verwertungen von Holocaust und Kolonialismus,” in Verwertungen von Vergangenheit, ed. Elisabeth Wagner and Burkhardt Wolf (Berlin: Workwerk8, 2009); on globital memory, see Anna Reading, “The London Bombings: Mobile Witnessing, Mortal Bodies and Globital Time,” Memory Studies 4, no. 3 (2011): 298–311; on connective memory, see Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) and Andrew Hoskins, “7/7 and Connective Memory: Interactional Trajectories I N T RO D U C T I O N

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of Remembering in Post-Scarcity Culture,” Memory Studies 4, no. 3 (2011): 269–80. 14. Dirk Moses and Michael Rothberg, “A Dialogue on the Ethics and Politics of Transcultural Memory,” Days and Memory (blog), February 16, 2014, https://hgmsblog.weebly.com/blog/a-dialogue-on-the-ethics-and-politics -of-transcultural-memory-part-i and https://hgmsblog.weebly.com/blog/a -dialogue-on-the-ethics-and-politics-of-transcultural-memory-part-ii. 15. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 16. See Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner, eds., The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 17. On co-witnessing, see Irene Kacandes, Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk Explosion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001). On co-resistance, see Nancy Kricorian, this volume. 18. On failure, see Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 19. On vulnerability, see Martha Albertson Fineman, Vulnerability and the Human Condition, Emory University, accessed December 7, 2018, http://web.gs.emory .edu/vulnerability/index.html; Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, eds., Vulnerability in Resistance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). Some of these ideas about vulnerability build on earlier reflections, my essay in that volume “Vulnerable Times” and Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, “Vulnerable Lives: Secrets, Noise and Dust,” Profession (2011), 51–67. See also the important caveats raised by Ewa Plonowska Ziarek: “Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability: Disrespect, Obligation, Action,” Substance 42, no. 3 (2013): 67–84. 20. Butler et al, Vulnerability in Resistance, 7. 21. Butler et al, Vulnerability in Resistance, 25. 22. Mieke Bal and Miguel Hernández-Navarro, Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011). 23. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 24. See Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 25. Ariella Azoulay, “Potential History: Thinking Through Violence,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 3 (2013): 548–74. On such alternate conceptions of temporality, see also e.g. Walter Benjamin’s writings about “incomplete history” and messianic time, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969); Giorgio Agamben on potentiality, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Reinhard Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); and [ 22 ]

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Jennifer Wenzel, Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009). 26. This introduction was written in conversation with the co-editors of this volume and some of its authors. Special credit for some of these reflections and formulations goes to Ayߞe Gül Altınay, María José Contreras, Jean Howard, Banu Karaca, Alisa Solomon, and Diana Taylor.

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CH A P T E R I

Stadium Memories The Estadio Nacional de Chile and the Reshaping of Space through Women’s Memory K AT H E R I N E H I T E A N D M A R I TA S T U R K E N

I

n the stands of the Estadio Nacional in Santiago, Chile, the site of the largest sports and entertainment events of the country as well as a national voting station, there is a small cordoned-off area. Amid the plastic orange seats of the large arena, this area next to the field consists of several rows of empty wooden benches. Above the aged and splintered benches, a sign reads “Un pueblo sin memoria es un pueblo sin futuro” (A people without memory is a people without a future). As part of a series of memorial projects at the stadium to commemorate those who were detained, tortured, and killed there from September to November 1973, the empty wooden seats form a kind of time capsule, an entreaty to remember through the material preservation of the original benches. The seats sit as a silent ruin, an eyesore in the larger stadium environment, and a reminder that the stadium was once the site of brutal repression. The Estadio Nacional has become, more than forty years after the coup, a site of memorialization. In this essay, we aim to situate the memorialization processes of the Estadio Nacional in relation to radical women’s activism through memory. The reclamation of the stadium as a space of memory can be seen in the context of feminist tactics of solidarity and resisting political violence, among both older generations of women who were revolutionaries and former political prisoners and younger generations of progressive activists, as well as the history of feminist women’s activism through the tactic of intervention into public space. The stadium’s use as a site of detention and torture and its [ 27 ]

partial repurposing as a space of memory raise issues related to visuality and invisibility, gendered spatial relations, and activist women’s mobilization of memory in relation to architectural forms and violent histories.1 Like those of memorialization projects throughout the world, the Estadio Nacional efforts have not been smooth. The process in Chile reflects local dynamics of power and struggle from the margins as well as the ways the conflictual and repressive past, and the pain and silences it produced, continues to weigh on the present. While we can situate the Estadio Nacional within a long history of stadiums being repurposed as places of violent repression, its transformation into a site of memorialization while still functioning as an active venue for sports and entertainment makes it a unique space of intersecting and contrasting social realms. The empty seats of the stadium memorial sit there not only as memories of the stadium’s violent past but are also actively intervening into the present as a spatial form of protest. In its contradictions and paradoxical uses, the Estadio Nacional opens up a space for the mobilization of memory for social change, deploying the memory of the stadium’s past to engage issues of social justice in the present. The stadium’s memorial projects reveal a unique intersection of spatial practices, mobilizations of memory, and women’s memory as a site of activism and renewal.

Containment and the Chilean Coup Chile’s September 11, 1973 military coup d’état resulted in the death of the democratically elected leftist President Salvador Allende and the beginning of the seventeen-year dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. The regime’s early and intense focus on systematically eliminating the Chilean left produced a pervasive state terror, including the murder and forced disappearance of an estimated 3,200 citizens, the torture of tens of thousands of Chileans, massive numbers of exiles, and the enduring neoliberalization of the economy and politics. For much of the world familiar with the coup and the 1973–1990 Chilean dictatorship, the black-and-white photographs of the detentions at the Estadio Nacional, which circulated in the international press, remain iconic, even though the stadium only functioned that way for three months. This iconicity derives from the fact that from September to November 1973, the stadium was the dictatorship’s largest detention center, with as [ 28 ]

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many as 20,000 prisoners from Chile and thirty-eight other countries.2 The stadium was also the focus of periodic global attention. On September 22, 1973, in a move to assure both Chileans and the international community that those being held were being treated humanely, the junta conducted an official press “tour” of the conditions there.Yet, the military’s strategy backfired, as reporters and photographers observed first-hand the soldiers’ cruel treatment and the poor state of the detainees. The stadium was emptied of prisoners in November 1973 in order for the World Cup qualifying matches to take place there (a match in which the Soviet Union refused to participate, resulting in a default). The regime’s reopening of the stadium after several months was an attempt to cleanse its sordid history and to normalize it as a nationalistic space of the Pinochet regime going forward. According to the 1991 Report of the National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, officially at least forty-one people lost their lives inside the stadium. Because of the numbers of those who were detained there, tortured, killed, and then dumped in Santiago streets, ditches, and in the Mapocho River during the regime’s early months, journalists and human rights advocates assume there were many more.3 Among the stadium prisoners were approximately 1,400 women, who were held in separate spaces on the stadium grounds, including in locker rooms adjacent to the main coliseum.4 Since women constituted a small number of the approximately 3,200 people who were killed and disappeared, women’s experiences as subjects and victims of the dictatorship were rendered all the more invisible during the detention and in its aftermath. The women do not appear in the iconic black-and-white photos. When the military emptied the stadium in November, many of the women were released (often only to be re-arrested shortly thereafter), while others were moved to clandestine detention centers and a women’s prison, where they experienced further abuse. Some remained prisoners for several months, others for a year or more, and others had their sentences commuted to forced exile. In March 1990, after seventeen years of military rule, a national referendum forced Pinochet to step down from his position as dictator; he then became the commander in chief of the army. In 1998, Pinochet was named a “senator for life,” as specified in the military-orchestrated 1980 constitution. Nevertheless, the former general was arrested in London in October 1998 on the order of the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón. This surprise arrest and his subsequent eighteen-month detention seemed to produce a moment of public release in Chile. It opened a new space for Chilean S TA D I U M M E M O R I E S

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survivor testimonies, which began to appear in major media reports as well as through memoirs and documentaries.5 This also became a period in which Chilean memorialization efforts like those surrounding the Estadio Nacional began to proliferate, primarily as small, fragmented, but determined struggles to mark sites of loss and to reclaim former sites of clandestine detention and disappearance.6 Through the fitful yet persistent work of former political prisoners and their families, human rights advocates, architects, journalists, filmmakers, political organizers, and more recently, a robust group of younger volunteers, the Estadio Nacional has been reclaimed as a site of memory, education, and activism.

Stadium Architecture, Visuality, and the Gendering of Space While the Estadio Nacional is unique in being partially remade as a site of memory, there is a long history of stadiums being repurposed as sites of detention. From recent examples of Syrian refugees being held at the Stadium of Kos, Greece, in August 2015; to the SuperDome as a site of neglect, brutality, and death during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005; back in history to the detainment of Jewish prisoners at the Vélodrome d’Hiver (Vel’ d’Hiv) in Paris in 1942 before they were deported to extermination camps, stadiums have served as sites of containment, detention, and torture.7 This kind of repurposing of space demonstrates in many ways the long history of crowd control in modernity. A stadium is a site of spectacle by design. Yet, precisely because they are built to accommodate large numbers of people, stadiums are also governed by the design of crowd containment, with restrictive venues of access and egress to prevent unpaid entry, and large hidden spaces underneath, used under normal circumstances for celebrities, entertainers, and sports teams. The scale of stadium spectacle has long aligned its meaning with nationalism (as sites of national sports teams, with the direct alignment of sports with patriotism, in particular in relation to football and world sports events such as the World Cup), with masculinist aesthetics, and with fascism with its deployment of massive rallies as events of spectacular affirmation.8 Architect Benjamin Flowers has outlined the different modes through which stadiums can be understood, such as nationalism and transnational capital flows, and among these he defines “death and destruction” [ 30 ]

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(as epitomized by the use of stadiums for detention and the building of stadiums on sites that have been destroyed) and “war incubator” (as sites where sport contests and nationalist events become incitements to war) as two central typologies.9 The built environment can become a space of oppression precisely because it is designed to restrain the energy of the crowd, which has resulted in many incidents of individuals in crowds being crushed to death as they surged up against the barriers at stadiums.10 These disasters are largely attributed to a conflict between spaces and crowds; as Camiel van Winkel writes, “There is, in the history of the modern sports stadium, an ominous undercurrent of mutual provocation between crowd and architecture. The architecture attempts to impose discipline on the crowd, but time and again it transpires that deciders and managers have miscalculated its blind force.”11 Architectural design of discipline can turn quickly to architecture as death. The Estadio Nacional embodies in many ways this history of modern stadium architecture and its shadowy history of violence. Built in 1938, and modeled on the fascist aesthetic of Nazi Germany, it was always an incomplete project, with its various stages of construction (including a renovation in 1962 and a later renovation in 2009) almost all incomplete in some way. As Valentina Rozas-Krause has written, the history of the stadium is a narrative of incompleteness, of “interrupted” modernism, which began with an embrace of modernist aesthetics as a symbol of a burgeoning consumerist middle class, distinguished from the landowning oligarchic aristocracy. She defines the structure as evoking the “unfinished promise of modernity,” which further deteriorated in an unfinished renovation for the 1962 World Cup, and more fully debased in its transformation into a site of detention and torture in 1973. She writes, “Its potential dungeons, the panopticon-like Press Gallery in the marquee, and the control of the flow of people that the spatial design of the National Stadium facilitated, appear to be the main functional arguments—although they were never declared as such—that led the military to use it as a prisoner camp.”12 These intersections of modern design, fascist and disciplinary architectural modes, and incompleteness signal both the potential of the stadium as a site of state terrorism and its eventual transformation into a site incorporating memorial elements. It is not incidental that this highly masculine space of discipline and state control has been reconfigured in part as a site of memory through the work of many women activists. During the months of detention and torture at the Estadio, the intersection of spatial organization and visuality (the deployment of power S TA D I U M M E M O R I E S

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through the visual) was explicitly gendered. The women were not held in the main arena with the men, but in smaller locker room buildings adjacent to the stadium and Olympic pool. Thus while the men were detained in the bleachers, under the gaze of the military and cameras, the women were held out of sight. The military conducted interrogations of both the women and men inside the indoor racetrack. This meant that the women were sometimes paraded through the main arena to the interrogation area, before the gaze of the men held there, with the men often responding with applause. The women were housed together in the locker room building and, as former prisoner Teresa Anativia López notes, the space itself allowed for the women to interact with each other and support each other. Here, she states, “I learned what solidarity is.”13 In contrast to other sites of detention in Chile, such as Villa Grimaldi, where prisoners were blindfolded and forbidden to have contact with one another, at the stadium they were housed together. When women returned from being tortured, they were cared for by the other women in the collective space. Anativia López notes that when the UN commission was brought in to observe the conditions and the military was trying to portray the situation in positive terms, the women collectively decided to bring out before the horrified commission members a badly beaten woman they had hidden, an act for which the women were severely punished. The design of the stadium also restricted views from the outside. Relatives who were seeking news about their missing family members often came to the gate of the stadium where they were unable, by design, to enter or to see into the interior space. Former prisoners and their families recount that there was one area near the locker room where families could make out their loved ones at a distance through the gates, when guards were not vigilant. These spatial arrangements—the crowd containment of the stadium’s arena, the space underneath where torture took place hidden from view, the containment yet community of the women in the locker room, the restricted views, and the dynamics of visibility, resistance, and solidarity—created a complex interaction of space, gender, and power.

Stigma, Shame, and Testimony Chile’s gradual democratic transition that began in 1990 preserved fundamental features of the dictatorship, including neoliberal social and economic [ 32 ]

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transformations, the weakening of collective civic life, and the denigration of a leftist imagination. Women have been some of the most visible protagonists of the Chilean human rights struggle for truth and accountability, and yet many women who themselves had survived imprisonment and torture needed years to begin to speak about those experiences. Beyond the pain and even revulsion of giving testimony was the experience of stigma; upon release from detention, women who remained in the country faced a climate of fear and silence. Often the fact that they had been held prisoner made them immediately suspect—perceived as a danger to themselves, their families, and to what was left of their communities. Former prisoners who survived were often labeled terrorist subversives. They also faced suspicion from the revolutionary left, some of whom questioned whether their release meant that the former prisoners had cooperated with interrogators by revealing the names and whereabouts of fellow militants. Many former prisoners suffered survivors’ guilt as well as the shame of their sexual violation in a cultural context of silence regarding sex in general. The torture of many of the women prisoners was brutal and sexually sadistic, targeting women’s bodies with electric shock, broken glass, and brute force.14 For virtually thirty years, Chilean women’s experiences of such sadistic practices were largely enveloped in what Veena Das has termed a “zone of silence” in which women evade specificity in testifying to their traumatic experiences. As a “repository of poisonous knowledge,” according to Das, women survivors can internalize the violence and violations to spare their families pain.15 Since the early 2000s, increasing numbers of women former political prisoners have provided their testimonies to journalists, scholars, and to official government commissions; yet to this day, many surviving former prisoners remain silent about their experiences, particularly regarding their torture.16 The testimonies that have emerged from women ex-prisoners describe the tremendous solidarity and organizing among the women within the stadium, across class, education, culture, and nationality. For example, they recount the role of Dr. Elena Gálvez, then a forty-four-year-old physician in Santiago’s left militant-organized squatter settlements, who became a leader among the prisoners.17 Along with several other detainees, Gálvez arrived at the stadium on September 21, beaten and bruised in the back of a truck. In spite of her state, she began to provide care to other prisoners and to organize support systems among them. Given Gálvez’s medical and organizing skills, the military periodically confined her to a tiny men’s bathroom, where S TA D I U M M E M O R I E S

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she was held incommunicada for days at a time.18 In addition to her medical assistance, Gálvez was known for her consistent good humor and insistence that women remain strong, control as much of their immediate surroundings as they could, and resist showing weakness before their captors.19 Many women have testified to the ways that their collective imprisonment allowed them to share information and strategies for survival. “We learned incredible things for survival from our Brazilian women comrades,” recounts Verónica Báez, as many Brazilian leftists who were prisoners had experienced detention under the Brazilian military dictatorship in the late 1960s before coming to Chile as political exiles. According to Báez, the Brazilians counseled not to argue or speak with the military, “who are very clear on what they’re doing and whatever thing you tell them can be used to extract information.” The Brazilians also advised fellow women prisoners not to bathe, “because the more greasy dirt we had on our bodies, the better protected we would be from electric shocks, because grease is a bad conductor.”20 The women also counseled one another on survival strategies to resist infection and disease and to maintain some strength. “I felt so supported by the other women prisoners there,” said Ruth Vuscovic, “women who became real friends. In that dark place you could find the best of what it means to be human.” Vuscovic, a young Communist militant, was arrested in her home and forced to leave her eight-month-old child. For ten days, Vuscovic had no word of her husband’s whereabouts until she learned that he, too, was being held in the stadium. A guard pointed to him among the men in the stands and arranged a brief embrace between them.21 Vuscovic and other prisoners managed to pass messages back and forth between the men and women prisoners, and very occasionally, more sympathetic guards allowed married couples who were both prisoners to meet.22 These small gestures, and the building of solidarity and resistance, would lay the foundation for the memorialization projects that would follow many years later. In their search for meaningful political engagement, younger generations of memory activists have been attracted by these histories of solidarity to become involved at the stadium. One such activist, Andrés Aguirre, states how important listening to and recording former women prisoners’ testimonies is to him, and he is working with other younger volunteers to build a video archive of the testimonies, particularly as the women grow old and pass away.23 The memorial projects at the stadium are thus actively connecting the current activities there with the political struggles that defined [ 34 ]

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the prisoners before they were detained and that formed the small acts of resistance and protest that bonded the women during their detention. The memorialization projects of the Estadio Nacional and throughout Chile emerged in fits and starts many decades after the coup out of the desire to make these memories and histories more visible. The destruction of family lives, shattered political projects, the loss of livelihood, and forced exile all help to explain ongoing tensions and fractionalization within postdictatorship memorialization efforts as well as the hesitancy to take part in such efforts. Chilean memorialization efforts also take place in a public context that has not embraced such processes. Former human rights violators continue to circulate in Chile; many of their former supporters are in high political office and corporate boardrooms, and the political tensions around memorialization shift constantly. Nevertheless, in 2010, at the end of her first term in office, ex-prisoner President Michelle Bachelet inaugurated Chile’s Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos. The museum marked an official memorial engagement on a major scale with the 1973–1990 dictatorship. By contrast, the stadium project has been a grassroots memorialization effort. Memorial projects and events at the Estadio Nacional are imbued in part by women’s shared experiences and by memories of resistance and solidarity in the stadium as well as outside the gates.

The Stadium as a Site of Memory For many ex-prisoners, the process of memorialization of those affected by the state terrorism of the Pinochet dictatorship began on October 16, 1998, when Chile awoke to the news Pinochet had been arrested in London under a Spanish magistrate’s extradition request. Many Chileans describe that moment as one of utter disbelief; ex-political prisoner and memory activist Wally Kunstmann states that she really thought she was dreaming when she heard the news. Pinochet’s arrest, according to Kunstmann, catalyzed a group of women former political prisoners to mobilize publicly together for the first time. The women sought a meeting with then president Eduardo Frei to demand that the government support Spain’s extradition request, though Frei refused to meet with them.24 The former prisoners then met each day outside La Moneda, the presidential palace, joining older human rights groups like the Agrupación de Familiares de los Detenidos-Desaparecidos and HIJOS (an organization of children of the S TA D I U M M E M O R I E S

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murdered and disappeared that began in Argentina and has spread to several Latin American countries, including Chile), to demand that Pinochet be held accountable. Kunstmann describes the protests: We got hold of sound equipment to read our demands aloud, at night we organized candlelight vigils, we painted signs and banners, we wrote libretos denouncing the human rights violations over the 17  years. More than anything, for the first time women and men former political prisoners raised our voices to talk about torture, supporting our denunciations with an exhibit of documents, photographs, testimonies, that brought into the public light the politics of state sponsored terrorism applied by the armed forces, with the support of civilian groups, against the people of Chile.25 The group would eventually form its own association of former prisoners, first gathering testimonies to send to the Spanish magistrate to support the Pinochet detention, and later publicly denouncing the violations and outing the military officers and civilians who had tortured them. The ex-prisoners’ torture cases would join those already in progress that were focused on the disappearances and deaths.26 The Agrupación also began a concerted effort with others to locate and publicize the former clandestine detention centers where they had been imprisoned and tortured. Kunstmann’s group would eventually become the nongovernmental Estadio Nacional, Memoria Nacional (National Stadium, National Memory) organization. At the same time that Kunstmann and others began to focus on the stadium as a site to be reclaimed for what had happened there, Chilean filmmaker Carmen Luz Parot released her documentary, Estadio Nacional (2003). In the documentary, former prisoners share their accounts of coping and resistance strategies as well as their experiences of torture and despair. They describe inventing and organizing games, and even a choir; celebrating mass with an imprisoned priest; communicating with their families through conscripted soldiers from the provinces in need of a lunch in Santiago on their days off. The documentary conveys the high level of organization and innovation the prisoners achieved in the midst of a great deal of pain and brutality. On August 21, 2003, in response in part to the years of ex-prisoner activism, the Chilean Government declared the Estadio Nacional a national monument. The stadium thus became a focus for both human rights and [ 36 ]

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political activists and for professional architects, including Claudia Woywood and Marcelo Rodríguez, the granddaughter and son of the architect Alejandro Rodríguez Urzua, who was detained and who disappeared on July 27, 1976. Woywood and Rodríguez began working on a design to repurpose the stadium grounds as a site of memory. The process regarding who would be authorized to represent the memorial site and design proved rocky, involving struggles and contestation over who could speak for the victims, who and what must be mourned and respected, and how, as well as what audiences and constituencies should be prioritized. Serious tensions and disagreements led to the exit of some activists and the Rodríguez-Woywood architects from the project. Subsequently, the architects Marcel Coloma and Alexandra Buzhynskaya, a couple working with the ex-political prisoners, became responsible for the master plan, which incorporated some dimensions of the RodríguezWoywood design. Paradoxically, the Estadio Nacional, Memoria Nacional organization ultimately received significant support from the sports ministry of rightist president Sebastián Piñera (2010–2014). The Piñera administration granted the organization the authority to approve or deny changes to the memorial site. It was in this context that parts of the “incomplete” stadium were repurposed yet again, into a memorial. The memorial projects at the Estadio Nacional demonstrate how the remaking of the stadium has created new kinds of looking within the designed stadium space.27 Escotilla 8, once a forgotten underground space, now functions quite effectively as a site of performance, with large photographs on display of the stadium in 1973 and those detained and killed there, accommodating crowds on anniversary occasions.28 Two memorials on the grounds demand the attention of crowds that are filtering into the stadium, pulling their views away from the central coliseum. The first stands at the central entrance to the stadium grounds and pays homage to the former prisoners. Its positioning also marks the site where families gathered outside for any news of their loved ones inside. The second memorial recognizes the many who were immediately rounded up from their jobs and political postings at the state- and worker-expropriated factories under the Allende government. Inside the stadium arena, the forlorn wooden benches cordoned off among the bright red stadium seats remain. New work on the stadium memorial spaces is underway, including developing a “memory path” between the coliseum and the indoor track arena, as well as a recovery of the writings prisoners had etched into the walls of Escotillas 7 and 8. S TA D I U M M E M O R I E S

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A permanent photography exhibit with iconic moments inside the stadium from the late 1960s to the present has been installed, where visitors may walk among the photographs spaced across the middle of a room, contemplating the imagery, chronology, and context. The memorial project is thus embodied in the reclaiming of space in ways that integrate the memories of the stadium’s past into its present activities and that actively mobilize memories in contemporary Chilean life. One of the striking features of the stadium’s transformation into a site of memory is that many of the spaces where the most brutal activity took place had been virtually untouched for almost forty years, during which time the stadium continued to function somewhat normally. Escotilla 8, one of the hatches underneath the bleachers where torture took place, was unused during this time, and the locker room had become a kind of ruin, used occasionally for the swimming pool but never updated. This provided an opportunity for the memorial projects to engage with the way material ruins can evoke the stadium’s brief history as a site of detention and torture. In this sense, the multiple uses of the stadium spaces, with contradictory purposes and affective modes, forms a part of its history of incompletion. The efforts to create sites of memory at the stadium will not result in a kind of completeness so much as a kind of parallel narrative to the ongoing entertainment activities at the stadium.29 The challenge of the site, and part of what makes it unique as a site of memory, is the dynamic set of spatial and affective contradictions this produces. The most dramatic of the spatial transformations of the memorialization is the locker room where the women and foreigners were detained, which had formerly been a dark and empty space of peeling paint. To transform the Camarín de Mujeres (Women’s Locker Room), the architect Claudio Guerra designed a gleaming, transparent glass exterior over the entrance to the building that brings warmth and light to part of its interior. The spatial design reconfigures the brutal modernism of the stadium itself, creating a kind of glass skin over the building, one that enfolds it, yet opens it up through glass and light rather than enclosing it. The space now has photographs of the former women prisoners along with excerpts of their testimonies, and is a place where people participate in guided visits, conduct educational workshops, and gather for cultural activities. Copper plaques with the names of the women prisoners, both Chilean and international, have been placed on the wall of the Camarín in an ongoing process to name all the women who were imprisoned there. [ 38 ]

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The transformation of these spaces into sites of memory has also opened up the stadium as a site for performances, events, and protests. Each March 8, Estadio Nacional, Memoria Nacional hosts a celebration of International Women’s Day and a commemoration of the women former political prisoners who were held at the stadium decades ago. On March 8, 2016, the events that day and evening took place inside and outside the Camarín de Mujeres. The evening ceremony was multigenerational and participatory, reflecting the organization’s aims to present performance, theater, and the arts as forums for human rights discourse and commemoration. Performance artist Mila Berríos Palomino paid special tribute to the women former prisoners through a piece evoking memory, the political context, and women’s resistance. A knitting collective that met each week in the locker room for several weeks prior to the event presented a large tapestry with individual bordered fabrics for each of the estimated 1,400 women who had been imprisoned there. Surviving former prisoners offered brief testimonies and remembered former fellow prisoners who had recently passed away. Former prisoner Ruth Vuscovic sang songs from the Spanish Civil War and from Violeta Parra. The ceremony ended with the harmonious and somber voices of the nine-member professional women’s choir Femme Vocal. In what can feel like a desolate, haunting space, the locker room was reclaimed and recoded to commemorate what women political prisoners endured, to mourn the passing of several former prisoners in recent years, and to signal the power of women to persevere, create, and to resist injustices then and now.

Generations of Memory The experience of returning to the stadium as a memory site has enabled some former prisoners to speak for the first time about their experiences there. Verónica Báez describes the toll the dictatorship took on her family, including imprisonment, torture, and forced internal displacement for her and for several members of her family, as well as the difficult re-insertion into Chilean society after many years in exile. At the time of her imprisonment in the stadium, Báez was pregnant, and she recounts how she willed her body into delaying any contractions until she was released from detention. “When I told my son Marcelo that I had returned to the stadium for the first time to recognize the sites and support memory recovery work  .  .  . he said to me that he, too, should testify, because he was also S TA D I U M M E M O R I E S

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there. In my womb, but he was there.”30 Because these memorial projects emerged after a generational delay, the activism generated by them has been multigenerational. The memory projects at the stadium have attracted younger generations of Chileans to participate as guides, artists, workshop facilitators, event organizers, and more. For some, participation has been a means to gain knowledge about their own family members, a kind of postmemory experience. Twenty-six-year-old Mauricio Jofre, a psychologist, travels to the stadium each week to conduct guided tours for visitors and school groups. After months of his involvement with the stadium, he learned from his own family that he had an uncle who had been a member of the elite Group of Personal Friends (GAP) that served as Salvador Allende’s personal bodyguards during his presidency.31 His participation with the Estadio Nacional, Memoria Nacional organization thus opened up a once silent familial space in relation to the past. Young volunteers organized a weekly film series and invited Estadio Nacional filmmaker Carmen Luz Parot to facilitate a discussion session after the film’s showing. Parot discussed her surprise at the large numbers of young people in the audience. One young woman thanked Parot and said she had come to see the documentary because her father had been a prisoner in the stadium but never talked about it.32 For many others, participation is more explicitly political—a search to retrieve a sense of an inspired and somewhat romanticized previous political generation amid massive discontent with Chile’s current political leadership. Stark social inequality, racism against the Mapuches who are labeled terrorists for their campaigns to reclaim land, and the exposure of widespread political and corporate corruption have together created a politics in which younger generations in particular seek new collective political identities and affiliations. From participation in the Estadio Nacional Memoria Nacionalorganized political history workshops to art collectives and major commemorative events, younger postdictatorship generations of Chileans situate the memories of the dictatorship’s militants in relation to contemporary political struggles. The March 8 women’s tapestry project, for example, was initiated by a thirty-seven-year-old activist, María José Cox, who explained that her participation was a way to honor her grandmother, who had visited the dictatorship’s women political prisoners in jail every Saturday. The intergenerational

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women’s knitting collective continues to plan projects. Stadium activists and teachers Anjélica Espinoza and Camila Paredes became involved through a 2015 political history workshop at the stadium, and they now work to develop a children’s storytelling project there. Espinoza grew up in a leftist political and extremely poor family. Working with the stadium volunteers had brought Espinoza a “feeling of belonging.”33 For lyrical singer Moisés Mendoza and his partner, musician and music teacher Luís Valencia, their work as guides has offered instructive ways to connect past human rights violations and issues with those of the present, including gay rights, immigrant rights, and the rights of the Mapuches. Mendoza and Valencia also arrange musical events at the stadium. In these actions, which might be seen within the more benign framework of guiding tours and running workshops, we can see activism that actively engages questions of memory within the framework and values of human rights. This memory activism thus deploys the past as a means not simply to remember state terrorism and its brutal consequences but also deploy the memories of state terrorism as a means to visualize human rights issues in present-day Chile. Each year, on the anniversary of September 11, the date of the coup in 1973, performances, events, workshops, and exhibitions are organized at the Estadio. Beginning in 2007 and continuing each September 11 through the present, a group of young artists, the Colectivo Nichoecológico, creates a unique installation. The installation features variations of a molded, golden central figure, tortured, crouched, surrounded by dozens of pairs of similarly molded shoes, all lit by candles; at night it is stunning and haunting. The shape of the central figure has changed each year, representing prisoners who are older or younger, male or female. In the most recent September 11 commemoration years, young people have constituted the largest presence at the stadium, as volunteers, performers and as political activists. The youth wings of Chile’s historic Communist and Socialist parties are joined by new, dynamic political groups, including the Revolución Democrática (RD), headed by former 2011 university student leaders-now-congressmen Giorgio Jackson and Gabriel Boric. The RD, the Humanist Party, and others have formed an alliance, the Frente Amplio, to combat inequality, express solidarity with the Mapuche movement, and propose radical reforms, primarily in education and pension policies. An estimated 4,000 people participated in the September 11, 2016 stadium commemoration. Individuals, friends, and families walked through

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the Escotilla 8 to the benches, listening to music and to testimonies, lighting candles, and at particular moments, voicing their disappointment with the center-left generation of political elites who have governed for nearly three decades. Through all its contradictions and incompleteness, the stadium shows us the deployment of a site of memory not only as a reminder of past abuses but also as a remembrance of past resistances and political struggles. The stadium memory projects also demonstrate the integration of memory into a space of everyday life. Memory events at the stadium are also focused on contemporary injustices, inequality, and a critique of the political status quo. It is perhaps ironic that this unlikely space of sports and entertainment that was so easily repurposed for violent repression has been so effectively repurposed by women survivors and their allies for political renewal. Yet this also shows the power of memory as a force that can activate political engagement as a catalyst for social change. This kind of spatial and social intervention evokes hope, the hope that comes from the ways that even a space of torture can be remade into a space of activism and an embrace of justice.

Figure 1.1 Empty seats as part of the memorial at the Estadio Nacional, Chile, August 10, 2016. Source: Andrés Aguirre, Corporación Estadio Nacional Memoria Nacional Ex-Prisioneros Políticos. [ 42 ]

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Figure 1.2 The redesigned space of the former women’s locker room. Commemoration on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2016. Source: Andrés Aguirre, Corporación Estadio Nacional Memoria Nacional Ex-Prisioneros Políticos.

Figure 1.3 Women presenting tapestry to women former political prisoners of the stadium. Commemoration on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2016. Source: Andrés Aguirre, Corporación Estadio Nacional Memoria Nacional Ex-Prisioneros Políticos.

Notes 1. For an analysis of culture and the politics of memory in Chile, see Macarena Gómez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Katherine Hite, Politics and the Art of Commemoration: Memorials to Struggle in Latin America and Spain (New York: Routledge, 2011); Daniela Jara, Children and the Afterlife of State Violence: Memories of Dictatorship (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016); Steve J. Stern, Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989–2006 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Cath Collins, Katherine Hite, and Alfredo Joignant, eds., The Politics of Memory in Chile from Pinochet to Bachelet (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2013). 2. Estimates range from those provided in the declassified November 15, 1973 CIA “Fact Sheet—Human Rights in Chile,” that placed the number of arrested and detained in the Stadium at 7,000–8,000, to the International Red Cross estimate at between 12,000 and 20,000. The most authoritative account of state terror within the National Stadium is Pascale Bonnefoy Miralles’s in-depth journalistic study Terrorismo del Estadio: Prisioneros de Guerra en un Campo de Deportes, now in an expanded second edition (Santiago: Editorial Latinoamericano, 2016). 3. See Bonnefoy Miralles, Terrorismo del Estadio, 8–9. 4. The military consistently lied and underreported the numbers of women. The infamous head of military intelligence Manuel Contreras himself kept what he claimed was a meticulous record of the names of the women prisoners, numbering 445 Chileans and 64 foreigners, while Pascale Bonnefoy Miralles estimates that women prisoners numbered over 1,000. See Bonnefoy Miralles, Terrorismo del Estadio, 59–60 5. This included television appearances by former prisoners, Carmen Luz Parot’s documentary Estadio Nacional (2001), former prisoner Jorge Montealegre’s memoir Frazadas del Estadio Nacional (Santiago: LOM, 2003), and later Bonnefoy Miralles’s Terrorismo de Estadio. In addition, in 2000, Felipe Agüero, Chilean political scientist and professor at the University of Miami, outed of one of his former torturers in the Estadio Nacional, former air force official Emilio Meneses, who at that time was also a political scientist at Chile’s Catholic University. 6. Cath Collins and Katherine Hite, “Memorials, Silences, and Reawakenings,” in The Politics of Memory in Chile: From Pinochet to Bachelet, ed. Cath Collins, Katherine Hite, and Alfredo Joignant (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Press, 2013), 133–63. 7. Léopold Lambert, “The Stadium, An Architecture that Concentrates and Controls Bodies: 2015 Kos, 2005 New Orleans, 1942 Paris,” The Funambulist, August 25, 2016, https://thefunambulist.net/architectural-projects/the-stadium [ 44 ]

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8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

-an-architecture-that-concentrates-and-control-bodies-2015-kos-2005-new -orleans-1945-paris. More recent trends have included corporate stadiums with luxury private spaces of spectatorship and the high-profile stadium designs of postmodern starchitecture exemplified by Beijing’s “Bird’s Nest” stadium, designed by Herzog & de Meuron in collaboration with artist Ai Weiwei, for the 2008 Olympics. Benjamin Flowers, “Stadium Architecture, Visual Iconography, and the Shaping of Urban and Sporting Identities,” 2016, http://www.academia.edu/914771 /Stadium_Architecture_Visual_Iconography_and_the_Shaping_of_Urban _and_Sporting_Identities. See also Flowers, Sport and Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2017). The most notorious of these was the deaths of ninety-six people in 1989 at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England. Camiel van Winkel, “Dance, Discipline, Density, and Death: The Crowd in the Stadium,” in The Stadium: The Architecture of Mass Sport, ed. Michelle Provoost (Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 2000), 13. Valentina Rozas-Krause, “Interrupted Stadium: Broken Promises of Modernity in the National Stadium of Chile,” Shift 8 (2015): 70. See also, Valentina RozasKrause, Ni tan Elefante, ni tan Blanco: Arquitectura, Urbanismo y Política en la Trayectoria del Estadio Nacional (Santiago: Ril Editores, 2014). Teresa Anativia López, from visit of Women Mobilizing Memory to site in December 19, 2013. Bonnefoy Miralles, Terrorismo del Estadio, 66. Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 55. Interview by Katherine Hite at the stadium with Wally Kunstmann, February 13, 2016. In 2015, as an innovative effort to commemorate women former political prisoners in the stadium, writer and researcher Marco Ensignia created a Twitter site, in which each day between September 11 and November 9, Ensignia tweeted an imagined instance in the lives of the women prisoners held there in 1973. Over the two months that Ensignia posted his tweets (@PresaEstadio), the Twitter site garnered 3,359 followers, 1,200,000 hits for the messages themselves, and 15,800 shares of specific tweets. Ensignia reproduced the commemoration in Presa en el Estadio (Santiago: Corporación Humanas, 2015). See, for example, the testimony of Verónica Báez Pollier, “La solidaridad de las mujeres prisioneras en el Estadio Nacional,” in Cien Voces Rompen el Silencio:Testimonios de ex Presas y Presos Políticos de la Dictadura Chilena (1973–1990), ed. Wally Kunstmann Torres and Victor Torres Ávila (Santiago: DIBAM, 2008), 4. Also the testimony of Ruth Vuscovic, video recording done by Felipe Garcia of the National Stadium National Memory Organization for their archival collection, recorded August 2013. See also Bonnefoy Miralles, Terrorismo del estadio, 59–63. S TA D I U M M E M O R I E S

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18. Bonnefoy Miralles, Terrorismo del estadio, 60. 19. Bonnefoy Miralles, Terrorismo del estadio, 58–60. 20. Báez Pollier, Cien Voces, 92. 21. From Ruth Vuscovic, National Stadium National Memory video archive. 22. From Ruth Vuscovic, National Stadium National Memory video archive. 23. Conversation with Katherine Hite, Santiago, February 28, 2016. 24. Wally Kunstmann, “Prólogo,” in Torres and Torres Ávila, Cien Voces, 19 (our translation). 25. Kunstmann, “Prólogo,” 20. 26. The evidence of systematic violations, coupled with a presiding judge who ultimately called for Pinochet’s indictment, did mean that the former dictator was removed from the senate and held under house arrest in Chile. He was never convicted and died in a military hospital on December 10, 2006, International Human Rights Day. 27. http://www.estadionacionalmemorianacional.cl/. 28. The Estadio Nacional, Memoria Nacional organization received new government funding to conduct a restoration project of the words, numbers, and symbols etched by former prisoners into the stadium’s walls, as well as to restore one of the large arena locker rooms adjoining Escotilla 8 to create a permanent photography exhibit space. 29. It is not uncommon for famous entertainers to reference the repressive use of the stadium during their performances. Sting, Bono, Mick Jagger, and Bruce Springsteen have all done this during their recent concerts, for example, and when his team won the 2015 Americas Cup, Chilean soccer star Jean Beausejour said, “In a place where there was so much death, today we bring happiness,” a statement that was widely broadcast on Chilean news and radio. See “En un Lugar donde Hubo Muerto, hoy le Dimos una Alegría a Chile,” July 4, 2015, ADN Radio 91.7, http://www.adnradio.cl/noticias/deportes/beausejour -y-la-memoria-en-un-lugar-donde-hubo-muerte-hoy-le-dimos-una-alegria-a -chile/20150704/nota/2836043.aspx. 30. Báez Pollier, Cien voces, 97. 31. Conversation with Katherine Hite during guided visit, February 13, 2016. 32. Observation of Katherine Hite, in attendance, February 23, 2016. 33. Interview by Katherine Hite with stadium memory activists María José Cox, Anjélica Espinoza, Camila Paredes, Moisés Mendoza, Luís Valencia, Mauricio Cofre, and Tasnin Khan, Estadio Nacional, January 17, 2017.

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The Metamorphosis of the Museal From Exhibitionary to Experiential Complex and Beyond ANDREAS HUYSSEN

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would like to raise a few issues about history, memory, and art in relation to museum culture and memorial sites. My focus is the memory museum, but it must be put in context of a more general transformation of museal culture in recent decades. I am interested in exploring the changing purposes of museal narratives and the double multidirectionality in the contemporary museum world, both in terms of expanding geographic horizons of cultural knowledge and in relation to transnational interactions among cultural institutions, media, and urban space. The recent wave of memory studies has been accompanied by a similar explosion in museum studies in different registers: history and conceptualization, empirical description, economics, and curatorial practices. At the same time, it seems that more museums have been built, often by prominent architects, than in any of the preceding decades, comparable perhaps only to the nineteenth century and its dual museal focus on the national and the universal. Many of these new museums are dedicated to specific memories of political violence, ethnic cleansings, and genocide. The popularity of museums today, which still varies greatly among different types of museums, is a sign of the times. The question is whether this popularity of the museal object and the experience it permits point to a revitalized understanding of human pasts, presents, and futures, or whether it functions more like a homeopathic [ 47 ]

remedy alleviating the worry about forgetting and the fear of amnesia in the age of the global and the digital. As institutions, museums perform multiple new functions in contemporary consumer cultures beyond the traditional function of inventing and shoring up national traditions. Museums dedicated to recent traumatic events of political violence are responsive to public concerns and political struggles. Memory museums and memorials do intervene actively in public political debates rather than only musealizing a respective past. They are oriented toward the future. Directly or indirectly, they can help give shape to political activism through educational programs, documentary shows, or exhibitions by artists committed in their work to memory politics. The relationship among monuments, memorials, art, and museums has become quite porous in recent decades. Museums have always been shrines of objects from the past, but in the context of the world-wide memory boom since the 1980s and 1990s, ever more museums have been dedicated to the memory of specific events of a recent past such as World War I (Péronne), the Holocaust (Washington), South African Apartheid (Johannesburg and the Red Location Museum in Port Elizabeth), or the genocides in Cambodia (S-21 Killing Fields Museum) and Rwanda (Kigali Genocide Memorial Center). The constitutive relationship of memory politics to issues of human rights is displayed in the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago de Chile. It critically commemorates Pinochet’s military dictatorship but supplements its permanent exhibition with changing exhibits of memory art by Chilean and international artists. The closeness of memory museum and monument is perhaps best exemplified by the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum adjacent to the World Trade Center (WTC) memorial with its reflecting pools. Or, quite differently, we can see the resonant connections between Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin and Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, where the reciprocal resonances are palpable in Eisenman’s use of stone stelae on slanting ground which respond felicitously to the stelae in the Garden of Exile in Libeskind’s Jewish Museum. But beyond these specific cases in New York and Berlin, there now are multiple resonances in memorial landscaping and museal architecture across the world as the need for a memorial politics and aesthetics has gone global. Thus the Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires in its original design cited both Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Libeskind’s Jewish Museum. And a comparison between Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin [ 48 ]

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also resonates forcefully with the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York despite their totally different political contexts.1 As many other memorial designs across the world, both come out of a tradition of minimalism; both work with geometric patterns rather than with figuration; both deploy stone surfaces either interspersed or framed with trees, grass, or bushes. The plans are developed by architects rather than by artists.The issue is not influence or derivation but connectivity across borders. At the same time, each of these museums and memorials remains firmly rooted in the social-political context to which it is addressed. There is no such thing as a global memory museum or global memorial, just as there is no global culture. But there is now an expanded field of memorial design practices and a politics of signification that has become transnational, highly professionalized, controversial to some for its alleged sterility, but successful with politicians and with much of the public. Museal curatorial practices in turn are in high demand in memorial sites such as concentration camps in Europe, killing and torture sites in Latin America, or the S-21 torture and killing site in Phnom Penh. All told, musealization, monumentalization, and memorialization form an interdependent field of transnational practices that is subject to historical change and cultural innovation, resonating in powerful ways with often contested public discussions of histories of ethnic cleansing, state violence, and genocide across the world. Gender politics has become a major issue since the systematic use of rape in the Bosnian War and the debate about the comfort women in Korea. Museums were often compared to mausoleums, burial chambers, public monuments to the mighty, and the famous invested in the display of power and cultural hegemony. In the nineteenth century, both museums and mausoleums were clearly in the service of the invention of national and civic traditions.2 Not surprisingly, museums then got a bad rap during the upsurge of the modernisms of the early twentieth century. Artistic avant-gardes emerged with the claim to make it new and to forget the past. Some cultural radicals in Germany suggested to shoot Rafael’s Madonna in Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie. The shooting soon found other targets. Revolutionary imaginaries of the future ruled the day on the right and on the left. Such utopian delusions of creating a future without a past proved to be deadly for millions, and they were never free of deep historical determinations. It was only in the last third of the twentieth century, with the waning of those earlier futurist utopias, that museums freed themselves from their exclusive functions of preservation and, as the critics had it,“mummification.” T H E M E TA M O R P H O S I S O F T H E M U S E A L

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But the old critique lingered on in recent museum discussions from Tony Bennett’s notion of the exhibitionary complex, a Foucauldian reading of the museum as a disciplining, male-gendered and class-based institution, via Rosalind Krauss’s critique of the Guggenheim as late capitalist museum, to Jean Baudrillard and Henri Pierre Jeudy’s poststructuralist take on the simulacral musealization of the world.3 It is quite ironic that in those same years of the 1980s and 1990s, when these critiques were articulated, museum visitors in the Western world voted with their feet and attendance numbers shot through the roof. The trend continues unabated. At the same time, the critique of the museum as institution may have been reductive, but it was never simply wrong. The question then arises to what extent museums can support or even enable social and cultural change, especially in relation to memory politics regarding formerly excluded groups. The popular upsurge of the museum was accompanied by a slowly developing change in function and modus operandi, which in turn forms the backdrop to the musealization of traumatic memories. From fortresses of conservation, bastions of high culture, show places of colonial loot, and temples of technological progress, the museum turned into a mass medium, a site of spectacular mise-en-scène and ever-increasing tourist attraction. Media-savvy spectators in ever larger numbers were looking for emphatic experiences, instant illuminations, stellar events, and blockbusters rather than time-consuming meticulous appropriation of cultural knowledge. Since roughly the 1990s, the old dichotomy between permanent museum collection and temporary exhibit gave way to permanent collections becoming subject to provisional rearrangement and in some cases even long-distance traveling.4 Temporary shows in turn are enshrined on DVDs and in lavishly illustrated catalogues, which constitute permanent collections of their own. New media strategies and opportunities to cite, appropriate, archive, and collect have been set in motion to such an extent that the old term of “musealization” as a kind of entombing hardly pertains any longer. The museum as a site of circulation has been sucked into that maelstrom of acceleration that characterizes the current phase of modernity. The status of the museal object itself has taken on new connotations in the age of digital dematerialization. In the museum exhibit, the real asserts itself against the virtual, but the virtual is able to enhance enjoyment of the real. The transformation may have begun in art museums, but it now also affects history museums, formerly the guardians of the “objective” and staid scholarly presentation of objects and documents. To be sure, there always [ 50 ]

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was a gender dimension in the alleged irreconcilability between alleged objective historical truth and subjective, affectively loaded memory.5 But that clichéd opposition itself has slowly been worn away. Traditional modes of presentation have been increasingly replaced by attention-grabbing shows that make productive use of interactive installations, films, video, computer screens, and online presentations. The typical white cube of the art gallery is being complemented by the black box for media projections. Much of it is designed to create affect and experiential responses from the audience, and, no doubt, to increase visitor statistics. If the old historical museum had served mainly national history, the new one engages public memory in its focus on subjective reaction and an increased use of documentary testimony combined with participatory pedagogy and instruction. The museum as a container of the past and its accumulated objects has been replaced by the museum as a site of activity and experience in and for an ever-expanding present. In decades past, curators as the ones organizing exhibits were rarely public figures. Today this has changed as curators’ names are prominently displayed and the verb “to curate” has taken on ever more activist and public dimensions. It has even migrated into commercial culture where restaurants or nightclubs may “curate” parties and stores “curate” their merchandise. Major museums do precisely the same. The commodification of art is accompanied by the post-Fordist aestheticization of the commodity, without, however, entirely wiping out the difference. Memory museums occupy a special place in this expanded museum world. Their rise and the transformation of more inclusive history exhibits has been accompanied by broad scholarly discussions of museums as sites of memory outside and beyond the narrow field of museology. At the same time, memorial sites are supplemented by museums (the Eisenman memorial/museum in Berlin) or they are turned into museums (the ESMA in Buenos Aires). Such projects are linked to the memories of traumatic twentieth-century events from the Holocaust via the Latin American state terror to South African apartheid and more recently the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides. Of course, there have been sites dedicated to traumatic events before: the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Yad Vashem, to mention only two. But now there was something new at stake in curatorial practices, and a different relationship to various pasts—call it interactive—was emerging. As witness testimony became ever more important in the discourses of memory politics, the presentation of witnessing has become standard curatorial practice. It requires us to see museums in that T H E M E TA M O R P H O S I S O F T H E M U S E A L

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larger field of public culture, not only including memorials and monuments but truth commissions, debates about human rights, the legal prosecution of perpetrators of state sanctioned terror. As postdictatorship societies struggle to achieve a consensus about their past, transnational comparisons show that such consensus is extremely hard to achieve and more often than not it remains elusive. Changes in the naming of museums and curatorial practices to include human rights, oral testimony, and individual memories are significant, and they raise many questions. As nations and communities emerging from state violence, military dictatorship, or racial apartheid try to come to terms with their violent pasts, the question of whether or not to remember and what past to remember is inevitably a loaded political one. Victims, perpetrators, and beneficiaries will have very different conflicted views on such matters. The traps of memory are multiple: Who deserves to be recognized as victim and how does one avoid victimology? How to avoid the gaze of the perpetrator? How to construct a museal archive of state terror that transcends political divisions? How to deal with the grey zone of active or inactive fellow traveling which complicates the issue of social responsibility? How does one frame the material in a museum exhibit in a way that does justice not just to memories of recent terror but to a larger history? Underlying it all is the potential unreliability of memory, which is always threatened by erasure and metamorphosis even where the will to remember is strong. Memory seems to be a weak base to achieve the dual goals of truth and social reconciliation. All of these issues swirl around projects such as the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile, and traps open up every step of the way. In another register, we may want to ask if museum practitioners still see a fundamental conflict between memory and history. Or has this conflict itself become history at a time when mnemohistory, the treatment of memory itself as a historical phenomenon subject to change has become academically established? If the latter is the case, how can the museum of history/ memory best negotiate the still differing demands encapsulated in those two terms? This issue becomes pressing when live testimonies are recorded and displayed, accompanied by claims to authenticity and truth without much reflection on the media and methods of registration. In the case of museums dedicated to traumatic histories: What is the best way of framing such histories? What is the role of recorded oral testimony and how to present it? How much of the pre- and posthistory of traumatic events should or can [ 52 ]

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be included and in what form? What are the political parameters of such choices? The Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw gives answers quite different from Yad Vashem or the 9/11 museum in New York. In the latter, the link between American foreign policy in the Middle East over the decades and at the time of the 9/11 attack is barely present. And the other 9/11 museum in Santiago—September 11, 1973, that is—avoids any mention of the politics which preceded the military attack on La Moneda and the death of Salvador Allende, a strategy to bypass the conservative discourse justifying the military coup by pointing to Allende’s radical socialist politics. Ultimately such avoidance may not stand, especially as memory and history of the Allende government must be transmitted to Chile’s younger generations, increasingly restless and looking for alternatives to the neoliberal groundhog day. Avoiding history to serve memory is often a successful strategy. It is a reminder that both traditional history and newer memory museums will inevitably exhibit blind spots, erasures, and politically motivated evasions. These come with the territory of memory and history, but they remain subject to legitimate critique.

2 Indeed, some sociologists and cultural critics, not surprisingly, have been quite scathing about this whole new culture of museal exhibition. Picking up on Tony Bennett’s The Birth of the Museum, which coined the influential term of the “exhibitionary complex,” Martin Hall has recently posited a new term describing what he calls the “experiential complex” in museum culture as part of an “experience economy.”6 He criticizes the focus on experience as potentially pampering the viewers and capitulating to the culture industry. Even if the experiential dimension of themed attractions might be traced back to the nineteenth century’s World Fairs, the rise of the experiential in the contemporary museal world functions in a differently structured environment. Hall describes the difference thus: “Rather than responding to the circumstances of rapid industrialization, public institutions today are shaped by deindustrialization, new ethnic identities, the rise of service economies, and the widespread loss of credibility in the idea of unitary progress in the face of manifest social inequities.”7 He laments the commodification trap in an urban museum world bent on combining “the primary consumer activities of shopping, dining, entertainment, education, T H E M E TA M O R P H O S I S O F T H E M U S E A L

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and culture.”8 An earlier pathology of discipline and control, which the term “complex” inevitably points to, has been replaced by the pathology of spectacle and fashion, ultimately yet another version of the old trope of mass culture as woman.9 Sure enough, in certain museums these days one wonders if one is at a fair or in a department store. Even in art museums, themed exhibitions have largely displaced shows based on form, genre, or period—another caving in to easy consumability and mass attraction. The use of the term “complex” for both types of museums suggests an anxiety, if not a pathology in both. Whether exhibitionary or experiential, the museum seems to remain a pathological symptom of modernity—more so, one could argue, in Hall’s than in Bennett’s writing.10 Bennett himself, who has always seen the exhibitionary complex in its dual role of disciplining and enabling, has more recently talked about the need “to break with the discursive and sensory ordering of the exhibitionary complex in order to open up new possibilities of negotiating relations of cultures-in-difference.” He now sees the museum as a “differencing machine.”11 In my essay from the early 1990s “Escape from Amnesia: The Museum as Mass Medium,” which did acknowledge the pathologies of the museum but didn’t reduce the museum to neurotic complexes, I wrote in a similar vein: It may be [. . .] that precisely this desire to move the museum beyond a modernity that hid its nationalist and imperial ambitions behind the veil of cultural universalism, will ultimately reveal the museum as that which it always also could have been, but never became in the environment of a restrictive modernity: a genuinely modern institution, a space for the cultures of this world to collide and to display their heterogeneity, even irreconcilability, to network, to hybridize and to live together in the gaze and the memory of the spectator.12 Against Hall’s thoroughly negative view of the experiential complex, I would still argue that the museum did find a new vitality and its popularity should not be dismissed by simply identifying it with theme park entertainment. Many museums have become self-conscious of the narrative dimension of their exhibits, the need to retell stories, to frame extant collections differently, to include formerly excluded dimensions of social and subjective experience—the past not as possession, but in process, in motion, not least in the heads of the spectators. The privileging of experience should not [ 54 ]

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only be linked to theme parking and to a neoliberal ideology of individuality, creativity, and authenticity. It should also be taken seriously as a new and multifaceted relationship between exhibition culture and its highly differentiated and interested public. In short, we must acknowledge that curatorial practices have adopted a modernist self-reflexivity, which enhances their potential of exhibiting in challenging new ways. Responding to social movements and activists’ struggles for recognition and rights focusing on gender, sexuality, and race, they have incorporated formerly neglected histories, thus breaking free from the stigmatizing or simply oblivious practices of the nineteenth-century museum. This is not to deny that as institution, even a memory museum like the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile or the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York continues to produce authoritative readings of the past by excluding politically unwanted controversial information. One common trap of commemorating violent national pasts is the political question of how much prehistory to incorporate. Nevertheless, the opening of the museum’s walls remains a valid project, even if my earlier somewhat utopian vision may have been overly optimistic. The question does indeed arise to what extent the museum world has abandoned its long-standing normative claims. Are museums now parts of global networks of information and sites of unbiased and unrestricted cultural communication and understanding? Can museums function as cultural contact zones at a global level and as such have an impact on transnational discussions? One may be skeptical as one looks at our persistently violent world riven by religious, racial, economic, and ethnic conflicts. Given “sharply diverging constituencies and publics in the context of complex intersections of class and racialized social divisions,” Bennett is right to point to the limits of those new possibilities if the new museum world is primarily oriented toward the cosmopolitan viewer and international tourist networks.13 Recently constructed memory museums and memory sites, however, pose the reverse problem. They are for the most part not global. Instead and for good reason they are firmly rooted in their regional or national contexts, built and funded either by states or by municipalities with different degrees of grassroots participation. At the same time, transnational encounters of curators and museum officials guarantee that museums can learn from each other. Organizations such as the International Council of Museums, founded in 1946, and the more recent International Committee of Memorial Museums for the Remembrance of Victims of Public Crimes T H E M E TA M O R P H O S I S O F T H E M U S E A L

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certainly play a role in creating a web of exchanges and relations, as does the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience. The focus on an experiential dimension for the spectator has become a common denominator of museal memory sites. But museums also know that spectator experience has to be grounded in historical evidence. Memory and history, experience and the production of knowledge must be in balance. Even if the local dimension is prevalent in most museums of memory, their curatorial practices are inevitably shot through with global resonances. But it is at the local level that such museums can best intervene in public debates about accountability, juridical proceedings, potential reconciliation. There is no global memory museum, nor would it be desirable to have one at this time. And yet, the question of the global can perhaps be posed in a different way as we look at the circulation of contemporary memory art.

3 The arts play a crucially enabling role in nurturing a politics of memory across the world. In recent years, there has been the surprising emergence in postminimalist art of memory installations: a kind of sculptural installation that is not centered on spatial configuration alone but that powerfully inscribes a dimension of localizable, even corporeal, memory into the work. It is an artistic practice that remains clearly distinct from the monument or the memorial. Its place is primarily in the museum or the gallery. Its primary addressee is the individual beholder rather than the nation or the community. In its handling of materials and concepts, it relates to a specific tradition of installation art, and in its emphatic reliance on an experiential dimension it is much less confined by generic conventions than either the monument or the memorial would be. Memorial sites such as the Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires or the Chilean Museum of Memory and Human Rights have increasingly drawn on the power of art. Alfredo Jaar’s Geometry of Conscience, installed underground in the Santiago museum, is a good example of how an art work can transcend documentary and archival strategies, thus opening up an entirely different dimension of empathic affect and visceral understanding of the past. At the same time, political memory art cannot be safely contained in the museum. It pushes outward beyond the walls of the institution

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and into the public sphere where it can unsettle commonly held views. To me, the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo best embodies this trend of memory art on the international scene. Salcedo’s early postminimalist sculptures from the 1990s consist of heavily worked wooden furniture: tables cut and jammed into each other; chairs, dressers, and armoires filled with concrete and pierced by steel beams; wooden doors unhinged; and a bed’s headboard embedded in a concrete filled armoire. Traces of violence such as human bones, tufts of hair, and fragments of clothes are embedded, almost imperceptibly, in the sculptures. The titles are telling: Casa Viuda, with its double meaning of widow’s house and widowed house or Unland as radical negation of the land as space of a community. The violence made palpable in the meticulous cuttings and distortions of domestic furniture conjures up the Colombian violencia that has consumed hundreds of thousands of lives over the past half century. The widowed house is the house of desaparecidos, men, women, and children, victims all of Colombia’s multifront civil war involving the military, death squads, guerrillas, and narco-gangs. The sculptures point to the disappeared who lived with the furniture, slept in the beds, sat on the chairs, and gathered around the tables. The meticulously worked remains of individual and communal lives have a powerful effect on the viewer. It is like looking into an abyss. But one can look into the abyss only for so long before being petrified. So it is not really surprising that Doris Salcedo at a given point in her career branched out from gallery and museal space into public and urban space with site-specific installations that function differently from the museal sculptures. A more direct address to the public in search of dialogue was the result. But the meticulous attention to laborious detail has remained. For instance, the use of chairs, symptomatic of disappearances from the private domestic sphere in the Untitled Furniture series, is now turned toward public urban space. One such project entitled November 6 and 7 commemorates the guerrilla siege of Bogotá’s Palace of Justice that was violently ended when the army stormed the building in November 1985. On the seventeenth anniversary of the siege, some 280 wooden chairs were lowered from the roof of the Palace of Justice, one each for each of the victims. Salcedo remained faithful to the forensic reports and sequenced the chairs according to spatial and temporal coordinates of the siege itself. The images of chairs dangling outside the façade of the government building

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and casting their shadows according to the time of day for all to see in that central square in Bogotá received major attention and triggered a public debate on a conflict that seventeen years after the event was still not resolved. It also refocused the discussion on the responsibility of the military for the disastrous outcome of a siege, which, as critics agreed, could have been easily prevented. One year later in 2003, in her contribution to the 8th International Istanbul Biennial, Salcedo chose an empty space between two buildings in Istanbul, filling it with approximately 1,550 wooden chairs stacked tightly between two buildings. The object of empty chairs grounding an installation had moved from museal space addressing the individual beholder to national public space in Colombia and now to transnational space in Istanbul. Given that her work was always connected to international practices, Salcedo was never simply a local informant. But now her memory work took on a genuinely multidirectional dimension. Again site-specificity was key. Once there had been a building here in this formerly Greek and Jewish Istanbul neighborhood that now looked rather derelict, spotted with similar empty lots and with ruined buildings. Again, the empty chairs conjure absence, absence in this case related to migration, displacement, and violent expulsion that took place over many years since the early days of the Turkish republic. As in the early work, the human body is absent, present only in the trace. The installation lasted no more than three months once the biennial closed. Its disappearance distinguishes it from that other missing house installation created in Berlin’s Grosse Hamburgerstrasse, center of Eastern Jewish immigration around 1900, by Christian Boltanski. This installation from 1989 is still visible today and certainly one of the canonical works of a site-specific post-Holocaust installation in Germany. As opposed to Salcedo, Boltanski left the space of the missing house empty. But in painstaking research he documented the names, professions, and dates of birth and death of the Jewish and German renters who had lived in the building during the Third Reich before it was destroyed in a bombing attack in 1945. These names and data were then put on signs fixed to the outside walls of the adjoining buildings at the appropriate levels where the renters’ apartments would have been. Boltanski and Salcedo: two very different yet resonating ways of mobilizing absence in urban space and to give testimony of its hidden history, its submerged social memories. It is such resonances that point to a web of memory politics in the arts, an important dimension of what Michael Rothberg has called [ 58 ]

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multidirectional memory and what Marianne Hirsch more recently has called connective memories.14 Site-specificity also characterizes Shibboleth, a work from 2007, executed in the Tate Modern in London. In a way, Shibboleth combines the two aspects of Salcedo’s work, the museal and the urban, thus showing indirectly how museum and urban space have become porous to each other. It is not an installation in gallery space. It rather intervenes in the architectural space of the museum’s turbine hall itself. Overcoming strong initial opposition, Salcedo cut a deep, at points widening, at others bifurcating or narrowing crack into the floor of the huge empty turbine hall that now serves as the gently descending entrance space to this vast museum, formerly a major south side energy plant. Salcedo split in two one of the major sites of contemporary art. But the gesture was more than merely architectural. The title gives a clue. “Shibboleth” is the biblical word from the Book of Judges 12 that cannot be pronounced correctly by foreigners trying to cross the Jordan River into safety. Recognized as “other” by their pronunciation, they are killed on arrival. The crack in the floor suggests a meandering river. The theme of immigration as exclusion and denial of rights is articulated in relation to language and visuality in this irregular crack all along the 500+ feet long turbine hall. It reverberates not only socially, but, as a mark in the museum, also aesthetically in that it points to a structure of exclusion in the canonization of modern art itself. In that aspect, it resonates with Rasheed Araeen’s famous attack from 1989 on the ways in which Western museums ignored what we now call modernism at large. That first major critique of modernism’s exclusionary ethos was articulated at another London site, the Hayward Gallery, which showed Araeen’s curated show The Other Story.15 As Salcedo’s Shibboleth reminds us, we are still very much in need of other stories, stories that are linked to migrations, dispossessions, and deportations in our own world. They can be articulated in museums, and we already have several migration museums, but they cannot be contained there. They can be related to past injustice or to past liberation, but they cannot be limited to the past alone. They must open up a future horizon, as Ellis Island once did, especially today when nationalist populisms are threatening basic rights of asylum and mobility across borders. Salcedo’s work is paradigmatic for the move from the confining space of gallery and museum into the open space of cities; from the mourning of a specific traumatic history to critical interventions in public urban space. T H E M E TA M O R P H O S I S O F T H E M U S E A L

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It started with the private sphere of kitchen and bedroom in the context of Colombian violencia, but branched out multidirectionally into public political space—first in Bogotá, then increasingly in international venues in Istanbul, London, Turin, and the United States. Her newest project Palimpsest takes up the issue of the violence and unmourned deaths spawned by migration across the Mediterranean.16 From Casa Viuda on, the gender dimension of this violence has been subtly present in the material tropes Salcedo uses and transforms—the domestic spaces, clothes, women’s shoes, furniture, the attention to ordinary lives in relation to public and private space. It is exhibitionary in the museum, deeply rather than superficially experiential both in museum and in public space, and ultimately political in an avant-garde tradition that renders the political in complex aesthetic form without ever abandoning the autonomy of art. At the same time, all of Salcedo’s memory works are acts of memory speaking to the future.17 Given the emphatic materiality of her works, memory is not conjured up as something passive, as mere trace or shadow of the past, but as mobilizing political thought through aesthetic means. Her works invariably draw the spectators into their space. They don’t allow objective distanced consumption. Instead they open up a vibrant space between abstraction and emotion, demanding that the spectators themselves become agents of these acts of memory, most obviously in the public works in urban space but also in the gallery installations that rest on individual rather than collective reception. Mieke Bal has said it best: “Her work does not promote the subsumption, but the willful, dialogic, critical, and empathic touching of the past within the present so as to hold the present accountable for what happens both to it and the past.”18 It is not performance art, but it points to the memory activism of performance artists such as Regina José Galindo from Guatemala as well as to the collective memory activism of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo or the Saturday Mothers in Istanbul. Museum installations, public art projects, performances, and political memory activism today form a multidirectional web across the world that allows us to act locally and think globally. Artists can function as guardians of time in a world in which data fetishism and algorithms destroy structures of temporal experience, sucking up pasts and futures into a rapacious everlasting present. Years before the internet went global, Alexander Kluge warned about the attack of the present on the rest of time. It is not too late to beat back that insidious challenge.

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Figure 2.1 Doris Salcedo, Casa Viuda, installation image, Guggenheim Museum, 2015. Courtesy Studio Salcedo.

Figure 2.2 Doris Salcedo, November 6 and 7, 2002. Courtesy Studio Salcedo.

Figure 2.3 Doris Salcedo, Untitled (1550 Chairs), Istanbul Biennial, 2002. Courtesy Studio Salcedo.

Figure 2.4 Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth, 2007. Courtesy Studio Salcedo.

Notes 1. For more on the comparison between Eisenmann and the 9/11 memorial see Andreas Huyssen, “Memory Culture at an Impasse: Memorials in Berlin and New York,” in The Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory, ed.Warren Breckman, Peter E. Gordon, A. Dirk Moses, Samuel Moyn, and Elliot Neaman (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 151–61. 2. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 3. For a detailed description see Andreas Huyssen, “Escape from Amnesia: The Museum as Mass Medium,” in Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995) 13–35. 4. In recent years such experiments with traveling collections have fallen victim to rapidly rising insurance fees. 5. See Janet Liebman Jacobs, Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011). T H E M E TA M O R P H O S I S O F T H E M U S E A L

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6. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History,Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995); Martin Hall, “The Reappearance of the Authentic,” in Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, ed. Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto. With Gustavo Buntinx and Barbara KirshenblattGimblett (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006) 70–101, at 80 and 81. 7. Hall, “The Reappearance of the Authentic,” 76. 8. Hall, “The Reappearance of the Authentic,” 78. 9. See Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other,” in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 44–62. 10. One thing must be said about Bennett’s The Birth of the Museum. While Foucauldean in outlook, Bennett’s exhibitionary complex does not buy into the early Foucault’s rather totalizing carceral analysis of bourgeois institutions. It rather focuses on how the museum also enabled a kind of bourgeois cultural self-understanding aimed at the population at large, perhaps closer to the later Foucault’s ideas about self-fashioning and governmentality. 11. Tony Bennett, “Exhibition, Difference, and the Logic of Culture,” in Karp, Kratz, Szwaja, and Ybarra-Frausto, Museum Frictions, 46–69, at 64 and 46. 12. Huyssen, “Escape from Amnesia,” 35. 13. Bennett, “Exhibition,” 65. 14. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009). Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 15. Rashid Araeen, The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain (London: South Bank Centre, 1989). 16. Andreas Huyssen, “A Palimpsest of Grief: Writing in Water and Light,” Doris Salcedo (London: White Cube, 2018). 17. I take this term “acts of memory” from Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998) as well as Bal’s insightful study Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 18. Bal, Of What One Cannot Speak, 225.

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CH A P T E R I I I

Kara Walker The Memory of Sugar C A RO L B E C K E R

K

ara Walker’s site-specific installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, was on exhibit at the abandoned Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, from May to July 2015. The site was once an enormous processing plant used for storing and refining raw sugar cane that came by boat from the Caribbean up the East River. Creative Time, whose stated mission is to present “art that engages history, breaks new ground, challenges the status quo, and infiltrates the public realm,” was the producing organization for the installation.1 To achieve these goals, Creative Time invited the renowned, provocative artist Kara Walker to the site, hoping she would be inspired and would create an ephemeral project. It was a brilliant idea. Walker’s reaction to the space and its history resulted in A Subtlety, her first public sculptural installation. Monumental in scale, this massive piece was perhaps the most talkedabout public art project in New York City history. Like all of Walker’s work, it received extensive critical acclaim while generating equally vitriolic criticism. It raised many important questions about representation, race, the exploitation of women, the absence of a strong memorial recognizing the impact of slavery on the United States, and the seeming impossibility of ever agreeing to create such an historic site.

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The Location The Domino Sugar Factory—a 90,000-square-foot complex built in 1856, before the Civil War—has been a New York City landmark, recognized most easily by its familiar neon sign (red when turned on and yellow when off). This logo signage, which illuminated the East River, was added in 1950. Since the factory closed in 2004, the building has sat as an enormous ruin, a monument to defunct industry in late capitalism, a symbol of the production that has left the United States in the past decades as businesses that were seeking cheaper labor laid off masses of U.S. workers and moved overseas. Many small and large cities that were once industrial hubs are now burdened with tracts of unused land and abandoned buildings. These properties recall the industrial and postindustrial history of America, a country once known for its ingenuity in “making” things, but which seems to have lost its grit and know-how for physical fabrication, favoring instead innovations in digital technology. The Domino Sugar Factory now sits in a trendy borough of Brooklyn, where the impact of gentrification is everywhere apparent. This site has not been permanently abandoned; rather, it was slated to go the way of many industrial spaces in major global cities: conversion into high-end condominiums for those who can afford such properties. At one time the Domino Sugar Factory was the largest sugar refinery in the world, employing as many as 4,000 workers and refining more than 3 million pounds of sugar a day. Kilns once blasted 140 degrees year-round. When Walker first entered the building in 2014, it must have been an inspiring ruin. The rafters were still coated in sugar and molasses at the 7 1/2-foot mark, where the mounds had once topped out. Even vacant, the factory, filled with a pungent aroma similar to burnt marshmallows, surely evoked a powerful nostalgic and sensual experience. Empty of people, the cavernous space must have echoed its own history, like an abandoned cathedral. When Walker began work on this installation, she became fascinated with the factory’s layered past. How could one represent the history of the sugar industry, which formerly profited the United States and countries throughout the world, without addressing the exploitation that was at the core of its economic viability, the black lives lost while producing this confection? The installation came to function, in part, as a monument—or perhaps a countermonument—to slavery itself. [ 66 ]

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As Sidney W. Mintz writes in his definitive study of the history of sugar, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Sugar—or rather, the great commodity market that arose and demanded it—has been one of the massive demographic forces in world history. Because of sugar, literally millions of enslaved Africans reached the New World, particularly the American South, the Caribbean and its littorals, the Guianas, and Brazil. It was sugar that sent East Indians to Natal and the Orange Free State, and sugar that carried them to Mauritius and Fiji. Sugar brought a dozen different ethnic groups in succession to Hawaii, and sugar still moves people about the Caribbean.2 Because Walker’s sculpture so deftly referenced this history, the exhibition allowed us to envision the full extent of the labor embedded in a product that we now consume ferociously in massive quantities, without a thought to the complexities and contradictions that enabled and still enable its production. Can something as delectable as sugar, and the “subtleties” fashioned from it, actually hide its actual story and the social inequities of its production process? Walker appeared determined to answer “no” and to complicate our understanding and memory of sugar’s origins and the metaphoric significance of its whiteness.

The Piece Itself To tackle both the scale of the building and the historical weight of its social complexity, Walker created an enormous figurative sculpture—40 feet tall, 75 feet long, 35 feet wide—cast in polystyrene blocks coated with 30 tons of sugar. Walker is best known for her black, silhouetted, representational figures adhered to white walls and for her epic drawings depicting the topsy-turvy, exploitative, and perverse world of slavery. Here, for the first time, she gave one of her figures dimensionality in space and time, replacing the flat, black, Victorian-like cutouts and drawn lines with a massive, fleshed-out, awe-inspiring, and completely white, monumental sculpture. A Subtlety was a complex representation of an ancient Sphinx: halfwoman, half-lion, resting on her lioness haunches, whose face bore the exaggerated features of a stereotypical Southern “mammy,” with her head wrapped in a kerchief, or do-rag. The sculpture, so majestic and strange in K A R A WA L K E R

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situ, left many people in awe, even though some viewers were confused, unsettled by, and even conflicted about its meaning. Conjuring the fraught memory of slavery, the mammy has been stereotyped as a contented house servant, a surrogate mother to the master’s children, and a sometime wet nurse. She is the image of the passive and content domestic female servant, a person of “abject subjectivity.” As Hortense Spillers writes, “The horror of slavery was its absolute domesticity that configured the ‘peculiar institution’ into the architectonics of the southern household.”3 During the 1950s, the image of the mammy appeared on packages of Aunt Jemima pancake mix, and her shape was given over to ceramic cookie jars, post–Civil War memorabilia, and images of black women in TV sitcoms. “Mammy” became synonymous with domesticated slavery and forced black/white cohabitation. In Walker’s reinterpretation, against type, the mammy/sphinx became overtly eroticized. A Subtlety was portrayed naked, with enormous breasts, firm nipples, and a vulva to scale. Reminiscent of Greek mythological creatures, she too was hybrid: half-woman, half-lion—powerful and complex enough to awaken the iconography of myth and the unconscious and the memory of the female slave on the plantation and in the sugar refinery itself. Accompanying this massive creature were smaller figurines of black boys carrying baskets filled with bits of ghostly, child-sized limbs—the outtakes of failed figure castings broken in the firing. Walker fashioned them from the familiar curios that became popular collectibles in the antebellum and postbellum South. Like many other African American artists, Walker collects such objects, and she was able to purchase the items online to serve as prototypes for her larger-scale sculptures. Figurines of this genre, so-called blackamoors, cast in bronze or plaster, decorated the front lawns of many American homes in the 1950s and can still be seen in some states today. In this installation, Walker arranged the figures so as to create a clear path leading up to the mammy/sphinx. Her “attendants,” these small stereotypes, were spun out of sugar or resin. The “lollypop boys,” as Walker called them, were tinted to resemble caramel candy, translucent in the light. Their fragility became all too apparent as, over the course of the exhibition, they withered and melted in the extreme summer heat, forming sticky puddles into which they eventually dissolved. Walker created iconic images out of these stereotypes. Her enormous sculpture gave the illusion of a solid block of refined sugar, radiating mythic [ 68 ]

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proportions and strength, while its whiteness illuminated the dark factory space. As large as the heads of U.S. presidents carved in stone on Mount Rushmore, Walker’s mammy/sphinx was mammoth enough to reflect on the enormity of slavery and its memory as an omnipresent force and on its objectification of women servants in particular. A great deal has been written about the piece, raising questions that have no simple resolutions: What happens when a stereotype is reified into a sculpture with allusions to the mythic at this scale? Does it become archetypal, and if so, is that a good or bad thing? Is it made absurd by its size or is it emboldened, made powerful, forbidding, and even vengeful? Who owns imagery when it is historically related to a specific group of people and it references painful, unresolved histories? For some women, A Subtlety was an insult—her naked and exposed genitalia, large and public, a great embarrassment. The piece generated layers of controversy, but controversy was nothing new to Walker. Once again, the world was divided as to the impact and significance of her work. Within the enormous body of writing that attempts to explicate the complex imagery of Walker’s work—and the ambiguous meaning of A Subtlety in particular—two complementary studies enumerate the range of arguments. The first is Rebecca Peabody’s 2016 book, Consuming Stories: Kara Walker and the Imagining of American Race, which offers in-depth analysis of several of Walker’s most complex installations, some written about extensively and others rarely analyzed. The second is the comprehensive article “Queering Sugar: Kara Walker’s Sugar Sphinx and the Intractability of Black Female Sexuality” by Amber Janella Musser. The author, joining the debate about female sexuality that Walker’s piece has generated, suggests “new modes of black female queerness,” which, for Musser, addresses the animality manifested in the work.4

Layers of Meaning Kara Walker’s art generates a great deal of speculative scholarship because it consistently lives in the tension between what is past, what is present, and what of the past persists in the present, albeit hidden. This piece was no exception. She titled her installation A Subtlety after the intricate sculptural sugar delicacies and ornamentations made as decoration for medieval festivals, K A R A WA L K E R

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feasts, and the tables of the wealthy. References to these “art works from the sugar bakers” appear in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts.5 Sugar was a great sculptural medium, “preservable clay” that could be baked or left to harden.6 Subtleties took the form of animals, buildings, objects, humans, etc. And because sugar was desired and expensive, these items were both eaten and admired.7 Also known as “warners,” they were often designed as art pieces with political resonance, “sly rebukes to heretics and politicians.”8 It is no wonder that Walker found this playful, political, humorous, yet somewhat archaic and satiric form so appealing. She brought all of these layers of meaning to this specific project and linked them to the presentday exploitation of millions of workers—women and men—in places such as the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and, of course, the United States. She was well aware that many plantation sugar workers still die as a result of hard, toxic labor. During and after the run of the exhibition, several articles appeared about sugar workers who suffer from an inexplicable, fatal “wasting disease.” In Nicaragua during the last decade, thousands of workers have died from Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD).9 Although this illness is still the subject of study, there is little doubt that the severe symptoms and, in many cases, deaths are directly related to dehydration, the result of strenuous labor exerted in the extreme heat that characterizes the work conditions on sugar plantations around the world. To make her intentions quite clear, Walker subtitled the exhibition, The Marvelous Sugar Baby: An Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. Visited by at least 130,000 people, A Subtlety was designed to reflect these ongoing issues of colonialism, postcolonialism, slavery, and the role of black women in these historic situations, while simultaneously and self-consciously obliterating that history. Walker achieved this alchemical transformation of the memory of the black mammy through metaphor: making black, white— or turning molasses into “refined sugar,” as she has said. “Sugar crystalizes something in our American soul. It is emblematic of all Industrial Processes, and of the idea of becoming white—white being equated with pure and ‘true.’ It takes a lot of energy to turn brown things into white things. A lot of pressure.”10 Surely Walker has expended an enormous amount of physical and intellectual energy transforming—or sugarcoating—the stereotypically brown figure of the mammy to create an enormous white presence. [ 70 ]

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Like the whiteness of the whale, to which Melville devotes an entire chapter in Moby-Dick, the whiteness of A Subtlety was complex and, quite deliberately, difficult to explicate. This is because Kara Walker is a trickster/ artist, both in the production of her work and in discussions about her work, as many of the best artists tend to be. Now you think you understand these artists, now you don’t; now you know what they are up to, now you don’t. Walker is adept at keeping the viewer and the entire historical/theoretical art apparatus hypothesizing as to her intentions. In his book, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, Lewis Hyde elegantly describes this type of artist, who enjoys messing with the sacred, sullying and dirtying the temple—who is fearless in the face of the sacrosanct and takes pleasure in putting the viewer in an array of compromising positions.11 At their best, these artists renew the world, bring the familiar onto unfamiliar ground, and, in so doing, make it fresh again. They deliberately mix up conscious and unconscious associations and refuse to simplify or to adhere to the rules set by others. Irreverence is at the heart of the process. In the spirit of Hermes, the trickster of mercurial imagination will always get into trouble with those unwilling to engage the world playfully, those who revere images and refuse to turn them on their heads. Walker is a great example of trickster practices. She plays on the meaning of her work and on the expectations of her audience, continually. She wants to jostle us out of complacency and into thought. She empowers herself to engage stereotypes in any way she chooses and to conflate conscious and unconscious memories into complex conundrums. She simply does not create an uncomplicated viewing experience. Her audience is constantly forced to participate in this irreverent play and then to monitor its own response. Such practice often generates a good deal of anger in her viewers as well. The Subtlety, with its multiple resonances and allusions, created just such a reverent/irreverent effect. It was gorgeously seductive and dramatic but, at the same time, disturbing in appearance, meaning, and scale: mammy was naked. She was mysterious and she took up an enormous amount of space. There was no way to ignore her. But the gargantuan, urban location that held her—providing both physical and historical context—also was sociologically problematic. Many such spaces, once the loci of production and of jobs for a working population, have fallen into the hands of developers and become glamorized art venues and/or high-priced condominium complexes. This global phenomenon reaches from New York to Berlin to Beijing. The fact of gentrification and its relationship to class and, therefore, to K A R A WA L K E R

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race was not lost on Walker or, one hopes, on the audience, many of whom understood the relationship between art, real estate, class, diversity, and profit margins, especially in New York City. Nonetheless, we, the audience, were inevitably complicit in helping to transform this important historic venue into an art space simply because we showed up. And, perhaps even more problematic, we were all put in the position of the voyeur, engaging with the mammy stereotype that many people, both white and African American, found complex, and that some found offensive. Did the scale of the piece and its hybrid nature allow it to transcend stereotypes and become myth? Can something, anything, take such a leap away from the stereotypical, and if so, what controversy has it leapt over to get there? What happens when an ancient image, such as the sphinx, merges with a more temporal image already burdened with negative attributes and this hybrid construction is then thrust into public space? These are dynamics Walker consistently creates for her audience. There are many classical Greek sculptures of sphinx women—partially clothed or naked creatures whose fascinating effect lies precisely in their human/animal hybridity and often also in their immensity. The Sphinx of Giza is monumental and enigmatic, but the smaller and less powerful hybrid women sculptures that grace ancient tombs, often playing harps, are equally otherworldly. In Greek mythology, a threatening sphinx meets Oedipus at the crossroads and asks him to solve the famous riddle: “What walks on all fours in the morning, on two legs in the afternoon, and on three in the evening?” Oedipus correctly answers, “Man.” His intelligence disempowers the Sphinx. Her mystery (and its power) now revealed—exposed and therefore diminished—the Sphinx kills herself. Oedipus, who already knows his fate, in an attempt to thwart the gods, has left what he believes to be his home, only to walk through the gates of Thebes unopposed and find himself in even more profound difficulty: he has already unknowingly murdered his father but then also unknowingly commits incest with his mother. The sphinx is thus over-determined with many mythic significations. She guards the crossroads between truth and fiction, between human and animal, and she inhabits a liminal space where such conscious and unconscious configurations are omnipresent. She asks a question that cannot be answered easily and takes the lives of those unable to respond correctly. She is an embodiment of danger, contradiction, dreams, and mortality. She is an archetypal gate but here she is also the mammy writ large, mythic, a [ 72 ]

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cultural icon that hovers between history and imagination, and is, in her layered complexity, however powerful, not in the least subtle. The resulting union of sphinx and mammy is magnificent, dreamlike, problematic, and constantly being remade. For example, the left hand of Walker’s sphinx is configured into the “fig sign,” with the thumb thrust between the index and middle fingers—an expressive act that can be understood, and has been understood in many cultures, as a rude gesture but also as a magical gesture associated with fertility. This hand (which is all that remains of the piece) was shown in the DESTE Foundation’s Project Space—an abandoned slaughterhouse on the island of Hydra—from June 30 to September 30, 2017. In that context, the left hand was presented alone as both a relic and a monument to “slaves, migrants, refugees, outcasts and marginalized people.”12

The Controversy Among artists, there is a recognized prohibition against using stereotypes about slavery, but Walker, as a trickster/artist and shape-shifter, is undeterred by such constrictions. In fact, she complicates the mammy even further by sexualizing her. Eroticizing or demeaning victims in her work is something for which Walker has been criticized throughout her career. Her atypical representations of black figures have ostracized her from a section of the African American art community. Artist and historian Howardena Pindell has written, “I feel that artists who use racial stereotypes without critique become complicit. . . . Thus, in the visual industries’ uneven playing field these artists entertain, titillate, mesmerize and amuse their European/ European-American admirers.”13 If the images of black oppression under slavery are to be handled carefully, as Pindell and others believe, then Walker appears to have quite deliberately chosen to sully them, to recontextualize them, to provoke us, to actually force us to see them more clearly. She is not the first African American artist to have done so: Robert Colescott, Michael Ray Charles, Chris Ofili, Fred Wilson, and others have done the same. In 1972, Betye Saar, one of Walker’s detractors, used the mammy figure in her installation The Liberation of Aunt Jemima. Walker’s piece is no doubt a great deal larger and fiercer than Saar’s, but it is finally only recycling an overused image that some have already incorporated into their work, as Walker herself also has done in the past. K A R A WA L K E R

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Nonetheless, African American artists, including Saar and Pindell, have attacked Walker in essays, books, and interviews and at symposia and in public debate. During Walker’s debut in the art world, the criticism was well organized and unrelenting. Perhaps some artists were incensed that Walker received so much attention from the art world at such a young age. She was one of the youngest artists ever to become a MacArthur Fellow. Her first big show at the Drawing Center attracted enormous attention. She sold the entirety of one of her very first exhibitions in Chicago to a much-admired collector. From the beginning, the critical response to her work has been extravagant and also highly polarized, attracting both praise and criticism. Walker’s continued success has at times provoked ire and even taken the debate into psychoanalytic and personal realms. Some artist-detractors have attributed the scale of her success to the way in which the work might appeal to the racist fantasies of a predominantly white, Eurocentric art world, which, they believe, is more comfortable with work by African Americans that reflects negatively on black people than they are with work that challenges white racism. Many have attacked Walker on this basis and explained her success in such terms. The question of who owns images and how images can or cannot be used to represent violent historical events and oppressed groups of people has launched ongoing debate in African American art and cultural circles, crystallizing many times around Walker’s provocative silhouettes. In her installations and drawings, the environment of slavery has been populated by figures engaged in compromised, sexualized, and sadistic acts. More disturbing than erotic, the imagery often has appeared violent—not unlike the images in Hieronymous Bosch paintings—filled with various scenarios of perversion and societal chaos, yet somehow made contextually mundane as an inevitable byproduct of slavery and a debased power structure that irredeemably deformed all black/white relationships. Because eroticizing slavery, by acknowledging its sexual elements, has been Walker’s trademark, it is not surprising that she created a sexualized mammy. In doing so, she rejected the image of the happy servant and the mammy figure that has become an overused representation of all unseen or “misseen” women who labored under slavery.14 Rather, Walker chose to empower her figure, giving her enormous proportions, presenting her as potentially treacherous and eroticized, as a familiar yet unfamiliar reincarnation of the past. [ 74 ]

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That Walker dares to go to such dark, repressed places, to these sites “where embarrassment lay,” as she has said of her own Imaginary, is infuriating to some.15 That she feels entitled to use whatever images she chooses to represent slavery and its consequences deeply unsettles those who actually would censor her images if they could. Those critical of the work believe she has put her silhouetted figures in humiliating positions—the antithesis of what Walker herself refers to as “black pride,” which, as a movement, never did include the possibility of shame.16 But in Walker’s iconography, those enslaved within a corrupt system, white and black, are never spared its degradations. One might ask whether such work functions as a collective catharsis, as a group psychoanalysis, or as an inevitable trigger to unleash, as she says, the repressed or regressed. There is no one interpretation of her intention or effect—the work is far too complex. She, as an artist, is far too complex. But it seems that for Walker this work, in part, is about her desire to liberate particular images, such as the mammy figure, from the stranglehold of history and from control by any one group of artists or historians. She refuses to capitulate to anyone else’s sense of what she can and cannot represent. As Christina Sharpe has written, “What is effective about Walker’s work is that she opens up these monstrous excesses.”17 In this sense, Walker is bold and fearless. In an interview with her father, artist Larry Walker, published in BOMB Magazine in 2014, Kara Walker references the work of Betye Saar, one of her most outspoken critics: There was a sculptural piece that Betye Saar had done, maybe in 1970, a constructed box, with a Mammy doll holding a broom and a rifle, looking like an ironic play on the subservient versus the militant. My critique of that was that she was still making Mammy do her bidding. (laughter) Mammy was still playing a submissive role relative to the artist. I thought maybe one of the things that would be more likely to happen, although impossible because I’m aware that I am talking about inanimate objects, would be to have them unleashed. To have derogatory figures from history be set loose on the world to do their own thing.18 Perhaps A Subtlety, which appeared many years later in Walker’s canon, is exactly that: an image of the mammy hybridized with the sphinx and K A R A WA L K E R

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“set loose” to be as big, brash, confident, defiant, and in-your-face as she chooses to be. The piece raised important considerations about who gets to memorialize what, how, and in whose name. If Walker, as an African American artist, continues to make work about slavery and, to do so, uses controversial images of female slaves performing fellatio on slave owners or others in a range of demonic, scatological, and psychosexual situations, is this not her interpretation of the system of slavery and its inherent desires as an inevitable form of pornography? Or is this, as some of her accusers have noted, a provocation on Walker’s part to “titillate” white people, resulting in even more racism and more negative images of black people?19 Is the mammy—large, white, and spectacular—still a negative image, or has she catapulted herself out of the confines of stereotypes to now exult in her own power? Or, as Dennis Kardon writes, perhaps “part of the riddle or mystery of the piece is its refusal to console.”20 I have never understood Walker’s intention as one of catering to white people. No one of any race can be at ease with work of this intensity or fashioned at this scale. The inappropriate behavior of many viewers attests to what some people do when they feel such extreme discomfort. There is no doubt that A Subtlety provokes the memory of the history of women trapped in slavery—only the most racist viewers would find consolation in that. Walker admits to creating images of humiliation and shame. “I thought, for visual resources I should look really in those places where embarrassment lay.”21 But even when she honestly presents her motivations, Walker is still challenged by others. Those who speak out against her feel as if she has been provocative in order to secure her own success and monetary gain. It is therefore understandable that, given this analysis of the work’s intention, they have felt compelled to fight against her. Many writers, both white and black, have praised A Subtlety as a breathtaking utilization of an enormously complex physical space, a highly successful in-situ sculpture, a magnificent achievement in form and content. The piece received so much written attention that the history of sugar— something that had been little discussed in the United States—became a topic of concern. The conjuring of the memory of slavery, the exploitation of black workers, the stereotyping of black women laborers as mammies, and the abuse of sugar workers of color around the globe, brought race and class right back to the center of the conversation in the United States. A Subtlety most assuredly captured the collective imagination. If it can be understood as a monument to slavery that refuses to “console,” then it also has to be [ 76 ]

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understood as a monument to the complexity of how the memory of slavery still operates in the collective Imaginary and how it surely has not been overcome by anyone, black or white.

This Historical Moment The Walker controversy came at a time when some people in America actively and wrongly believed that the issue of race had ended with the election of Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States. At that time, some actually said that there was no longer any issues of race to contend with. There were justices in the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, who overtly took such positions. They even accused those who attempted to create equity around race, by acknowledging the history of blackness in America, as de facto racists encouraging discrimination against white people. This situation became exacerbated by the repetitive murders of unarmed black men and women by police in the United States during 2015 and 2016, which led to innumerable demonstrations and to the organization of Black Lives Matter. Since the civil rights era, the discussion of race in the United States had never been as overtly present as it was during this protracted period. Add to this complexity the outrageous, aggressive, and overtly racist actions of some white visitors to the installation—tourists and locals—who insisted on demeaning this large sculpture of a black, voluptuous woman/ sphinx. They turned art into entertainment and made obscene gestures for the camera while standing in front of, pointing to, or pretending to lick her breasts and vulva. During the last weeks of the installation, their behavior received a good deal of press. Whoever could have dreamed that there would be a website that enabled visitors to create a selfie with this huge sculpture by superimposing their image in front of her digitally, without actually ever having to set foot in the space? These responses shocked much of the art world and confirmed Walker’s detractors in their belief that her images actually do provoke a response of white racism, something that never could have been monitored so extensively before the existence of the internet. Clearly there are enormous risks involved in mobilizing the memory of slavery and its complexity of images especially focused on women. The exposure of white racism might well have been one of Walker’s intentions. We cannot be certain. But when such events do occur, it is then surely K A R A WA L K E R

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up to the spectator to decide how to respond. This piece—large, majestic, provocative, and photogenic—clearly demonstrated that racism is alive and well in the United States. It also demonstrated that aggression against the black female body continues without self-consciousness on the part of the  aggressor. Because the installation was in public space and on such a large scale, people felt permitted to appropriate the image as their own, in the crudest, most crass manners possible, abusing the figure as one might choose to abuse the black body it represented. The trickster-artist might say, or feel, that these images merely brought to the surface the racism at the core of U.S. society, which has often been denied, repressed, or covered over, and whose eradication has progressed little since the days of slavery. Maybe the trickster is right, and it is better to bring it all on, to smash the illusion that racism is gone, to drain the abscess publicly, to observe racism acted out, rather than help to keep it buried behind an inauthentic, polite façade or a reverent memorial to slavery. It is hard to know. But there is no doubt that this work and the responses to it have had a profoundly unsettling effect, still being discussed and reckoned with. Some black artists and writers insist that artists have responsibility to control the reception to their work and that they should never make work that allows for such racist and negative reactions. But really, can we blame artists for what is done with/to their work once installed? Can they ever really predict its reception? Or imagine the effect of their creation, no matter how hard they try to make their intentions clear? Perhaps Walker herself did anticipate that expressions of white racism and abuse of the female body would be outcomes of such a provocative piece. Roland Barthes has hypothesized that “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.”22 When a text is produced, “the burden of deciphering the meaning from the text becomes the responsibility of the reader of that text.”23 What is true for the reader is equally true for the viewer of an artwork. The completion of the process is the responsibility of the audience. And if this piece was a monument to slavery, in all its gargantuan proportions and complicities, then perhaps this ridiculing by some observers did reveal what they felt about slavery and its aftermaths. Perhaps those willing to degrade themselves by attempting to humiliate the work on some level, however unconsciously, still believe in the subjugation of blacks and of black women in particular. Perhaps they believe that they have a right to be masters over others and over the images of others and that they are therefore free to demean such images at will. [ 78 ]

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They surely demonstrated that the deeper meaning of the work was lost on them; their actions confirmed their obliviousness as to how such behavior might cause pain. Perhaps they would be surprised to learn their actions were perceived as racist or that they reacted to a stereotype in the most grotesque, stereotypical fashion. Or perhaps they would instead be upset to learn that some black viewers found the piece humiliating and that their outrageous behavior simply confirmed those viewers’ worst fears: that the oppression of blacks in America has not been transformed and the abuse of the black female body continues to this day. Or perhaps they would not care about any of these conjectures and, having simply thought that the piece was provocative and encouraging of such a response, believed that they were justified in complying. I cannot be certain about all that Walker intended with this installation, but I am convinced by the entire body of her work that she would not simply demean the figure of the black woman. Walker has never just re-presented stereotypes, such as the mammy figure; she has recontextualized them and made them so big and palpable that their impact has become explicit, their effect easily recognizable to all. This ephemeral memorial to slavery—this revenge of the mammy/sphinx, with her silent, contained power, ready to be unleashed—has generated a debate about the particular rage and racism focused on the black, sexualized female body. This debate has been as expansive as the installation itself and as explosive as the memory of slavery, the exploitation of African American workers in the sugar industry, and of women slaves, and, in particular, the abuse of their bodies.24 Writing this in 2017, the reality of the fissure between some people of color and some very angry whites in the United States has rarely been more palpable and visible, with fellow citizens overtly attacking others through violent actions and hate speech. We can only hope that over time it will become clear that something cleansing has resulted from gutting this former sugar factory, with its embedded, iconic history of exploitation, which served, more recently, as the site of an evocative artwork directed at a profoundly difficult and deeply unsettling historical subject. But certainly this layered memorialization of the mammy and the history of slavery that it embodied affected many in New York City and in the United States, making clear that there is still an enormous amount of work to be done and more conversations to be had about race, racism, and sexual exploitation— with ourselves and with each other. K A R A WA L K E R

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Figure 3.1 Kara Walker, A Subtlety, 2014. Source: Photography by Jason Wyche, Courtesy Creative Time.

Figure 3.2 Kara Walker, A Subtlety, 2014. Source: Photography by Jason Wyche, Courtesy Creative Time.

Figure 3.3 Kara Walker, A Subtlety, 2014. Source: Photography by Jason Wyche, Courtesy Creative Time.

Notes 1. Creative Time mission statement (2014), cited in Laura K. Reeder, “Kara Walker: Subtlety as a Big Idea,” Art Education, January 2015, 51. 2. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 71. 3. Hortense Spillers, “Changing the Letter: The Yokes, the Jokes of Discourse, or, Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Reed,” in Black,White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 2003), 178, qtd. in Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 159. 4. Amber Jamilla Musser, “Queering Sugar: Kara Walker’s Sugar Sphinx and the Intractability of Black Sexuality,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42, no. 1 (Autumn 2016): 153–74, accessed July 19, 2018, https://www.journals .uchicago.edu/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1086/686756. 5. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 88. 6. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 88. 7. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 89. 8. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 89. 9. “Clues Found in Nicaraguan Sugar Cane Worker Kidney Disease Epidemic,” National Kidney Foundation,accessed December 3,2016,https://www.kidney.org /news/clues-found-nicaraguan-sugar-cane-worker-kidney-disease-epidemic. 10. Kara Walker, quoted in Blake Gopnik, “Rarely One for Sugarcoating: Kara Walker Creates a Confection at the Domino Refinery,” New York Times, April 25, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/arts/design/kara-walker-creates -a-confection-at-the-domino-refinery.html. 11. Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: North Point Press, 1998). 12. “Kara Walker—Figa,” DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, accessed July 9, 2017, http://deste.gr/hydra/kara-walker/. 13. Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 174. 14. Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 167. 15. Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 156. 16. Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 168. 17. Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 184. 18. “Kara Walker & Larry Walker,” BOMB Magazine, Oral History Project May 8, 2014, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/kara-walker-larry-walker/. 19. Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 174. 20. Paul Carter Harrison et al., “Symposium on the Recent ‘Mammy’ Sculpture of Kara Walker,” Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire 14, no. 2 (2014): 97–98. 21. Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 156. [ 82 ]

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22. Roland Barthes, Image–Music–Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York:The Noonday Press, 1978), 148. 23. Barthes, Image–Music–Text, 148 24. In “Queering Sugar,” Amber Jamilla Musser provides a comprehensive analysis of those writers who have addressed the issue of gender, sexuality, and racism in relationship to Walker’s A Subtlety.

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CH A P T E R IV

Curious Steps Mobilizing Memory Through Collective Walking and Storytelling in Istanbul BÜ R G E A B ԭ R A L , AY ߸ E G Ü L A LT I N AY, D ԭ L A R A Ç A L I ߸ K A N, A R M A N C Y I L D I Z

I don’t want to discuss it. I don’t want to hear the reasons and excuses given one after the other to present war as something exciting and desirable; and I do not accept that war is an inevitable necessity.1 ZAB E L Y E SAYAN, EN OU GH, 1912

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ince 2014, a group of young people has been reading the powerful words of feminist Armenian writer Zabel Yesayan describing the Balkan wars of 1912 and the arrival of Muslim refugees into Istanbul, to attentive listeners and curious passersby on Istiklal Street, Istanbul’s cultural and political hub. With the growing number of Syrian refugees in Turkey since 2013, the essay reads as contemporary critique and provides an opening to layered local histories of gendered violence and silencing. Our public reading of Yesayan’s timeless reflections embodies overlapping acts of bearing witness: Zabel Yesayan bearing witness to the suffering of Muslim refugees in Ottoman Istanbul in 1912; the participants of the reading, to the taboo history of the Armenian genocide of 1915 and the victimization of Yesayan; the collective, to the suffering of Syrian migrants and refugees in contemporary Istanbul. The public reading of this text in front of Aras, the publishing house that has been re-introducing this “forgotten” feminist writer to readers in Turkey, constitutes one of the many stops of Curious Steps: Gender and Memory Walks of Istanbul, a collective effort to mobilize memories through walking and storytelling.2 After more than two decades of feminist interventions in the gendered histories and memories of Turkey and the Ottoman State, and following recent initiatives like the virtual Women’s Museum Istanbul that seek to create alternative memory sites, we—a group of young people, students and [ 84 ]

faculty—came together to create a “gender and memory walk” of the BeyoОlu neighborhood in Istanbul in 2014. Currently organized in three Istanbul neighborhoods, Curious Steps brings together diverse groups of people for collective walks through urban spaces to listen to women’s and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex (LGBTI) stories researched and told by young volunteers. The walk has employed a growing repertoire of interventions to accomplish several interrelated goals: drawing attention to the silencing of non-Muslim women’s lives, work, and struggles in the city; making visible the nationalization and militarization of public spaces; introducing forms of alternative memorialization; co-witnessing and co-resisting with memory activists; exploring feminist and LGBTI struggles connected to space; making visible sites of sexist and homo/transphobic violence; exploring the gendered memories of recent cases of urban transformation; problematizing the marginalization of women and LGBTIs in other rights struggles; and drawing attention to multiple layers of dispossession that mark public space.3 In the background of these interventions lies a basic question that we share with Marianne Hirsch: “How can our albums and archives gesture toward what has been lost and forgotten, toward the many lives that remain obscured, unknown, and unthought?”4 We add to this question a search for ways to collectively revisit the “obscured, unknown, and unthought” lives of women and LGBTIs of Istanbul in the places marked simultaneously by their creative expressions and contemporary absence. Moreover, we seek ways of connecting different histories and memories to one another, and to the present. Exploring the intricate connections between public and intimate archives, Curious Steps looks at how connective histories are woven onto the urban landscape of Istanbul.5 The walks combine references to official histories and archives (often to talk about their silences), intimate archives (in the form of oral histories, memoirs, and private collections), and the personal memories of the storytellers and the participants. We argue in this chapter that a feminist city walk offers the possibility to engage in what we call “situated feminist storytelling” for mobilizing “silenced” memories, on the one hand, and making visible creative mobilizations of memory, on the other.

Walking through Istiklal Street Retelling Stories We took our initial steps towards designing a feminist walk through Istanbul in Spring 2014. We were inspired by the feminist walks we had taken CURIOUS STEPS

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in Budapest (organized by historian Andrea Petö) and Bochum (organized by the feminist archive collective ausZeiten), as well as by the informal memory walk that Soledad Falabella offered the Women Mobilizing Memory group in Santiago, Chile in late 2013. Another source of inspiration was the Militourism Festival (2004–2006) organized by an antimilitarist group of conscientious objectors, drawing attention to the “militarist” sites of Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir with creative “antimilitarist” performances. As faculty and students from Sabancı University Gender and Women’s Studies Center of Excellence (SU Gender), we joined with activists from Karakutu, a non-governmental organization (NGO) that had recently begun to work on memory walks in Istanbul, and had several meetings to talk over which stories we would want to explore for a feminist walk of the BeyoОlu district. By August 2014, each participant had researched and written the story of a particular person, group, or event that was historically relevant for women and LGBTIs of Istanbul. The stories spanned the twentieth century and covered a wide range of fields, from literature to activism, legal struggles to everyday experiences. Published in a booklet of postcards related to each site, these stories were first shared with the participants of the Women Mobilizing Memory Working Group during a rainy September day.We will walk the reader through the major stops of the BeyoОlu walk before engaging in a discussion of the possibilities offered by these walks for a feminist mobilization of memory.

Kohen Sisters Bookstore Our first curious steps began at the end of Istiklal Street, not far from the famous Taksim Square that includes Gezi Park. Until the late 1980s, Istiklal (literally, independence) Street was a predominantly male space, with narrow sidewalks and heavy traffic. For young women, walking on Istiklal almost certainly meant encountering verbal and physical sexual harassment. The ordinary walker would have no knowledge of the street’s centuries-long history as the vibrant Grande Rue de Péra or Cadde-i Kebir, nor of the layers of state violence that had targeted the livelihood, expressions of creativity, and political dissent that shaped it. School books said nothing about April 24, 1915, when more than 300 Armenian writers, journalists, musicians, artists, clergy, and politicians—some from their residences and workplaces on or around Grande Rue de Péra—were sent to what would become their [ 86 ]

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Figure 4.1 Walking route of the BeyoОlu Curious Steps, September 2014. Source: Design by ԭlkim Karakuߞ.

“death camps” inside Anatolia; nor about the 1942 “wealth tax” that mainly targeted the non-Muslims of Turkey, resulting in a Muslim takeover of many businesses on and around Istiklal Street; nor about the September 6–7 events of 1955, when Greek, Armenian, Assyrian, Jewish, and other non-Muslim homes and shops were violently attacked by organized mobs as a result of which many closed their stores and migrated to Greece, Israel, and other countries, radically transforming the make-up and daily life of the street and its neighborhood. During the walk, our first curious steps took us toward Tünel Geçidi (Tunnel Passage), to visit the Kohen Hemߞireler/Sisters Bookstore, one of the earliest bookstores in BeyoОlu and one of the very few that have survived a century. This story of survival through a century of violence and discrimination becomes all the more remarkable when one takes into account that the bookstore was established and run by two Jewish sisters, Mazalto and Eliza Kohen, in 1918, and has been maintained by their relatives until today, retaining its Jewish name throughout its history (although the term “Sisters” was dropped in 2004). During our walks, Ayߞe Gül Altınay described participating in long editorial meetings with the photographer Attila Durak and some of the authors of Ebru: Reflections of Cultural Diversity in Turkey at the café right in front of this bookstore and completely missing the “reflections” of the Kohen sisters, who had provided a meeting place for diverse Istanbulites a century earlier, most likely inspiring other women to claim space in the bookstore, taking their own independent, curious steps.6

Zabel Yesayan and Aras Publishing House Arriving at the entrance of the bilingual Armenian-Turkish publishing house Aras, which is a short walk from the Kohen Sisters Bookstore, five or six of us read sections from Zabel Yesayan’s 1912 essay “Enough!” Even when the walk participants are international, this reading is often done in Turkish, with copies of the whole essay available for curious passersby. The life story of Zabel Yesayan, which we share with listeners following this reading, stands as a witness both to some of the most violent moments of militarization, war, and genocide of the early twentieth century, and to women’s courageous and creative activism against them. Identified as “the first Ottoman-Armenian socialist-feminist, pacifist female writer” by the Women’s Museum Istanbul, Yesayan wrote prolifically on women’s rights, [ 88 ]

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war, and peace.7 In 1915, Yesayan was the only woman on the blacklist prepared for the April 24 roundup of Armenian intellectuals in Istanbul, which has become the historical marker of the beginning of the genocidal process. She was among the few who were able to escape the roundup, finally settling in Soviet Armenia in 1933. In 1937, she was arrested and died in an unknown prison at an unknown date as a victim of Stalin.8 The reason we commemorate Yesayan through a powerful antiwar essay from 1912 at this particular site, in front of Hıdivyal Palas that houses Aras, is that the pioneering book that introduced her to the Turkish readers, A Cry for Justice: Five Armenian Writers from the Ottoman Times to Turkey by Lerna EkmekçioОlu and Melissa Bilal, was published by Aras in 2006. This book has not only challenged official historiography, built on the denial and silence about Ottoman Armenian presence, as well as the Armenian genocide, but also on a reversal of feminist historiography, which had initially imagined the Ottoman women’s movement to be a movement of Ottoman, Muslim, Turkish women.9 Reading the powerful antimilitarist critique of Zabel Yesayan a century later calls to mind the many layers of militarization, destruction, and silencing that have shaped not only the Turkish nationstate, its histories, and streets but feminist histories of knowing and acting as well. At the same time as this collective reading recalls the gendered toll of wars and genocide, of which Yesayan herself was a victim, it also acts as an empowering step, opening our hearts and minds to Yesayan’s wisdom, courageous critique, and imaginative activism, which she was able to sustain in the darkest of times.

Ayߞe ߸an and the Mezopotamia Cultural Center At our next stop, the former Mesopotamia Cultural Center, a center established by a group of Kurdish intellectuals and artists in 1991 to promote Kurdish language, art, and culture, we discuss the history of dengbej music and feature Ayߞe ߸an, one of the most influential names in contemporary Kurdish music. “Dengbej” translates as “the master of the voice,” and refers to a particular mode of singing and storytelling that has historically covered everyday matters, love, war, suffering, and the ongoing struggle of Kurds against discrimination and state violence. Dengbej verses build a collective memory archive and help transfer unwritten histories to the next generations. Born in 1938 to a dengbej father, Ayߞe ߸an started singing in village CURIOUS STEPS

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gatherings but was reprimanded by relatives, for women’s singing in public was considered inappropriate. She nevertheless continued and released her first album in 1963 in Kurdish and Turkish, becoming the first singer to procure a public record in Kurdish in republican Turkey. Soon after, her music was banned by the state and Ayߞe ߸an had to spend several years in exile in Germany. As we stand in front of the former Mesopotamian Cultural Center and recall Ayߞe ߸an’s contributions to the transmission and development of Kurdish music and culture, we play one of her songs in Kurdish on a portable speaker. Our brief public intervention not only brings to light the significance of a cultural space of struggle, the Mezopotamia Cultural Center, that has historically been subject to raids, police violence, surveillance, and countless detentions and arrests, but also of a woman who has contested state violence through her songs in Kurdish, as well as a patriarchal field of cultural production by persistently claiming her space and voice.

Saturday People and Maryam ߸ahinyan at Galatasaray Square Most of our BeyoОlu walks since 2014 have taken place on Saturday mornings, and have included a stop at Galatasaray Square at noon, where we have stood or sat with the Saturday People who have marked the square with their vigils since 1995. Holding up photographs, they ask for the whereabouts of their disappeared children and relatives, mostly Kurdish, as well as for justice and legal prosecution.10 After the vigil, we resume our walk to uncover another layer of creativity and survival rendered invisible by urban transformation and nationalist historiography: Maryam ߸ahinyan, the “first professional Armenian woman photographer,” had her studio, Foto Galatasaray, at the same spot as the Saturday vigils, until the building was demolished in the early 1970s to make room for the square and a monument that marks the Republic’s fiftieth anniversary.11 Although the studio changed locations three times between 1937 and 1985, ߸ahinyan was its owner and photographer for almost fifty years, leaving behind an archive of 200,000 black-and-white images of close to 1 million people.12 ߸ahinyan’s studio photographs capture astonishing images of unlikely public appearances, such as women in underwear and male lovers kissing. The intimate and transgressive content of these photos suggests [ 90 ]

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Figure 4.2 Photograph by Maryam ߸ahinyan Source: Courtesy of Aras Publishing House.

that they were not meant for public use or circulation but remained with ߸ahinyan and with those who posed before her. Indeed, until ߸ahinyan’s negatives, secured by Aras Publishing House founder Yetvart Tomasyan, were made public in an exhibition at SALT Galata and published in a book by artist Tayfun Serttaߞ in 2012, no one had been aware of the existence of this remarkable woman photographer. Andreas Huyssen argues that “[c]ities  .  .  . are palimpsests of history, incarnations of time in stone, sites of memory extending both in time and space.”13 He looks at Berlin as an urban palimpsest and explores the ways in which “city text” consists of not only “a richness of traces and memories” but also “voids, illegibilities, and erasures.”14 We speak of the same kind of void when we speak of Galatasaray Square, with the Republic Monument and without Foto Galatasaray. Seeing such a void is made possible only by bringing public and intimate archives together. While standing as a group on the former site of Foto Galatasaray, we talk about not only ߸ahinyan’s distinctly creative eye that created an archive of a complicated spectrum of cultural and gender expressions in her Istanbul but also the role of the Armenian genocide that brought her family to Istanbul in the first place. CURIOUS STEPS

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Figure 4.3 Saturday People Vigil, April 25, 2015, Galatasaray, Istanbul. Source: Photograph by Ayߞe Gül Altınay.

Throughout the walk, but especially in Galatasaray Square, we stop and stand. The act of standing lends the word layers of meaning: standing with, standing in front, standing against, and standing up come together in the context of various connective histories and struggles. For instance, in April 2015, the participants in Curious Steps found themselves sitting and standing at Galatasaray Square with Nancy Kricorian, Arlene Avakian, and other Armenian intellectuals, commemorating the mass disappearances of Ottoman Armenians that took place on April 24, 1915. As we joined the Saturday People holding photographs of these Ottoman Armenians who represent the “first disappearances” in the past century of state violence, we were at the same time commemorating Maryam ߸ahinyan, who had survived the genocide as a four-year-old in her hometown Sivas, migrating to Istanbul with her family and, for decades, photographing life and love at the very same spot where we were sitting. While the Saturday Mothers held the photographs of those who disappeared more than a century ago, we were also looking at the photographs by ߸ahinyan reproduced on the postcards that constitute the Curious Steps booklet. Standing next to the Republic Monument that marks a significant time in official state history, we were also standing at the intersection of the different moments of dispossession and violence that are not part of the official Turkish historiography but are made visible through contemporary struggles. [ 92 ]

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The Office of Judicial Support Against Sexual Harassment and Rape Under Custody and the Human Rights Association Until recently, the literature on women incarcerated for political or other reasons throughout republican history was limited to a few autobiographical texts; the gendered experiences of prison and torture had hardly been voiced or analyzed.15 During Curious Steps, we stop at the office of the Human Rights Association, located on a side street between Galatasaray Square and Taksim Square, to tell two connected but partially conflicting stories. One narrative line recognizes the significance of the daring struggles spearheaded and sustained by the Association since 1986 to record, raise awareness of, and struggle against human rights abuses by the state while facing intense forms of state violence themselves. Another line, however, highlights the ways in which gendered conceptions of violence, law, and human rights have limited the reach of human rights activism in Turkey. As we stand in front of the Human Rights Association of Istanbul, we share the story of the Office of Judicial Support against Sexual Harassment and Rape in Custody, the first institutional effort to expose gendered state violence experienced in custody. The office was founded by lawyers Eren Keskin and Leman Yurtsever in 1997 with the aim of providing legal support for women in cases of sexual assault in custody. The recipient of the prestigious International Hrant Dink Award in 2017, Keskin has served as the director of the Human Rights Association for many years and continues to face numerous criminal charges and lawsuits brought by the state, attempting to impede her work on human rights and sexual violence.16 Through their office, Keskin and Yurtsever have played a key role in breaking a decades-long silence, raising awareness, creating an archive, conducting research, and exposing and publicizing state-based sexual violence against women. Because the most recent use of rape and sexual harassment as systematic tools of torture in Turkey took place during the 1990s against women active in the Kurdish struggle, the majority of the applicants to the office have been Kurdish. Yet female sex workers, trans women, and politically active women also remain subject to sexual violence under custody and receive support from this office. Keskin and Yurtsever’s book on the short history of the office and on state-based sexual violence, Devlet Kaynaklı ߸iddet, starts with an CURIOUS STEPS

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account of how challenging it has been to convince other human rights lawyers and activists, as well as the victims themselves, that sexual violence under custody should be raised as a political and legal issue.17 Through their support for sex workers and trans women, they have also contributed to expanding the field of classical human rights activism in Turkey to incorporate gendered violence and struggles. A stop at the Human Rights Association office that incorporates a discussion of Keskin and Yurtsever’s office (whose physical location is not public) allows Curious Steps walkers to reflect not only on the layers of state violence and the challenges of the struggle against it but also on the patriarchal and heteronormative limitations of human rights activism itself.

Gezi Park: A Site of Dispossession and (Re)Assembly Our final stop during the Curious Steps of BeyoОlu is Gezi Park, where we share a number of connective stories, among them, the histories of the feminist and the LGBTI movements in Turkey. Following the government’s decision to cut down the park’s trees and build a mall, Gezi Park became the much-contested venue for an uprising in the summer of 2013. The spontaneous uprising brought together people from different walks of life, classes, religions, ethnic backgrounds, and political views to oppose the plans to demolish this historically significant public space and resulted in a twoweek “occupation” of the park. Feminist and LGBTI activists were among the central actors of this experiment in self-governance and collaborative resistance. As we stand in different parts of Gezi Park with Curious Steps walkers, we invite everyone not only to share their own experiences of participating in (or witnessing through social media) the Gezi Park demonstrations but also to connect this moment with histories of feminist and LGBTI activism in the BeyoОlu neighborhood in general and the park in particular. While most of the walkers are familiar with the mass feminist demonstrations (on March 8 and November 25) and the LGBTI Pride Parades (in June) which have brought an increasing number of activists together on Istiklal Street since the 1990s, they often have little awareness of the longer histories of these movements (e.g., the Ottoman women’s movement or the Campaign Against Battering in 1987, which organized the very first collective march after the 1980 coup and led to the foundation of Mor Çatı, the first women’s shelter) and the significance of Gezi Park in these histories [ 94 ]

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(e.g., the first hunger strike by trans and gay activists that took place on the steps of the park in 1987 or the park having been an important “cruising” site for trans sex workers and gay men since the 1980s).18 Remembering feminist and LGBTI activists’ collective challenges to gendered citizenship, nationalism, and militarism on the site where their tents stood during the Gezi uprising, we then move to the far end of the park to remember one of the most powerful, and most militarized, women figures of republican history, Sabiha Gökçen.19 As we stand across the street from the shuttle bus stop for the Sabiha Gökçen International Airport, we talk about Gökçen, Atatürk’s adopted daughter becoming Turkey’s first military pilot as well as the world’s first woman combat pilot after her active participation in the 1937–1938 bombing of Dersim, a Kurdish-Alevi province in eastern Turkey. Although Gökçen is one of the important “female heroes” of republican Turkey, regularly cited in official historiography and textbooks, a feminist critique of her participation in the militarization of gendered citizenship emerged only in the 2000s.20 Yet this critique missed a layer of militarization by neglecting to address Gökçen’s family of origin. During our retelling of Gökçen’s story, we highlight a controversy that emerged after the publication of a news piece in the Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos in 2004, which argued that Gökçen was Hatun Sebilciyan, an Armenian child who had lost her parents in 1915 and was later adopted by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.21 The publication of this article has been recognized as the beginning of Agos editor Hrant Dink’s tragic end, making him a direct target of nationalist attacks that led to his assassination in January 2007.22 As we peel back the layers of silence that surround the story of Sabiha Gökçen, from the Dersim massacres to the Armenian genocide, we also remind participants that the site of our stop, the northern end of Gezi Park, marks the demolished Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery whose tombstones were used in the building of the park’s steps in the 1930s.23 Like other stops on the Curious Steps route, this one enacts several layers of (co)witnessing: our collective witnessing of the convoluted history of gendered militarization as it reflects in the life story of Sabiha Gökçen as the world’s first woman combat pilot; Hrant Dink’s fatal witnessing of Sabiha Gökçen’s “hidden story” as Hatun Sebilciyan; Armenian activist group Nor Zartonk’s powerful witnessing of the destruction of the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery during the Gezi Uprising; and our co-witnessing of dispossession as a constituent of both official and oppositional narratives of Gezi Park and BeyoОlu, as well as of Istanbul and Turkey at large.24 CURIOUS STEPS

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What possibilities does Curious Steps, as a city walk organized around gender and memory, offer for feminist mobilizations of memory more generally? The rest of the chapter explores our preliminary answers to this question.

Mobilizing Memory Through a Feminist City Walk As BeyoОlu has been the main cultural and political hub of Istanbul for the past thirty years, many of the organizers and participants of Curious Steps frequently walk down Istiklal Street. Yet everyday walks hardly encourage walkers to pay active attention to the deeply layered and gendered histories of creativity, struggle, and dispossession highlighted by Curious Steps.25 Our initial walks made us aware of this disregard, often with surprise and a sense of embarrassment. Even for those who had partial access to the silenced histories and memories retold in our stories, listening to them publicly in the presence of other people was a new experience. In the absence of any public recognition of Armenian history in Istanbul, for instance, the collective act of visiting sites of significance for Armenian and other marginalized communities constitutes a small but meaningful crack in what Talin Suciyan calls the “habitus of denial.”26 Indeed, as we sat down in the summer of 2014 to design what we first called the “BeyoОlu Gender and Memory Tour,” we envisioned ourselves undertaking collective city walks as an effort to mobilize gendered histories and memories. If pedestrians act on the city through their tactics (à la de Certeau), Curious Steps experiments with spatial and temporal practices that invite its participants not only to undo stories of the past but to engage in collective walking as a way of opening ourselves to new ways of becoming.27 In his article, “Brotherhood in Dispossession,” Kabir Tambar speaks of a “negative historicity: negative in the sense of being evacuated from the time and place of historical progression that has characterized the national subject.”28 He argues that Saturday Mothers, by protesting state violence against Kurds, Armenians, and more recently against the Gezi protesters, gesture toward a “brotherhood” of the dispossessed, who meet in the negative historicity of Turkishness. Beyond noting the gendered connotations of this concept, we are also interested in moving beyond kinship as we conceptualize our desire to connect diverse struggles positioned in such negative historicity. Clare Hemmings’s concept of affective solidarity and the concept of co-resistance guide us more effectively through the connections that are [ 96 ]

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established and practiced at Galatasaray Square, as well as our interest in joining them.29 At the intersections of the Armenian genocide and state violence against Kurdish people—with various episodes of violence and displacement of other religious and ethnic minorities in between—Galatasaray Square becomes a space for affective solidarity for those of us who desire to connect with each other, with those who have the same feelings of rage and frustration, and those who are dispossessed of their stories and histories. As Marianne Hirsch argues, “gaps and silences—signifiers of a violent erasure of subjectivity and humanity—can themselves become the connective tissue conjoining diverse memory communities.”30 Curious Steps aims to make visible these gaps and silences, as well as the creative ways in which they are mobilized by diverse memory communities coming together. What keeps us going back to Galatasaray Square on Saturdays is the possibility of co-witnessing connective dispossession and of engaging in co-resistance against it. Following Andreas Huyssen’s invitation to think about different forms of palimpsests not only in literary texts but also in urban spaces and their histories, Curious Steps allows us to look at unsettling and seemingly unimaginable intimacies among diverse histories from different times and places. Unlike the unilinear architecture of Istiklal Street, where all buildings stand side-by-side and across from each other, being in Galatasaray Square looking at the statue that “celebrates” the fiftieth year of the Turkish republic while holding Maryam ߸ahinyan’s photographs, taking part in the Saturday Mothers’ sit-in, and noting the absence of Foto Galatasaray, reminds us that Istiklal is actually haunted by different layers of destruction, erasure, and forgetting. While Curious Steps invites us to think about unsettling forms of being in time and place and of knowing “the past” and “the present,” it also complicates the relationship between materiality and absence. Foto Galatasaray has been demolished and Surp Hagop Cemetery has been confiscated, but the erasure of materiality does not necessarily mean absence. Like on a palimpsest, traces remain and they haunt. As Huyssen notes, “[t]he strong marks of present space merge in the imaginary with traces of the past, erasures, losses and heterotopias.”31 What is no longer there materially or in the archive, finds expression in connective storytelling and re-embodied memory through the walk. It is possible to think of Curious Steps as a performative gesture that weaves together public and intimate archives with repertoire, or embodied memory.32 Curious Steps engages with and enacts embodied memories in at least four ways: First, the stories shared in each stop draw on the embodied CURIOUS STEPS

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memories of survivors of past violence, transmitted through writing, oral testimony, or political action. Second, it allows for participation in the resistance, based on embodied memories, of the families of the disappeared at Galatasaray Square. Third, the walkers share their own memories with the group during the stops or with each other walking in between the stops, interweaving them with the stories that have been offered. And finally, Curious Steps creates a new repertoire for its participants, as an embodied memory of walking through Istiklal Street through connective storytelling. Many participants have later remarked that walking on the street has never been the same after this initial collective walk and that they continue to reflect on this experience in themselves and with others. Ephemeral and unfixed, the walks begin to re-inscribe gender-curious memories into the fabric of the city. Similar to the theater groups in Latin America discussed by Diana Taylor, Curious Steps is also about “creating a community of witnesses by and through performance,” in this case the stage being streets and parks.33 But what kind of witnessing is created here, and what is the process of creating a community of witnesses? The witnessing entailed in these walks has different layers. Drawing on Dori Laub’s discussion of witnessing in Holocaust testimonies, one can argue that Curious Steps consists of at least three levels of witnessing: “the level of being a witness to oneself within the experience; the level of being a witness to the testimonies of others; and the level of being a witness to the process of witnessing itself.”34 The third level of witnessing is invited through constant critical reflection on gaps, voids, and silences in public space and collective memory, as well as on our collective responsibility of witnessing. It is also invited through a recognition of the limited nature of our witnessing and a discussion of ongoing gaps in knowledge production. The first step in the creation of a “community of witnesses” is the process of volunteers, mostly young people, coming together as producers of knowledge and storytellers. Searching for “connections and unexpected openings situated knowledges make possible,”35 the volunteers of Curious Steps engage in a kind of storytelling that presents multiple perspectives and voices, including their own.This is also a kind of storytelling that “serves not to settle questions but to unsettle them, and to inspire spontaneous critical thinking in its audience.”36 Discussing Hannah Arendt’s use of storytelling as an important political tool, especially in totalitarian times, Lisa Disch emphasizes the significance of not correcting “false views with true ones,” but invigorating “the practice of critical skepticism.”37 In Curious Steps, this is done by critically juxtaposing different kinds of knowledge offered in [ 98 ]

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different archives, problematizing silences and gaps (including those in our own narratives), and raising a set of critical questions about what we know and how we know. Bringing together Arendt’s use of storytelling as “situated criticism” and Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledges,” a feminist city walk like Curious Steps offers the possibility of “situated feminist storytelling.”38 Situated simultaneously in gendered bodies and gendered places, Curious Steps counters “the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere” that official histories and public memories often enact, and offers, instead, new meanings, new understandings, and new ways of knowing.39 If witnessing the histories of dispossession and the layers of silencing that shape contemporary urban space has marked one direction of our situated feminist storytelling, the re-telling and enacting of struggles for collective reclamation has simultaneously marked another. Changing our name from “tour” to “walk,” we were not only moving away from connotations of passive consumption and exoticization that the touristic gaze entails but also marking collective walking as a political act that connects with other collective walks and struggles. We have tried to do this by creating connections of various kinds: temporal, spatial, interpersonal, and experiential. The connections are temporal in the sense that we stitch together the present with forgotten pasts of different times; spatial in marking many sites on Istiklal Street as related locations of dispossession and struggle; interpersonal because we create a liminal community of co-witnessing and co-resistance during each walk; and experiential because we aim to shift the participants’ experiences with the spaces they walk through every day. It matters to us that this is a community that stands and walks together in real space (as opposed to the virtual) because we believe that “being there” pushes knowledge to become experience and transforms perceptions of space. In that sense, Curious Steps aims for a “relational aesthetics” that takes as “its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space.”40 Therefore, as much as the walk invites us to see anew real streets, buildings, public squares, and monuments, it allows us to see each other. Curious Steps strives to make a creative intervention into public space. Particularly in the last three decades, political activism has experienced a “creative turn,” blurring the lines between art and activism. These “contemporary activist practices” are “directed toward distributing and reorienting the cultural and political sphere by attacking the narratives of truth in society by way of diverse tactics.”41 While such tactics in cultural activism CURIOUS STEPS

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use mostly ludic forms of intervention “based on humor, playfulness, and confusion” our intervention is not ludic, but it is tactical in another sense.42 Precisely by having no visual signs that differentiate us from the rest of the crowd on Istiklal Street, we are able to look like we are part of the crowd. If tactic “is a maneuver ‘within the enemy’s field of vision,’” our memory walk takes its creativity from its ability to blend in while contesting the truth regimes written into the urban palimpsest of Istanbul.43 Although these kinds of creative tactics and interventions have been taken up by a wide range of activists in the last three decades, their history goes further back in the field of art. Situationist International, for one, an organization made of artists and intellectuals following the orientations of Dada and surrealism, used many tactics for intervening in public spaces. One of these was “dérive,” or drifting, which refers to “a form of playfully constructive behavior in which participants walked parts of the city’s terrain, not as tourists or incidental observers but as active makers of new meanings in their reading of its text, its traces of human occupation and institutional control.”44 Except for the playfulness, this is exactly what we have tried to accomplish in situating our walk in real space, as opposed to virtual space, or say, in a living room or lecture hall. By walking, standing, witnessing, looking, and touching, we make new meanings of the cityscape. The urban palimpsest stops being a text written by history. We actively participate in its writing process, adding a new layer to it, creating counter-publics with each walk.45 Taken with people, our steps connect sites, the texts we read stitch together different times, and our collective experience turns us into a community of co-resisters acting in public space.

Positionality, Privilege, and Access As much as Curious Steps opens new possibilities for mobilizing connective memories, as a particular form of city walk it also has significant limitations. First and foremost, as a walking endeavor, Curious Steps takes for granted the presence of bodies that are able to walk, hear, and see. Second, we have thus far not been able to evoke the experiences of people with different forms of physical ability in the histories that we explore in relation to gender and ethnicity, and to unsilence them. Third, while we endeavor to draw a network of connections among otherwise disconnected histories, we have been limited in our reach to the spatial borders of the neighborhoods in which [ 100 ]

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we take our walks. Fourth, constant surveillance and police presence have restricted our walks, sometimes making us cautious about using the word “genocide” when we have suspected that we were being followed by undercover policemen, at other times preventing us from actualizing the BeyoОlu walk at all due to increased “security” measures. We have also been limited in terms of integrating the daily struggles that mark the spaces of our stroll, such as the increasing number of refugees who find themselves in BeyoОlu and the feminist and LGBTI spaces that remain in solidarity with them. Last, but not least, it remains a challenge for us to figure out how to make it accessible to a more diverse body of participants.While an interactive digital map might help expand our reach, we are also aware that moving Curious Steps into virtual space would remove the elements of presence, standing, and walking together in the city, therefore restricting the participants’ active participation in the writing process of the urban palimpsest. Hosted by SU Gender, a gender studies center of a prestigious private university, Curious Steps also enjoys a host of material and political privileges. As the only university in Turkey that continues to hold (and practice) an Academic Freedom Policy, Sabancı University offers the space for faculty and students to engage in critical research and public outreach that has become an even greater privilege since 2014, when we first began these walks.While we, too, face the risk of legal prosecution by the state and interference in our activities by local authorities, we are privileged to have institutional support to continue exploring and sharing Curious Steps. Beyond the institutional privileges, the participants and storytellers often share their own stories of privilege and access during the walks or the discussions that often follow them. One of the potentially transformative characteristics of Curious Steps is its invitation to all walkers to reflect on their own “situatedness” and privileges. It is precisely through such reflections that we are able to find new ways to connect with each other, as well as new possibilities to mobilize memories for a different future.

Notes 1. Zabel Yesayan, “Yeter!” in Bir Adalet Feryadı: Osmanlı’dan Türkiye’ye Beߞ Ermeni Feminist Yazar [A Cry for Justice: Five Armenian Writers from the Ottoman Times to Turkey], ed. Lerna EkmekçioОlu and Melissa Bilal (Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2006), 228. CURIOUS STEPS

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2. The name in Turkish is Cins Adımlar. The multiple meanings of the word “cins” include kind and species; as well as peculiar, curious and queer. Cins is also the root of the terms cinsiyet (sex) and toplumsal cinsiyet (gender). 3. We borrow the term “co-resistance” from Nancy Kricorian, “Choosing ‘CoResistance’ Rather than ‘Turkish-Armenian Dialogue,’” The Armenian Weekly, May 22, 2015, https://armenianweekly.com/2015/05/22/co-resistance/. 4. Marianne Hirsch. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 247. 5. The term “connective histories” taken from Hirsch, Generation of Postmemory. 6. Attila Durak, Ebru: Reflections of Cultural Diversity in Turkey, ed. Ayߞe Gül Altınay (Istanbul: Metis Yayınları, 2007). 7. “Zabel Yesayan,” Istanbul Kadın Müzesi (Women’s Museum Istanbul), http:// www.istanbulkadinmuzesi.org/en/zabel-yesayan#. 8. Lerna EkmekçioОlu and Melissa Bilal, Bir Adalet Feryadı: Osmanlı’dan Türkiye’ye Beߞ Ermeni Feminist Yazar (A Cry for Justice: Five Armenian Writers from the Ottoman Times to Turkey) (Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2006); also see the documentary Finding Zabel Yesayan, dir. Lara Aharonian and Talin Suciyan (2008), and Melissa Bilal, “Pavagan E (Yeter!): Zabel Yesayan’ın Barıߞ ÇaОrısını Duyabilmek” (“Enough! Being Able to Hear Zabel Yesayan’s Call to Peace”), Kültür ve Siyasette Feminist Yaklaߞımlar 7 (2009). 9. Ayߞe Gül Altınay,“Centennial Challenges: Denationalizing and Gendering Histories of War and Genocide,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 25, no. 2 (2014): 307–12. 10. Saturday People are also known as Saturday Mothers (see Ahıska, this volume). 11. “Maryam ߸ahinyan,” Istanbul Kadın Müzesi (Women’s Museum Istanbul), http://www.istanbulkadinmuzesi.org/en/Maryam-sahinyan#. 12. Tayfun Serttaߞ, Foto Galatasaray: Studio Practice by Maryam ߸ahinyan, (Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2016). 13. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 101. 14. Huyssen, Present Pasts, 83–84. 15. See Bürge Abiral, “Silencing Sexual Violence and Vulnerability: Women’s Narratives of Incarceration during the 1980–1983 Military Junta in Turkey” in Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories: Feminist Conversations on War, Genocide and Political Violence, ed. Ayߞe Gül Altınay and Andrea Petö (Routledge, 2016). 16. See “The 2017 International Hrant Dink Award goes to Eren Keskin from Turkey and Ai Weiwei from China,” Hrant Dink Vakfı (Hrant Dink Foundation), accessed November 15, 2017, https://hrantdink.org/en/announcements/1014 -the-2017-international-hrant-dink-award-goes-to-eren-keskin-from-turkey -and-ai-weiwei-from-china. 17. Eren Keskin and Leman Yurtsever, Hepsi Gerçek: Devlet Kaynaklı ߸iddet (Istanbul: Punto, 2006). [ 102 ]

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18. Participation in the LGBTI Pride Parade reached a record number of approximately 100,000 in June 2013, doubling in size from the previous year, which has been attributed to the centrality of the LGBTI activists during the Gezi resistance and the increased interaction with other groups. 19. Salih Can Açıksöz and Zeynep Korkman, “Masculinized Power, Queered Resistance,” Cultural Anthropology, October 31, 2013, https://culanth.org/fieldsights /395-masculinized-power-queered-resistance; Aslı Zengin, “What is Queer about Gezi?,” Cultural Anthropology, October 31, 2013, https://culanth.org /fieldsights/407-what-is-queer-about-gezi. 20. See Ayߞe Gül Altınay, The Myth of the Military Nation: Militarism, Gender and Education in Turkey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 21. Hrant Dink, “Sabiha-Hatun’un sırrı,” Agos, February 6, 2004, http://www.agos .com.tr/tr/yazi/17528/sabiha-hatunun-sirri. 22. Fethiye Çetin, Utanç Duyuyorum! Hrant Dink Cinayetinin Yargısı, (Istanbul: Metis Yayınları, 2013); Alev Er, “Hrant’ın, Kayıp Ermeni Yetimin Peߞinde,” Agos, July 24, 2015, http://www.agos.com.tr/tr/yazi/12263/hrantin-kayip-ermeni-yetimin -pesinde. 23. Alice von Bieberstein and Nora Tataryan, “The What of Occupation: ‘You Took Our Cemetery, You Won’t Have Our Park!’” Cultural Anthropology, October 31, 2013, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/394-the-what-of-occupation-you-took -our-cemetery-you-won-t-have-our-park. 24. For powerful critiques of these narratives, see Karaca this volume, and Ayߞe Parla and Ceren Özgül, “Property, Dispossession, and Citizenship in Turkey; or, the History of the Gezi Uprising Starts in the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery,” Public Culture 28, no. 3 (2016): 617–53. 25. See Alp Biricik, A Walk on Istiklal Street: Dissident Sexual Geographies, Politics and Citizenship in Istanbul, (PhD diss., Linköping University, 2014) as an innovative theorizing of the gendered and sexualized practice of walking on Istiklal Street. 26. Talin Suciyan, The Armenians in Modern Turkey: Post-Genocide Society, Politics and History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015). 27. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 28. Kabir Tambar, “Brotherhood in Dispossession: State Violence and the Ethics of Expectation in Turkey,” Cultural Anthropology 31, no. 1 (2016): 34. 29. Clare Hemmings, “Affective Solidarity: Feminist Reflexivity and Political Transformation,” Feminist Theory 3, no. 2 (2012): 148. 30. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 248. 31. Huyssen, Present Pasts, 7. 32. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 20. 33. Taylor, The Archive, 211. CURIOUS STEPS

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34. Dori Laub, “An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (Routledge 1992), 75. 35. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 196. 36. Lisa Jane Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 112. 37. Disch, Hannah Arendt, 114. 38. Disch, Hannah Arendt, 112. 39. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 189. 40. Nicolas Bourriaud, Simon Pleasance, Fronza Woods, and Mathieu Copeland, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002), 14. 41. Begüm Özden Fırat and Aylin Kuryel, “Introduction,” in Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas, and Possibilities, ed. Begüm Özden Fırat and Aylin Kuryel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 10. 42. Fırat and Kuryel, “Introduction,” 10. 43. Eduard von Bülow, qtd. in Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 37. 44. Malcolm Miles, Tim Hall, and Iain Borden, “Separation Perfected: Editor’s Introduction,” in The City Cultures Reader, ed. Malcolm Miles, Tim Hall, and Iain Borden (London and New York: Routledge), 88. 45. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2014).

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CHA P T E R V

Pilgrimage As/Or Resistance NANCY KRICORIAN

B

efore I leave home, I come up with a title for the Armenian Heritage Trip to Turkey: Twenty Armenians on a Bus, or The Thirty Handkerchief Tour. Our guide calls it a pilgrimage, and refers to us as pilgrims, as though we are on a religious or spiritual quest. What do I hope to find? Almost one hundred years have passed since my paternal grandmother and her family were driven from their home in Mersin in 1915, just a few months into the Ottoman government’s genocidal campaign that resulted in the deaths and exile of the vast majority of its Armenian citizens. Of her immediate family, only my grandmother and her brother survived the death march. They were among eight thousand Armenian orphans in a camp in the Syrian desert at Ras al-Ain.

Everek/Develi The Saint Toros Church in Everek is now a mosque. There is a fresco of the Virgin Mary on the wall between the left and central apses near the altar. When our guide had last visited, there was a moveable plywood board over the fresco. The painting had been whitewashed many times, but the portrait of the virgin bled through again and again. Now the plywood panel is screwed into place so it cannot be moved. The mayor of the town arrives at the mosque while we are there. He asks if we [ 105 ]

have any information about the church because he knows nothing of its history. Remnants—that word floats up in my mind as we leave the mosque and walk towards the home of the last Armenian in Everek, the old Armenian Quarter of the town of Develi. He died in 2000 and left the property to his nephew in Istanbul. We peer in the windows at the dusty rooms of a oncegrand house. These buildings are remnants, and we are remnants, like scraps of fabric from a torn curtain. We are searching for ghosts, and we ourselves are ghosts come to haunt this land.

Gümüߞhacıköy The last Armenians in this town are an elderly sister and brother named Hayganoush and Kegham. Their ramshackle wood frame and plaster house features an inner courtyard that is jammed with logs, pots, broken furniture, cats, stacks of newspaper, fragments of stone with Armenian inscriptions, and balled-up plastic bags. Hayganoush says, “My house is a mess, but my soul is orderly.” The rest of their family lives in Istanbul and Germany, but they stay here as guardians of this property: a crumbling house, a jumbled courtyard, a large walled garden next door with fruit trees, vegetable beds, chickens, more cats, and piles of matted wool. Hayganoush and Kegham lead us to the local grade school. Kegham says it had originally been an Armenian school, and the parking lot next to it is where the Armenian church once stood. A local official who disliked Armenians had ordered the demolition of the church. When the town held the groundbreaking for a mosque to be erected on the same spot, an earthquake hit and a stone fell on the official and he died. Or maybe, says Kegham, a lightning bolt hit him; he can’t remember which. In any event the man was killed, and the mosque was never built.

Mersin My grandmother always said, “We came from near Tarsus. You know Saint Paul of Tarsus? I was born in Mersin, and your grandfather in Adana.” She was a devout Armenian Evangelical and this proximity to the birthplace of [ 106 ]

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Paul the Apostle was a source of pride. It wasn’t until after my grandmother died, however, that I even bothered to look for these towns on a map. As we drive south through the Toros Mountains, we start seeing signs for Mersin, Tarsus, and Adana. The landscape changes dramatically. There are pine trees along the roads, which give way to orchards, and then we begin to see pink oleander and tall thistles. Our guide has warned me that there are no traces at all in Mersin of the Armenians who once lived there—everything is gone. When we arrive in Mersin, we drive to the marina where there are boats docked and beyond them, the Mediterranean Sea. My grandmother saw these skies, and walked along this very shore. She loved the flowers in her New England garden, and how much she must have loved the ones here: pink and white oleander, lantana, bougainvillea, and red hibiscus.

Adana We go to the old Armenian Quarter, where the main market street has recently undergone a renovation, replacing its rundown charm, still evident in the side streets, with a gentrified sameness. We walk to the Great Clock Tower, which was designed in the late nineteenth century by two Armenian architects, but is now shrouded for renovation. Our guide tells us that it was at this tower that Turkish crowds were incited to murder Armenians during the Adana Massacres of 1909, during which over 2,000 Armenians were killed. My grandfather left for America in 1911. None of the Armenian churches and schools of Adana are still standing. This is another place where we have been erased, a word that one of the women on the bus keeps using. Erased. Effaced. Rubbed out. We go to the Stone Bridge, which dates to Roman times, over the Seyhan River. My grandfather died when I was three, so I have few memories of him, but I imagine the young man from a faded photo. He is wearing a charcoal gray suit, and his moustache has just been trimmed. He strides across the bridge, a folded newspaper under his arm.

Mezireh/ElâzıО One of the men on the bus, Dikran Fabricatorian, tells us his family story as we drive towards Mezireh, now known by its Turkish name of ElâzıО. P I L G R I M A G E A S / O R R E S I S TA N C E

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Dikran’s great grandfather, Krikor Ipekjian—ipek means silk in Turkish— founded a textile factory in Mezireh in the nineteenth century. The silk produced by Ipekjian was so fine that it attracted international acclaim, and in recognition of this renown, the Sultan changed the family name to Fabricatorian. Krikor Fabricatorian had five sons who took over the company after his death in 1902, and they expanded its operations to two large factories. The five brothers built five townhouses side by side. In 1915, the five brothers were shot on the outskirts of town. Their wives and children were deported. One of the children was Dikran Fabricatorian’s father. The townhouses were pulled down and replaced by apartment buildings in the fifties, but the name “The Five Brothers” survived. We walk down the hot, crowded street, all twenty of us following Dikran and our guide, until we find the signs: the Five Brothers Apartments and the Five Brothers Passageway. On the ground floor of one of the buildings, we enter an internet café, whose owner tells us he was born in one of the houses. He shows us an old photo of the houses hanging on the wall. He tells us to go next door to his brother’s pharmacy to see more pictures. We find there also, hung somewhat incongruously and off center, a brass chandelier, salvaged from one of the townhouses. Dikran’s son asks the pharmacist if they might purchase the chandelier. He replies, “I wouldn’t sell it to you even if you offered me a million dollars.”

Aghtamar/Akdamar We begin the morning, which happens to be the first day of Ramadan, with a ferry ride to Aghtamar Island on Lake Van. It is breezy on the blue lake, and not too hot on the island. The tenth-century Armenian Cathedral of the Holy Cross is beautifully preserved, as are the bas-reliefs on its exterior. Inside the church there are frescoes depicting the life of Christ, sections of them still in good condition. The church is now a state museum, and when people in our group start singing the Hayr Mer prayer, a Turkish guard approaches, saying that singing is forbidden. We are the sole visitors in the museum, a museum that has a cross on its roof and an ornate altar. Adi explains that we are singing a universal song for peace. Then someone starts the Der Voghormia prayer while the guard motions with his hand to keep the volume down. The voices rise, [ 108 ]

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and he rakes his thumb across his throat, telling us to kill the music. The Armenians keep singing. Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, All Holy Trinity, give peace to the world, and healing to the sick and Heaven to those who are asleep. With the music echoing after me, I leave the church to sit outside behind a tall metal candle stand, weeping. As a very-much lapsed Armenian Evangelical, I think of religion as a tool of oppression. But here a prayer has, for a moment, transformed this so-called museum—a state-controlled space concerned as much with forgetting as remembering—into the host of something radically incarnate. Here, where Armenian churches have been razed, ruined, turned into barns, made into prisons, wedding halls, cultural centers, mosques, and museums, we sing this prayer as an act of pure resistance: Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, All Holy Trinity, give peace to the world, and healing to the sick and Heaven to those who are asleep.

Notes Originally published in Guernica: A Magazine of Global Art & Politics on November 14, 2014. A previous version of this piece was presented at the Women Mobilizing Memory Public Roundtable at DEPO in Istanbul on September 17, 2014.

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CHA P T E R V I

Traumatic Memes D I A N A TAY L O R

Con los padres de las víctimas, sostengo: no hay nada peor que estar enfermo de incertidumbre.Y vivos los queremos. (With the families of the victims, I affirm that nothing’s worse than to be sick with uncertainty. Back alive.) E NRI QUE GO NZÁLE Z RO JO A RT HU R

1

W

hen I first met the family members and classmates of the 43 disappeared students of Ayotzinapa, I almost felt I knew them. The enlarged photographs of the missing young men crowded the room. I recognized the photographs but also the strategy of using the oversize images to claim justice for the disappeared. In April 2015, the families and advocates of the students arrived in New York as part of their caravan throughout the United States seeking international support for human rights. A brutal state attack on September 26, 2014 left three students dead, 43 disappeared,1 and about fifty who survived by hiding and running for their lives. As a member of an International Jury for the People’s Permanent Tribunal (PPT), I heard them tell of the anguish of disappearance and blame the Mexican government for obstructing justice.2 The testimonies resounded amid the photographs of serious faces. At the end of the session, everyone shouted in unison: “vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos” (they took them alive, we want them back alive) and “¡Presente! ” The photos, the grieving mothers, the chants making political claims were very familiar to someone who has followed mother’s movements since the Madres of Plaza de Mayo started protesting in the late 1970s in Argentina. They replicated [ 113 ]

and circulated as traumatic memes. At the end of the event, I asked one of the mothers of a disappeared student if she knew of the Madres from Argentina. She had never heard of them. This essay explores some of the factors that made the 43 a cause célèbre nationally and internationally and proposes an additional explanation that has not been advanced in the media or in academic studies: the family, fellow students, and human rights advocates who demanded an account from the government did so by animating powerful, traumatic memes to further their cause. The grieving mothers, the chants (or consignas) demanding justice, and the use of photo IDs are the recognizable traumatic memes that made the tragedy immediately register with a public now only too familiar with disappearance. Traumatic memes capturing the affective and political dimension of disappearance circulate throughout the world to make violence and loss visible. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined “meme” in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, to rhyme (imperfectly) with “genes,” accentuating what he saw as the biological mechanism vital in the reproduction of cultural codes, and with the Greek mimeme, which he says “comes from a suitable Greek root.”3 As mimeme does not exist as a Greek root, I assume that he is referring to mimesis, from the root mimeomai, “I imitate” (infinitive mimeisthai).4 Memes, which he calls cultural “replicators,” are behaviors, gestures, ideas, tunes, practices, and so on that catch on and spread from person to person in a version of the survival of the (cultural) fittest.5 “Just as genes propagate themselves in a gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”6 Good ideas, the belief in God, and the notion that the world is flat are cultural units that catch on and then seemingly replicate themselves. “Happy birthday,” for example is sung throughout the world, including in the many places where people do not speak English. Nonetheless, everyone immediately knows what it signals. Memes are cultural items of social thought or practice (ideas, jokes, styles, and other forms) transmitted through repetition. Like viruses, like social practices, they are successful only if they catch on, if people continuously transmit them. “For a meme to survive and spread in a competitive environment it must have attributes which give it advantages over other memes.”7 Gradually, the notion and use of memes themselves became rampant, memetic. But instead of the version of virus-like genetic “mutation” [ 114 ]

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Dawkins had identified in cultural memes, he noted that memes were now “altered deliberately by human creativity” through digital transmission. Whether they start as a mutation (as in the replication of genetic code) or as a deliberate alteration (say of a photograph), memes are never for first time.8 They become themselves through the force of repetition, by catching on.9 The fact that they have been creatively altered matters less, to my mind, than the force of the uptake. It makes no difference whether or not the cultural unit was designed to spread—it becomes “memetic” at the moment of propagation. Memes repeat through a mechanism of sameness and change. The structure remains, immediately recognizable, while inviting others to adapt it for their needs. While memes have links to mimesis, the nature of the repetition differs. In very broad strokes we could differentiate between memetic repetition-as-replication and mimetic repetition as “imitation.” Singers of “Happy Birthday,” for example, are not imitating others. On key or off, they’re engaging with a cultural form they have incorporated from who knows where. While mimesis is an extremely complex philosophic and aesthetic term that ranges from “representation” to “imitation” to “a family of concepts,” for the moment we can limit ourselves to the oversimplified meaning of the classical Greek mimeisthai as “to imitate.”10 For Aristotle, a dramatic work imitates action. In this sense, mimesis often involves corporeal repetition of actions. We learn to walk and talk by following others.You sing, I will try to sing as you do. Learning, for Aristotle, becomes pleasurable through mimetic repetition. Memes, unlike mimesis, emphasize replication and copying often lacking corporeality—as in ideas jumping from brain to brain or proliferating digitally. They have multiple and different ways of entering our system. People commonly use words such as “contagion” and “virus” to describe mimetic and memetic transmission. The viral component, after all, was central to Dawkins’s theory. Does that mean that people have no choice but to transmit materials from their memespheres?11 It depends. Jingles may enter our heads and be difficult to shake, however hard we try.We tend to be hosts, not agents, in Dawkins’s paradigm.12 But singing Happy Birthday or using a political meme entails choice. Nonetheless, it is hard to assess where ideas and cultural forms originate. Mimetic and memetic repetition serve different though at times related and overlapping functions. The political force of memes lies in their ability to catch on, circulate, interrupt a governmental discourse (for example), and reproduce uncontrollably. T R AU M AT I C M E M E S

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The traumatic meme, like all memes, depends on the simplicity of structure for its power and efficacy. The Woman + Photo + Chant/Demand is actually a cluster of memes, a “memeplex,” a term developed by Dawkins to describe “mutually supportive [elements that] . . . clearly help to secure the longevity of the memes of which they are composed.”13 The memeplex I study here—the grieving mother, the photo, and the chant—includes memes recognizable in their own right. The Virgin Mary or Pietà is only the best-known example of the grieving mother, for example. The centrality of mothers, as opposed to fathers or other family members, in these movements varies from place to place. Because this particular memeplex becomes recognizable after the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires developed it, three central reasons account for the predominance of “mothers.” First, the Argentinean mothers had to leave their husbands at home in order to go to the plaza—the military would have killed them otherwise, staging the protest as an act of armed resistance by subversives. Secondly, in many of the countries where we first see this memeplex, such as Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, mothers enjoyed a privileged symbolic status denied other women. The military did not want to be seen gunning down unarmed mothers. Third, once the memeplex was circulating globally, transmitting a recognizable story of disappearance and criminality, others protesting the disappearance of their kin could use it to telegraph their loss and their demands for justice. The use of “mothers” is often a strategic choice and does not entirely reflect the gender composition of the group. In 1977 the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo started moved around the square, holding and wearing the photo IDs of their disappeared children and demanding that their children be returned alive. Other women, such as the Saturday Mothers in Turkey sit surrounded by the photographs of their men disappeared by the Turkish military in the 1980s and 1990s, as Meltem Ahıska writes in this volume. Photographs in the exhibit Yuyanapac (I remember) that document the violence of Peru’s internal conflict (1980–2000) show women holding a small photo ID of their missing in their hands.14 Each variation contributes something of its local context while remaining immediately identifiable. Always, however, traumatic memes speak to the specific violence of forced disappearance. In the case of Ayotzinapa, the fathers joined the mothers, and the classmates were necessarily male, given the gendered separation in the escuelas normales. Those using traumatic memes in Ayotzinapa had no idea where they came from. Memes circulate freely, [ 116 ]

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available for use. No one owns them. Memes cite and build on previous practices without acknowledging where they started or who performed them. Only the most transmitted ones “succeed.” The cluster or memeplex of traumatic memes—the grieving mothers, photos, and the demands—accumulates affective and symbolic power in each new iteration. Memes, clearly, are not in themselves traumatic. They are agnostic—as capable of transmitting images and slogans linked to racist and misogynist violence as they are in making claims for human rights. Nonetheless, given their reiterative nature, they serve as a potent mechanism of reproduction of the affective traumatic charge. Trauma too, I have argued, is never for the first time. It is also known by the nature of its repeats.15 If, as Cathy Caruth argues, traumatic “repetitions are particularly striking because they seem not to be initiated by the individual’s own acts but rather appear as the possession of some people by a sort of fate,” then the contagious meme seems the perfect form of transmission.16 This is not to say that the meme is or repeats the trauma. Rather, it is a form of transmission that conveys the grief, identifies the loss, and makes the claim, all without providing the viewer with specific details of the disappearances. That is its power. Encountering the grieving women, the photo, the demand for justice, moves me in profound and deeply contradictory ways. I feel pity, outrage, tenderness, frustration, a sense of impotence coupled with a sense of responsibility and political urgency. I struggle to imagine the protesters’ loss yet resist the pain of engaging too deeply. The traumatic memes “carry an impossible history within them.”17 The more we engage, the more some of us try to understand the particular context. Traumatic memes, thus, are doubly charged, repetition as form and repetition as content, accentuating the again-ness of the loss, pain, and impunity of the perpetrators. Disappearance, these memes communicate, exceeds violence against individuals; it is ongoing state practice that also undermines entire families and communities left in permanent states of uncertainty. Are these people living or dead? What happened to them? These traumatic memes underline the durational and globalized nature of protest as a response to continuous and globalized criminal practices. Here, then, I look for the signs of the loss, criminality, and resistance by tracing the traumatic meme back from Ayotzinapa to their first known appearance. Traumatic memes put images and memories of disappeared people back into the public sphere. T R AU M AT I C M E M E S

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2 In Mexico, between 2007 and 2014 some 140,000 people have been murdered and 22,322 to 120,000 or so disappeared.18 The wild disparities in the number of disappearances depend on whether authorities include the migrants from Central America who disappear in Mexico. Those are the official figures. Actual figures are believed to be much higher. The victims, if noted at all, become nameless ciphers in the official rosters. Most of the bodies lie in mass graves or have been dissolved in acid by pozoleros (a macabre play on pozole, the pre-Columbian stew popular in Mexico). Very few of these crimes have been investigated, and fewer than 1 percent of the perpetrators have been charged and brought to trial. Many of the criminals, human rights groups surmise, belong to the government, the military, the paramilitary, the police forces, and drug cartels.19 International corporations, supported by the Mexican government, contribute to the violence by hiring paramilitary security forces to target those who oppose their land grabs and extraction of natural resources. Thus, it is impossible at times to tell who is responsible for the violence—the state, the corporations, or the narcos. Often the three work in tandem, creating a narco corporate state. Impunity reigns on all levels. Investigations, if attempted at all, inevitably get bogged down, evidence goes missing, and documents lost. Fighting crime in Mexico belongs to the realm of lost causes. The deaths and disappearances seem to have been accepted as the new reality since President Felipe Calderón had taken office in 2006 and declared his U.S.-backed war on drugs. Yet in the midst of this new macabre norm, the 43 prompted a national and international outcry that almost toppled the Mexican government: “Fue el Estado!” Why this outrage over 43 disappeared students when more than a hundred thousand others have been killed and/or disappeared without repercussion? Journalists and scholars have offered a number of important reasons. The victims were students, which certainly contributes to the outpouring of repudiation. The Mexican government has long targeted students and teachers, regarding them as unruly and critical. The massacre of some three hundred or so students in Tlatelolco Square, a working-class neighborhood of Mexico City, at the height of the student movement in 1968, was only the most egregious example and it has carried symbolic weight ever since. Every October 2, people throughout Mexico honor the students [ 118 ]

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who died in Tlatelolco. El 2 de octubre no se olvida (The 2 of October is not forgotten). The September 2014 attack on students shocked Mexico and the world. The victims were all male, poor, and indigenous or mestizo students at La Escuela Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos, commonly known as Ayotzinapa, in the state of Guerrero; they were on their way to the annual commemoration of the 1968 massacre. The students commandeered five buses from the nearby town Iguala to take them to Mexico City. They did that every year, and always brought the buses back. This time, military and security forces were alerted. On that night in 2014, a mix of military, police, and federal forces joined with drug cartels to attack the buses. No one understood why at the time— even in Mexico, the brutality seemed completely out of proportion. More than a year later, it was discovered that the students had inadvertently taken two buses loaded with $2 million-worth of heroin about to make their weekly journey to Chicago. The drug route needed to be protected.20 The collusion of government and extrajudicial forces was clearly on display. “43”—the number of disappeared—became a rallying call for millions of people throughout the country. People took to the streets demanding a governmental investigation, and proclaiming “Fue el Estado” (It was the State). Another feature that provoked widespread shock was the viciousness of the assault. Julio Cesar Mondragón, one of the three students killed outright, had his face skinned alive by soldiers who had taken photographs, which they posted to Twitter hours before the body was “found.”21 The photographs, meant to terrorize the population, went viral on social media and sparked unbridled outrage. In the years following the tragedy, the enigmas and the public furor have only increased. After flows of misinformation, the government decided to declare the students dead in November 2014 and have done with it. The students had been killed and burned in a garbage dump in Cocula (thirteen miles from Iguala) by a few no-gooders, said Jesús Murillo Karam, Mexico’s attorney general. The murderers had confessed, he added. Period. When the press pushed him to explain incongruities—the evidence that the so-called culprits had confessed under torture and that it was physically impossible to burn 43 bodies in a dumpster overnight—he walked away saying, “Ya me cansé” (I’ve had enough).22 Memetically, “Ya Me Cansé ” became a rallying cry. Mexicans, too, had had enough, enough of the violence, the corruption, the impunity, the arrogance, and the incompetence. The Argentine Forensic T R AU M AT I C M E M E S

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Anthropologists, who started their work in 1986 analyzing the DNA of the disappeared in Argentina were brought in by the Mexican authorities in a show of good faith. However, relations strained when the team found that, with one exception, the remains in the dump did not match the DNA of the missing students. The matching DNA from the one student, Alexander Mora, bore no links to the putative scene of the crime. The evidence had clearly been tampered with, increasing the families’ suffering and the national ire. Seeking international support, the families and advocates of the 43 began their caravan throughout the United States in 2015 to let people know about the cover-up in Mexico. These van or bus trips by family members and advocates have become a crucial part of the rights strategy for migrants in Central America and Mexico to bring international attention to their struggles for justice. As families of the 43 prepared for the caravan, former president Vicente Fox publically told them to “get over it”: “It is good that they love their sons so much. It’s good that they miss them, and cry so much for them, but now they need to accept reality.”23 But what reality? The false one that the government kept force-feeding the population with doctored proof? In 2015, the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (CIDH) appointed an interdisciplinary group of independent experts (Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes, or GIEI) to examine the situation.24 GIEI arrived and worked closely with the families, government officials, bureaucrats, and all involved with the 43. Their resulting report pointed to the multi-faceted deception promulgated by the government.25 The 43, the GIEI suspected, had been taken to a military base where all or some were incinerated. They requested to search the nearby military base of the 27th Infantry Battalion without success. Their request to continue investigating was officially denied by Mexico and the group was informed it needed to leave the country. Peña Nieto’s government no doubt hesitated to blame itself and its own military forces for its systematic use of extrajuridical violence. Anabel Hernández, a respected journalist for the weekly news magazine Proceso, asserted that the army “ordered, orchestrated, and organized” events related to the disappearance of the 43.26 Murder might be a straightforward act of brutality, but disappearance is a political project. It entails the purposeful mangling of bodies and evidence beyond recognition. As Mexican theorist Roberto González Villarreal makes clear, “disappearance is not an excess, not an error; it is a specific [ 120 ]

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repressive technology.”27 Disappearance, he continues, “is not an event but a process, an assemblage of actions, omissions, confusions, in which many agents participate.”28 So those shouting “Fue el Estado” were right even if the president did not order the killings, tortures, and disappearances. It was the state, from the president on down, that created the “disappeared” by allowing all evidence to go missing and by threatening those who searched for facts. Those involved in the functioning of disappearance include social actors from the military and security forces, the executive branch, the judiciary, the technicians who handle evidence, the bureaucrats responsible for filing documents, the compliant members of the media, and on and on. The politics of death—what Achilles Mbembe has termed “necropolitics”—and permanent states of exception during which people can be tortured, assassinated, and disappeared, dominate contemporary Latin American “democracies” just as they did during the U.S.-backed military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s.29 And just as in that period, the Madres of Plaza de Mayo cried, “¡Vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos! ” today the mothers, fathers, and family members of the 43 give voice to their protests in the same way.

Figure 6.1 “Photos of the 43 in Washington Square Park,” New York City. April 2015. Source: Courtesy of Diana Taylor. T R AU M AT I C M E M E S

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When the caravan came to New York in that April of 2015, the group held a rally in Washington Square Park. They strung hundreds of enlarged photographs of the 43 from the trees, filling the park with the presence of those absent. The space was alive with photographs, cries of “back alive,” and calls for justice, producing an affective density and intensity—a memesphere. The parents animated the photos of their missing sons with stories about their dreams and accomplishments, thereby rendering the disappeared present, resisting even from the space of death. The hundreds of people who attended the rally repeated the 43 names, one after another, punctuated by the shout, “¡presente! ” Those who happened to be walking through the park and joined us shared the palpable sense of sadness and indignation as we followed the families from the park, up the avenues, to the Mexican Consulate to demand answers. Bystanders and even police officers asked what we were protesting. When we told them about the 43, they looked shocked and saddened. Others joined us. The meme was contagious.

3 How did that meme make its way to New York in 2015? Where did it start and how did it travel around the world? Given the unrestrained ways memes circulate, tracing them does not always prove a productive endeavor. Nonetheless, memes can make visible the continuity and circulation of practices that other forms of print and embodied transmission leave out. The political practice of disappearance, predicated on the notion of cover-up, makes it difficult to identify the crime. Are the people really gone? When can we authoritatively classify them as “missing” and, beyond that, as “disappeared,” victims of an intentional political act? The traumatic meme, circulating since the late 1970s, demands an answer—and provides one: returning contestation to the public sphere, it displays evidence of governments’ criminal attacks on their people, their youth most particularly. While the memes may not carry much specific information, they provide hints that can point to the relationship between the memesphere and historical and political reality. Following this trace, in fact, reveals an enormous amount about political practices. The memes alert us to disappearances that otherwise go unnoticed by all but the loved ones of the disappeared. Registering the appearance of the meme is like catching [ 122 ]

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sight of a large shadow. Is there an airplane overhead? What, we wonder as we look up, disturbs the light? To the best of my knowledge, the first grieving mothers to carry photos and demanding “back alive” started in Argentina in 1977 with the Madres, a group of unarmed, middle-aged women wearing white scarves, and holding or wearing photographs of their disappeared children; they walked counterclockwise around the Plaza de Mayo demanding information about their whereabouts. These women, nonpolitical actors, came upon the cluster of memes by trial and error. They needed to be noticed as mothers insisting that the government recognize the missing as citizens, thus the photo IDs. The claim, “back alive,” reflected their early hope of getting their loved ones out of jail. However, we cannot call this apparently initial instantiation of a traumatic cluster memetic, as memes are, as I said, “never for the first time,” always a repetition. From the Southern Cone, the traumatic cluster became memetic and “jumped” to many parts of the world: the Saturday Mothers in Turkey in 1995, the Mourning Mothers and Mothers of Khavaran in Iran that started in 1981, the Committee of Relatives of Disappeared Migrants in Honduras (1999), the Comadres in El Salvador in the late 1970s, and the Tiananmen Mothers in 1989 China among many more.30 Not all enactments are identical—some mothers dress in black, for example, or remain stationary and silent. Each uptake reflects contextual particularities even as it gains in affective impact by virtue of previous iterations. Each, in isolation and in tandem, points to the proliferation of disappearance as explicit state strategy. Clearly, there are many possible routes through various parts of the world that one could take to explore the replication of the traumatic memes and the specific historical conditions that made them useful, even necessary. My route tracks the meme through Central America during the 1970s and 1980s, when associations of mothers’ movements demanded information about their disappeared in situations that shared many historical similarities.30 One less-known group, the Comadres, for example, came into existence informally in El Salvador after the 1975 military massacre of students from the National University who, like the students in Tlateloco, were protesting for better conditions.31 Women began looking for their missing children, much as the Madres did, and started wearing black initially to identify themselves to each other and the world. Their movement predates the Madres by two years, but they formalized their mothers’ organization towards the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, the period when the traumatic meme jumped T R AU M AT I C M E M E S

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Figure 6.2 Marcha de madres de presos politicos y desaparecidos. San Salvador. Courtesy, Colección Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Source: Unknown.

from the Southern Cone to Central America and Mexico. Mothers who had lost children during the U.S.-backed wars in Central America32 donned white headscarves, waved the photographs of their disappeared, and shouted their demands. Who carried the memes? Did they know of the Argentinean Madres? One older Madre in El Salvador told me that the Argentinean Madres visited the country in the 1990s at the invitation of Catholic Priest Jon de Cortina, who founded Pro-búsqueda (Pro-Search) in 1994 to find the children disappeared during their civil war, many of them given up in illegal adoption. But the photographs of the El Salvadorian women with the white scarves told of earlier transmissions. How had that happened? A search through archives in El Salvador did not turn up any local press photographs of the Argentine Madres. Had descriptions circulated word of mouth or by radio? For there they were with the photos, the women in white scarves, shouting for the return of their disappeared. In the late 1970s the traumatic memes leapt to Mexico. This was important because it showed that disappearances cannot be limited to the U.S.backed dictatorships and wars that have tormented Latin America. These practices persist under so-called democratic governments such as Mexico’s. One of the most important social movements that made evident the routine practice of torture, disappearance, and extrajudicial killings in Mexico during the late 1970s—and who took up the traumatic meme—were the Doñas of Comité ¡Eureka! The Doñas lost their children to state terrorism in Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. They, too, hold photographs of their missing children while calling for their safe return. Comité ¡Eureka! was started by Rosario Ibarra de Piedra in 1977 after years of looking for her son Jesús, a student who was disappeared in 1974 for his activity in the Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre. The Greek word “¡Eureka!” means “ya encontré” or I have found it, him, or her. It denotes not just finding the desired thing but also a process, a heuristic, a way of life and exploration. This is what the search for the disappeared became for the Doñas. One member of ¡Eureka!, Sara Hernández, the wife of Rafael Ramírez Duarte who disappeared 1977, has kept a record of ¡Eureka!’s news clippings, posters, and other materials in her apartment. While she did not represent her husband in the demonstrations—that role was reserved for his mother, Della Duarte viuda de Ramírez, in part because ¡Eureka!, like the Argentinian Madres, saw the affective advantage of defining

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themselves as a mother’s movement—she accompanied ¡Eureka! closely and kept their files. Sara’s binders of material offer evidence of the transfer of the traumatic meme as exiles from the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships were granted asylum in Mexico in the late 1970s. Comité ¡Eureka! learned of the Madres’ strategies through them. The Doñas deliberately and strategically placed their disappeared in the sad trajectory of disappearances in Latin American dictatorships. They blasted the government for its hypocrisy in granting asylum to exiles of state terror while exercising terror tactics on its own population: ¡No Sólo en Argentina y en Chile Hay Desaparecidos Políticos! ¡En Mexico Hay Cientos También!33 While the Doñas started animating the photographs of their disappeared, their practice reveals an intriguing variation on the traumatic memes. They wore the photos not in the plain plastic sheathes used by the Madres but rather framed them as relics enshrined in pearls and velvet around their necks. This handmade and religious dimension underlines the religious homogeneity among the Doñas. Madres in Argentina included many Jewish mothers in their organizations, as the military specifically targeted Jews. The use of the photograph identifies the political demand—mother searching for missing child—yet its style captures some of the specific characteristics of the group. Today, the traumatic memes appear in Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia—everywhere that state terrorism disappears its opponents. Currently, the Madres organizations of Central America use the photos and chants to make their demands in their search for their children who have gone missing. They have joined the mass migration of young people toward the United States, pushed by a variety of hemispheric factors involving corrupt governments in the grip of multinational mining and agro corporations and by the violence of the drug trade. One Salvadorian mothers’ group, COFAMIDE, consciously uses the traumatic memes they have seen in videos of the Argentinean Madres.34 Their use of the photographs and the slogans, however, has an added dimension. The migrants who leave often change their names and nationalities to avoid deportation once they cross into Mexico—so the photo ID is key not just in presenting the evidence of loss (as it is now with the Argentinean Madres) but in identifying their loved ones. And because their children left as migrants, they have changed the slogan “vivos se los llevaron” to “vivos se fueron, vivos los queremos” (they left alive, we want them back alive). [ 126 ]

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The crimes against migrants also qualify as disappearances, as the Madres cogently explain.They, too, enter the Kafkaesque world of systemic dissimulation and cover-up. Official forces deny requests for information and refuse to carry out investigations. If coffins are returned to families, as sometimes happens, they come with instructions not to open them. Families do open the coffins, of course, to make sure their loved one is inside. In coffins coming from Mexico, they tell me, they have found body parts, or bodies of the wrong gender. One rights advocate told me they have seen coffins filled with dead animals or stones.33 In short, the various governments along the route, including the United States, actively participate in obfuscating the situation and destroying the evidence. Mothers’ movements throughout the Northern Triangle have organized caravans to find their missing, who, they hope, are somewhere in Mexico. Marta Sánchez started the Movimiento de Migrantes Mesoamericanos to help women who were already embarked on the search. The crime of disappearance, she told me when I joined the Central American mothers recently, is not just organized, it is authorized.34 The government is fully involved in it. While the participants were not familiar with the traumatic memes, Sánchez was and she suggested that they organize as mothers, sensing the symbolic power of situating the demand for justice within a recognizable framework. Unlike the Madres in Argentina, these women do not employ the language of motherhood to physically protect themselves. But mothers, throughout patriarchal Latin America, still enjoy a special status not available to other women. The Central American Madres, then, started wearing the photographs of their children and chanting the well-known slogans. When their caravan arrived in San Cristóbal de las Casas in the southernmost state of Mexico on November 16, 2016, they were greeted by hundreds of supporters.35 As they walked through the throng, carrying and wearing the photo IDs and chanting “vivos los queremos,” people joined in the chants. Some of their children have in fact been found alive—some in jails, in brothels, or held captive—ashamed or unable to contact their families. Most of the over one hundred thousand disappeared, however, will never be found. Their remains lie unidentified in one of many mass graves. The Madres continue their search. “Buscamos la vida en caminos de muerte” (We look for life on the roads of death), they say. For the past twelve years, they have embarked on exhausting caravans through Mexico, stopping, asking, showing the photographs, and staging public protests. The Central American Madres have become a powerful force for human rights in the area and beyond. Sánchez T R AU M AT I C M E M E S

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told me that their movement has sparked similar ones among migrant families in Africa—a second generation of memetic transfer that points to different heinous social and political conditions. Sánchez plans an international summit of mothers’ movements for 2018, a worldwide enactment of protest characterized by these traumatic memes. So when the families of the Ayotzinapa students wanted to make their search and demands internationally visible, it is not surprising that they, too, turned to the traumatic memes, even if they had never heard of the Madres or the Doñas. As early as October 4, 2014 they adopted the language (“vivos se los llevaron”) and visual strategies (the enlarged ID photograph) made famous by earlier mothers.36 Although the parents did not know of these memetic strategies, their children’s schoolmates from Ayotzinapa were politicized and likely aware of them. As human rights advocates who joined them, they drew from their repertoire of consignas (slogans) and images associated with Comité ¡Eureka! and the Central American Madres. The memes made visible not just the trajectory of criminal practices but also a strong trajectory of resistance.

4 What can the mothers’ demands for “back alive” and the display of the photo do against the processes of “disappearance” as a political strategy? Traumatic memes, having gone global, light up the map. They instantly mark the continuities of criminal practices and performed resistance across space and time. We who become witnesses can observe, investigate, hear testimony, and make our own political demands. Those responsible for state terrorism continue to cover their tracks. Nobody knows for sure where the disappeared are. “¿A dónde van los que se van?” (Where do they go, those who go?) asks Argentinian singer/composer Liliana Felipe in her song by that name, dedicated to her disappeared sister. The erasure of space for the disappeared, she says, threatens the space of political response and grief. When people disappear, she told me, “you don’t have a place to put your grief.”37 Traumatic memes also powerfully transmit the continuities among the disappeared themselves—young protesters, unruly students, migrants, or the poor. The particularities might change—victims used to be called subversives in an ideology-infused regime; now they’re “desechables” (throwaways), [ 128 ]

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disposable in today’s global capitalism that renders many lives precarious. During the dictatorships, the military kept records of the assassinated and disappeared and dumped bodies into water or buried them in mass graves. Nobody counts today’s dead and disappeared. Truth Commissions throughout the Americas examined the crimes against humanity committed by the armed forces. They all declared, “Never Again!” But who, besides the symbolic People’s Permanent Tribunal, will bring up these so-called democratic governments on charges? Nonetheless, the photographs of the young faces and the women’s chants provide evidence of ongoing criminal, statesupported violence. The mothers’ movements, furthermore, are affective as well as communicative. Their performance of grief and outrage delivers a strong emotional message. How do we make sense of their loss? Traumatic memes reappear, always asking the same question, always receiving the same official answer: silence. “It’s hard to give an answer,” says Sister Valdette Willeman, from the Center for Returned Migrants in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, where she works with deported migrants and with the families of those who continue to search for their loved ones. With disappearance, she says, “There is no answer.”40 The social movements by mothers of the disappeared now span forty years. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo remind us that protest is a durational performance. Their resistance affirms the force of bonds that unite—love, care, loyalty, perseverance. Although they were originally dismissed as the “crazy” women of the plaza, their persistence contributed directly to the first Kirschner government’s bringing the perpetrators to trial. Protest, the Madres show, can work. The symbolic, and at times actual, power of the “powerless” inspires others to keep demonstrating, even though the odds against them seem overwhelming. The Madres’ performance, like the enactments of grief and resistance, is far from over. It offers no closure. Rather, as the memes make clear, they repeat, they come back again and again to the now and always of criminal practice. Part of the reiteration comes from the fact that the crimes have not been acknowledged or adjudicated either by the state or by civil society. Part of the memetic repeat stems from the traumatic nature of the injury. For the Madres and Doñas and Comadres throughout the Americas (and beyond), the claim and the pain become transmittable, bearable, and politically efficacious through the ever-present, increasingly ubiquitous, traumatic memes. T R AU M AT I C M E M E S

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Notes 1. The number 43 has become iconic; hence, it appears as such, rather than spelled out as any other number would be. 2. The nonbinding People’s Permanent Tribunal (or PPT), started in Bologna in 1979 to bring charges against governments for egregious crimes that their countries will never prosecute, has been the only “court” to hold Mexico responsible to date. 3. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). 4. My thanks to David Konstan, my colleague and classicist on call, for helping me identify the Greek roots. 5. Dawkins, Selfish Gene, 192. 6. Dawkins, Selfish Gene, 192. 7. Dawkins, Selfish Gene, 192. 8. This builds on Richard Schechner’s “performance is never for the first time . . .” in Between Theatre and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 36. 9. While mimesis, understood in its classical Greek meaning of mimeisthai or “to imitate,” belongs to the repertoire of embodied, reiterated practice, memes often lack corporeality. They have different ways of entering our system. While jokes may pass by word of mouth, ideas and symbols can seem to jump from brain to brain. People commonly use words such as “contagion” or “virus” to describe their transmission. 10. Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 6. 11. The term “memesphere” was coined by Sergio Parra, Cultiva tu Memesfera: Somos lo que nos Rodea (Córdoba, Spain: Arcopress), 2015. 12. The Wikipedia entry on “Memetics” shows the widespread notion of a meme as “ ‘hosted’ in the minds of one or more individuals, and which can reproduce itself, thereby jumping from mind to mind. Thus what would otherwise be regarded as one individual influencing another to adopt a belief is seen as an idea-replicator reproducing itself in a new host.” Wikipedia, s.v. “Memetics,” last modified September 12, 2018, 09:41, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics. 13. Mark A. Jordan, “What is a Meme?” The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science, February 4, 2014, https://richarddawkins.net/2014/02/whats-in -a-meme/. 14. See Yuyanapac, especially the photograph,“Ayacucho 1984” by Vera Lentz. http:// cgs.gmu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/2011_yuyanapaq.pdf. 15. Diana Taylor, “Trauma as Durational Performance,” Villa Grimaldi, accessed November 19, 2018, http://villagrimaldi.typefold.com/ [ 130 ]

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16. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 1–2. 17. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 5. 18. Rafael Mora in A Sub National Analysis of Homicides and Disappearances in Mexico reports that “Between 2007 and 2014 138,589 people were murdered in Mexico” Justice in Mexico Working Paper Series 14, no. 3, February 2016, https:// justiceinmexico.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/sub_national_analysis_of _homicides_and_disappearances_in_mexico_rafaelmora-final.pdf. The same report cites: “Though, Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano, a Central American non-profit that advocates for migrant rights in North America, claims that 70,000 to 120,000 Central American foreign migrants disappeared in Mexico between 2006 and 2012 (‘Comunicado De La X Caravana’) the numbers cannot be accurately calculated due to faulty data bases (4).” 19. The World Report documented in 2015 that “Mexico’s security forces have participated in widespread enforced disappearances since former President Calderón (2006–2012) launched a “war on drugs. Members of all security forces continue to carry out disappearances during President Enrique Peña Nieto administration, in some cases, collaborating directly with criminal groups.” Human Rights Watch, World Report 2015: Mexico, accessed November 19, 2018, https://www .hrw.org/world-report/2015/country-chapters/mexico. 20. See José Reveles, Échale la culpa a la heroína: De Iguala a Chicago (Mexico: Grijalbo, 2016). 21. Carlos Fazio, Estado de Emergencia: De la Guerra de Calderón a la Guerra de Peña Nieto (Mexico: Grijalbo, 2016), 364. 22. Reuters, “‘I’ve had Enough’, says Mexico Attorney General in Massacre Gaffe,” World News, November 9, 2014, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico -violence-idUSKBN0IT04D20141110. 23. Andrea Noel, “Get Over It, Ex Mexican President Tells Parents of Missing Students on US Caravan.” Vice News, March 19, 2015, https://news.vice.com /en_us/article/yw4aqw/get-over-it-ex-mexican-president-tells-parents-of -missing-students-on-us-caravan. 24. The Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes (GIEI) comprised Alejandro Valencia Villa, Ángela María Buitrago, Carlos Martin Beristaín, Claudia Paz y Paz Baile, Francisco Cox Vial. 25. GIEI,“Report by Grupo Internacional de Expertos Independientes,” accessed November 20, 2018, http://prensagieiayotzi.wixsite.com/giei-ayotzinapa/informe-. 26. Anabel Hernández, interview on the release of her book, La Verdadera Noche de Iguala, on CNN, “Ejército ‘Ordenó, Orquestó y Organizó’ la Noche en la que Desaparecieron los 43: Anabel Hernández en CNN,” Arestigui News, November 28, 2016, http://aristeguinoticias.com/2811/mexico/ejercito-ordeno-orquesto-y -organizo-la-noche-en-la-que-desaparecieron-los-43-anabel-hernandez-en-cnn/. T R AU M AT I C M E M E S

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27. Roberto González Villarreal, Ayotzinapa: La Rabia y la Esperanza (Mexico: Editorial Terracotta, 2015), 140. 27. González Villarreal, Ayotzinapa, 143 28. Achilles Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Popular Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 17. 29. Rivera Sun, “Remembering Argentina’s Mothers of the Disappeared,” CounterPunch, April 25, 2016, http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/25/remembering -argentinas-mothers-of-the-disappeared/. 30. “Comadres fue fundado en 1977; un período en que ‘desapariciones’ andaban a la orden del día en El Salvador. El grupo se estableció porque los familiares de personas ‘desaparecidas’ necesitaban compartir el dolor con compañeros y para juntar fuerzas. Hoy en día las mujeres de Comadres trabajan para esclarecer un gran número de ‘desapariciones.’” Comadres, Comité de Madres Mons. Romero, accessed November 20, 2018, http://comadres.org/main_espanol.html. 30. The description of how comadres took form could have been quoted directly from the testimonies of Madres de Plaza de Mayo: “Madres y familiares, luego de la masacre comenzaron la búsqueda de sus seres queridos, aquellos que no llegaron a casa. En la interminable búsqueda en hospitales, cárceles y morgues, las caras de aquellas mujeres se fueron reconociendo unas con otras, en su dolor se ayudaban, repartiéndose lugares con la esperanza de encontrar en el menor tiempo a sus familiares.” Gloria Guzmán Orellana and Irantzu Mendia Azkue, Mujeres con Memoria: Activistas del Movimiento de Derechos Humanos en El Salvador (Bilboa Spain: Editorial hegoa), 2013, 34. http://publicaciones.hegoa.ehu.es/assets/pdfs/292/Mujeres_con_memoria .pdf?1371741516 31. The United States backed the Salvadorian military to the tune of one million dollars a day during the Reagan era. 32. Interview with Sara Hernández, Mexico City, 2016. 33. Interview with COFAMIDE, San Salvador, November 23, 2016. 34. Interview with Sister Valdette Willeman, San Pedro Sula, Honduras, November 2016. 35. Interview with Marta Sánchez, San Cristóbal de las Casas, November 16, 2016. 36. The Misión Internacional de Observación de Derechos Humanos en la Frontera or the International Mission of Observers on Human Rights (MODH) was created to ask international observers to examine the conditions of migrants on the Guatemala-Mexico border. November 8–15, 2016. 37. See Paula Mónaco Felipe, Ayotzinapa: Horas Eternas (Mexico: Editorial B, 2016). 38. Interview with Liliana Felipe, Mexico City, January 2016. 40. Interview, Sister Valdette Willeman, November 2017.

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CHA P T E R V I I

Memory as Encounter The Saturday Mothers in Turkey M E LT E M A H I S K A

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once . . . and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you. SU SAN SO NTAG, AT TH E SA ME TI ME: ESSAYS AND SP EECHES , 2007

A

s I reflect on memory as encounter, suicide bombs keep hitting live targets in Turkey. Each bomb, another “terror attack” as the dominant media and politicians call it, fragments bodies and memories. As particles diffuse perhaps far into the universe, each bomb has a centrifugal force pulling us all, the survivors and the dead, into a dark and bloody pit. Even the increasing number of people—academics, students, journalists, politicians—incarcerated in prisons are not exempt from its violent pull. At least symbolically, all are propelled to the site of the catastrophe and must recognize the impact of its all-encompassing violence. In each “terrorist attack” we are once again pulled back to the forcefully unified space and time of power, having to bow to the dictates of national remembrance of victims—sometimes martyrs depending on who the victims are. National remembrance once more breeds forgetting, while memory traces travel to unknown directions, to unmarked spaces and temporalities. Trauma occurs in different time-spaces: the survivor does not recognize herself in the monumentalized progressive time of the nation built on disavowal. As Bracha Ettinger puts it so well, “breaking with the violent past demands paying intimate attention to its oftenerased figures.”1

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“Time Should Not Wear Out!” Gendering Disappearance In this chapter, I will be dwelling on the continuing political performance of the “Saturday Mothers” in Istanbul and the resistant memory of the enforced disappearances in Turkey that they embody.2 I would like to focus on the gendered quality of these protests as well as on the circulation of certain forms of political protest from one cultural context to another—for example, the inspiration the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo offered the Saturday Mothers. The discussion of gender is particularly significant since there is a debate in left circles in Turkey that the name “Saturday Mothers” readily adopted by the media is misleading not only because there are men participating in this political performance but also because the concept of motherhood plays into the hands of dominant and conservative ideologies in society.3 Thus the name “Saturday People” has been suggested instead. Today the political performance is usually referred to as “Saturday Mothers/ People.” The debate resonates with different problematizations of motherhood in similar movements around the world. Here I suggest that instead of discussing concepts, such as motherhood, in isolation, we should understand the relationship between gender and enforced disappearance. By gendering disappearance, I do not mean to talk about women and men as binary categories but instead about the subjugation of feminine experiences by a dominant masculinist regime of reasoning and perception. In this way, we can understand how women, particularly mothers, relate to the violence of the enforced disappearances by performing as witnesses. Rather than preferring Mothers to People, or vice versa, I would like to problematize the necessity of the slash between “Saturday Mothers/People.” I will argue that supplementing “mothers” with “people” not only obscures the sensory and intimate memories of violence but also unintentionally contributes to reframing motherhood in a phallic idiom. I will suggest that the slash halts our coming to terms with the differential experiences and temporalities of violent traumas. Thus, I contend that the mobilization of memory, the general theme of this book, need not mean forward mobility in time on predetermined routes. We should be able to think mobilization in relation to a form of stillness that stops the violent flow of time and affectionately embraces new constellations across boundaries of cultures, identities, and gender.4 Inspired by Bracha Ettinger, I suggest that [ 134 ]

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we think these questions through the concepts of memory as “encounter” and “co-emergence,” which could give us not only a different conception of subjectivity but also guide us in critically exploring both motherhood and the mobilization of memories from a feminist perspective.5 Ettinger’s significant intervention in expanding the realm of the symbolic with regard to feminine difference opens up a new space to cognize/recognize experiences and memory traces and their ways of linking, which have been silenced within the “normal” masculinist order of things. The Saturday Mothers have been gathering every Saturday since 1995 in a public square in Galatasaray, a busy and central district of Istanbul. They meet at noon and sit on the small square sometimes holding up and sometimes putting on the ground the photographs of the forcibly disappeared people in Turkey.6 The political performance of the sit-in started after Hasan Ocak’s tortured dead body was found in a forest and then buried in a common grave in Istanbul. Hasan Ocak, a young teacher, had left his home in Avcılar, Istanbul on Tuesday, March 21, 1995 and never came back. His family searched for him continuously with no response from the police. The police claimed not to have any record of him, although there were witnesses who saw Ocak taken into custody. The family found out about his tragic ending when his body was transferred to the common grave. Before giving a more detailed account of how the discovery of Hasan Ocak’s tortured dead body triggered the movement of Saturday Mothers, I would like briefly to dwell on the court case, whose details illuminate the spirit of the movement. The court case about Hasan Ocak’s disappearance that has been lingering for twenty years was recently closed in October 2016 due to the statute of limitations. The Turkish term for a legal statute of limitations is zamanaߞımı, literally the expiration of time or the wearing of time. Maside Ocak, the sister of Hasan Ocak, who has been participating in the Saturday Mothers performance since the first week, says that many similar cases have struggled against the statute of limitations, with no results.7 She cites an older woman in the movement, a mother whom she calls Hanife Mother, who said: “I am worn out in running after justice. My body, my legs have been worn out. My eyes have been worn out by the long wait. But time should not wear out.”8 These words succinctly grasp the political stake of the closing of Hasan Ocak’s case by the prosecutor who declared that no determination was possible specifying the cause of his death. The indeterminacy affirmed in the form of a declarative sentence evacuates Ocak’s life and his death; his experiential time is erased from the monumentalized time of national M E M O RY A S E N C O U N T E R

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law in a “dialectic of certainty and doubt that so characterizes disappearance.”9 Both the singularity of his time and the unmarked holes of time in which people have been forcefully disappeared are disavowed. In Taussig’s terms, this consolidates the “public secret” as something that is known but unspoken and unacknowledged.10 Hence the cry of Hanife Mother: time should not wear out! According to Avery Gordon, the implicit message of disappearances in the context of Argentina was: “Since we disappeared you, you’re nothing. Anyway, nobody remembers you.You don’t exist. A terrifying constituent feature of disappearance is that the desaparecidos have disappeared and so too all public and official knowledge of them.”11 The knowledge of disappearances is based on nonknowledge; the presence is very much connected to absence—a terrorizing paradox indeed! The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo were not paralyzed by this but were able to act with and within the paradox “not because they were mothers per se, but because they made . . . a special contact with loss and with what was missing but overwhelmingly present.”12 This kind of loss that cannot be certified in and by law, but that is “overwhelmingly present,” has provided the significant connection among a wide range of agents who started the political performance of the Saturday Mothers in 1995. We can name at least two distinct yet related groups who have had a role in shaping the movement of the Saturday Mothers. The first prominent agent has been a group of women, mostly mothers of the prisoners, who started to be active soon after the September 12, 1980 military coup. The mothers’ mobilization was triggered by the harsh sentences given to political prisoners, thousands of whom were incarcerated in the first year of the military regime. The mothers were getting organized in several actions: petitions to the parliament and to political parties, waiting outside the prisons, organizing demonstrations in public space, showing the blood-stained laundry of their children in prison, and going on hunger strikes. They were exposed to violence, getting beaten, and being taken into custody. It is striking that, similar to the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, the mothers in Turkey were the first social group protesting the injustices and violence of the regime, while the rest of the country stayed mostly silent. The movement of the mothers of the prisoners was very influential in founding IHD (Human Rights Organization) in 1986. One of the leading activists of the 1980s, Ayߞe Bakkalcı asserts that “mothers have been the engine for the human rights movement in Turkey,” thus providing the ground on which the movement of Saturday Mothers started.13 [ 136 ]

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The second prominent agent is a group of activists—mostly women but also men—who had been working closely with or in IHD and who had been involved in political campaigns such as Arkadaߞıma Dokunma (Hands off my friend) to protest discrimination and racism during the fierce war against the Kurds in the 1990s in Turkey. Ayߞe Günaysu, a human rights activist in this group, claims that the idea of Saturday Mothers first emerged in a meeting of the Arkadaߞıma Dokunma group. She remembers how deeply they were touched by the discovery of Hasan Ocak’s dead body and how they felt that they should do something—something like a silent vigil in Galatasaray every week. The idea was also supported by IHD. Günaysu further notes that “we did not name ourselves Saturday Mothers, there were both men and women in the vigil.”14 On the other hand, Nadire Mater, from the same group, finds it important to mention that they were searching for an influential form of protest against disappearances, and they were inspired by the examples from Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala. And she adds that Galatarasay became a place of hope when many Kurdish families from Diyarbakir came to join the movement.15 These accounts clearly show that the story or the history of the Saturday Mothers movement cannot be told in a linear fashion privileging a singular subject or one cultural-historical context.What was the main thrust in starting the movement? The mothers’ actions that had been going on in Turkey since the early 1980s culminating in the foundation of IHD? The activists’ conscientious need to do something and their search for a model of protest? The found body of Hasan Ocak that contributed to the materialization of enforced disappearances hitherto left invisible? The rising Kurdish movement that gave a new energy to the protest? The model offered by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and its transnational impact? The political performance of Saturday Mothers has been influenced by all of these in ambiguous ways: it is spontaneous yet organized, it is temporary but persists over a duration of time, it consists of activists but also of families of the disappeared from different localities and ethnicities, it consists of both women and men. And although it is a unique movement historically belonging to Turkey, it takes the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo as a particularly inspiring model. Thus the complex history poses challenging questions for understanding how memories are mobilized for resistance by the Saturday Mothers. It is of utmost importance that we recognize the significance of encounters and the co-emergence of memories in this and other contexts of mobilization of memory. M E M O RY A S E N C O U N T E R

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I would argue that the dominant patriarchal conception of categories, such as nation, identity, and gender, block the recognition of subterranean currents of memory-making in the midst of violence, fragmentation, and uncertainty. Diana Taylor’s question here, “whether society is the site of the so-called normal rather than a highly repressive or toxic environment” is crucial.16 And Kirsten Mahlke’s conceptualization of the “chronotope of terror” enables us to identify both the social time and space of trauma and its social consequences.17 Mahlke utilizes the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope to show how power infuses everyday life and interferes with subjectivities, which does not only limit what can possibly happen but also what can be perceived and imagined under those constraints. The formulation brings to mind Taylor’s concept of “percepticide”—a numbing, self-blinding response to the terrorizing shocks during “the dirty wars in Latin America.”18 Mahlke too focuses on the strategies of terror in Argentina, but she also argues that the chronotope of terror is reproduced in “modern warfare” in more general terms today. This, according to her, leads to the dissociation of subjects, the blurring of inside and outside with grotesque methods of confusion implemented to erase the markers of reality, and “causes at its inception an untranslatability of the experience of terror into the language of binary logic. Instead, the spatio-temporal distortions are coded in paradoxes and the language of the fantastic.”19 Under these conditions that affect reality, experience, and memory, there is no such one unified language of memory that can address trauma in an already established idiom. The “psychological weapons of warfare” in Mahlke’s terms, “culminate[s] in a loss of social communicability and collective memory” when the assumed self is severely fragmented.20 There is no one unified language of memory but there is still a shared condition for enacting memory. I find it important to note at this point that the above-mentioned loss of social communicability and collective memory concerns both the “victims” of trauma, and its bystanders; in other words, both those who are inside and those who remain outside. What Taylor names “percepticide” does not only mean victim’s inability to act but also the acting out of the spectators in a particular way: “an active inaction or a concerted not doing.”21 How, then, is witnessing possible beyond the binaries of inside and outside, action and inaction? Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub argue, with reference to the Shoah as an “event without witnesses” that bearing witness is as paradoxical as the reality produced by the chronotope of terror: the testimonial effort should be “paradoxically, both inside and [ 138 ]

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outside: to create a connection that did not exist in the war and does not exist today between the inside and the outside—to set them both in motion and in dialogue with one another.”22 Here the “inside” and the “outside” do not only refer to the dissociated space-time of “victims” and “bystanders” but also the separation of the “past” from the “present” within the normalized temporality of the power regime. The Saturday Mothers, I would argue, offer a political performance of memory and witnessing that creates a new space-time for the dialogue between the inside and outside in both meanings mentioned above— between the past and the present as well as between the “disappeared” and the spectators of the “disappearing acts” across national, ethnic, and gender lines.23 Both the shaping and the staging of the political performance are significant in this respect. According to the women activists involved in the Saturday Mothers movement, their performance is not based on a preset political program of “high politics” typically associated with men.24 Instead, it mobilizes the acquired experiences of feminists and adopts the principles of solidarity, collectivity, and the persistence for realizing goals.25 The few male activists in the movement also admit that it was not only women’s presence but also their particular practical attitudes and their skills in recognizing differences and solving problems that made this a women’s movement.26 In short, this feminine conception of doing politics27 through the movement of Saturday Mothers has nothing to do with the presupposed “essence” of femininity nor with literal motherhood. Instead, it denotes a nonsovereign political subjectivity and mode of performance that recognizes “difference as a crucial strength” 28 and is open to interaction and solidarity with others, sharing the traces of shared trauma—a mode that enables contact with loss in its multiple forms and temporalities. This special way of knowing, which Gordon calls “haunting recognition,” becomes the only way of knowing when “knowledge” about the disappeared has also disappeared.29 The photographs and stories of the disappeared people become testimonies to a “haunting recognition” to be shared with others. Much has been written on the use of photographs in mothers’ movements. Ana Longoni gives a vivid account of how “these images of the disappeared reaffirmed the existence of a biography that predated these subjects’ kidnapping, an existence that was categorically negated by the  regime.”30 The photographs were a minimal proof of that existence, the meaning of which shifted from family remembrance to becoming an “active instrument of public protest.”31 On the other hand, the images taken from M E M O RY A S E N C O U N T E R

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official documents that bear the stamps of the state machinery of violence and erasure are given an individual identity in the political performance. Besides photographs, the story of each disappeared person told in public also played an evocative role in the movement of Saturday Mothers. While numbers “alienate one to the reality” of the disappearances, stories release experiences that can be retold by listeners and collectivized through reminiscences.32 Diana Taylor similarly argues that the transmission of memory works through the interactive telling and listening associated with live performance. “Bearing witness requires live participation—it is a doing, an act of transfer that takes place in the here and now in the presence of a listener” who “comes to be a participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event.”33

Motherhood and Memory as Encounter Some years ago, on a Saturday at noon, when we were all gathered around Galatasaray Square for another Saturday Mothers performance with photographs and candles, a young man approached me to ask what this was all about. I said, you know there have been “disappearances” in Turkey, and this is an ongoing political protest for seeking justice. He was perplexed about the term “disappearance,” it sounded unreal to him. After some minutes of failed communication, he asked, whether “disappearance” is something like “torture.” I could only say “yes”; after all, “disappearance” is not equal to torture but related in the social and political history of entangled traumas in Turkey for at least one hundred years. The young man nodded and stayed there for a while. This small incident brings me to the power of connotations in the encounters that memory makes possible. The images and words in the political performance of Saturday Mothers bear the biographical traces of absent bodies through reproduction of photographs and narrated stories. But the performing bodies issue a call to witnessing—or wit(h)nessing as Ettinger calls it—the loss by way of associations that, though partial and plural, can be shared.34 This was also the case when a group of Argentine Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo came to Istanbul to visit the Saturday Mothers in 1998. Rosa Tarlovsky de Roisinblit, who was among them, says in a much later interview that the visit was a response to the call that came from Turkey, from people who had their kin forcibly disappeared.35 The mothers and grandmothers traveled all the way from Argentina to share the experience [ 140 ]

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that they acquired in their struggle for justice. However, Rosa adds that “every country is different, although there are some similarities every society has its particular problems.” In Istanbul, unlike in Buenos Aires, “the people in the sit-in were not just mothers, on Saturdays everybody, mothers, siblings, nephews, nieces, uncles, children, all were together. They had their own methods. They placed the photographs on the ground together with candles.”36 Yet, despite the differences, the Argentine women were able to mobilize their particular memories to stand together with Saturday Mothers because they were able to respond to the overwhelming presence of loss beyond its particular and fixed cultural coding. It is significant in this respect that the Saturday Mothers have included “disappeared” people from other times and spaces in their political agenda including those who were forcibly disappeared during the Armenian genocide. For example, in their meeting on April 27, 2013, the mothers asked what happened to 220 Armenian intellectuals who were deported from Istanbul on April 24, 1915 and hence “disappeared.” Such associations and connotations open up divergent paths for making connections between different temporalities, between inside and outside, between self and other that societies often conceal. As Ross Poole argues, “the taken for granted world in which we are—literally—’at home’ is also a world of hidden tensions, of desires which cannot be spoken, and of expectations and demands which can only exist on the condition they be concealed. It is a world of multiple and contradictory meanings.”37 Connotation becomes an effective mechanism for crossing the thresholds of concealment through the activation of multiple meanings. In the context of the Saturday Mothers, the connotations are triggered by the embodied performance of collective memories that creates a space-time with conative power. Conation, an old Latin word variably employed in philosophy, psychology, and education, regards the puzzling question of how one acts on thoughts and feelings. It concerns the impulse, desire, volition, motivation, and attempt to act. The encounter with memory traces could provoke “conative memory” which according to Poole “guides our will in the directions required by the responsibilities and commitments that we have acquired in the past.”38 Conative memory is different than cognitive memory of “knowing” things; it provides and activates the link between the things we know but choose not to know, and our feelings of unrest resulting from this. It is again a “haunting recognition.” Images and stories, and the space created through the political performance contribute to conative memory M E M O RY A S E N C O U N T E R

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by making the ghosts of the past mentally visible. They neither give us just facts nor just feelings but an invitation to respond to their message—an invitation for response-ability.39 “They (the ghosts) appear on the scene to tell us of a responsibility that we have. This is not, at least not usually, a case of being informed of something which, amnesiac like, we have completely forgotten, the traces of which have been completely erased. We know, but we do not want to know.”40 Response-ability is the antidote for the paralyzing chronotope of terror and percepticide. It has the capacity to bridge the violent divide between facts and strategies of denial, between victims and bystanders. I would argue that this becomes possible by creating another space, one that is fluid yet has durability over time. It is a space that can become a “home” for accommodating and materializing the violently displaced and repressed thoughts and feelings on the basis of which we might be able to act, both as victims and bystanders. It is a way of revealing “public secrets.” In this respect, conative memory is also a counterpart to habit memory through which continuity is maintained with the help of rituals and repetitions. Home, as the corner of our world, is the locus of habit memory and usually maintains “normalcy” under patriarchal rules with all the possible tensions. But when home is torn apart, when families are violently displaced, when people are disappeared, a newly configured or imagined political space could become “home” in a very different way. This becomes apparent in the way women who are kin to the forcibly disappeared articulate a new sense of home in response to the Saturday Mothers performance. The report of Hafıza Merkezi (Truth, Memory, Justice Center) gives an impressive account of the less visible experiences of the wives of the disappeared, mainly in the Kurdish regions of Turkey, such as ߸ırnak and Diyarbakır, but also in Istanbul.41 The report, while providing both historical background and factual information regarding the enforced disappearances in Turkey, aims to “gender” this political domain. Here “gendering” means attending to the narratives of women whose husbands are forcibly disappeared, to be sure. But the report also significantly brings to the fore another kind of gendering, one that invites us to recognize the complexity of the experiences of women that cannot be represented within existing idioms of human rights discourses. These women are not just passive victims but actors in a network of relations that can entail contradictory loyalties to their families, particularly children, to their absent husbands, to their religious and ethnic community, and to the Kurdish political party. [ 142 ]

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The women have multiple identities. They have undergone severe pains and hardships after the disappearance of the husbands, but they also strive to keep up the memory and to seek justice.42 They repeat the stories of disappearance in detail: ”It should not be forgotten, it should be relayed in full.”43 However, the transmission of memories is never full in the private realm: for example, women as mothers mostly hide stories and feelings from children, as Kader says, “secretly, unseen by them I would go to the back of the house, cry, rock my cradle, and cry.Then I would run cold water over my eyes, they should not see my eyes I would say.”44 Home is the place of secrets. But, “at the moments when women step into public space they develop certain points of resistance and strategies against both the various manifestations of state violence and the mechanisms of social control.”45 The most important space of struggle in which women publicly come together and voice their demands for justice has been Dayikên ߸emiyê, a version of Saturday Mothers in Diyarbakır and Cizre.46 The women say that Saturday is for them a different day. They go to the space of protest to hold up their photographs, they talk to each other, and share their pain. Asuman says: “It is like our home there . . . when we go there I see that I am not alone and I am relieved. They are like my family.”47 Another woman Meliha says, “Yes, honestly, our trouble all of ours is one and the same. If I don’t go one day, if something comes up and I don’t go I feel bad. I mean I say I wish I had gone. I say our photograph should not be left at home. I say let me send the photograph.”48 Despite the fact that photos enact singular identities and stories, in this context, they also function as affective agents to create a space for the co-emergence of memories. The space of encounters that becomes a new “home” for women demonstrates the feminist understanding of how the personal becomes political. It is actually about appropriating a public space and turning it into familiarized yet “artificial” space, something like a stage. According to Susana Torre, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo “were able to sustain control of an important urban space much as actors, dancers, or magicians control the stage by their ability to establish a presence that both opposes and activates the void represented by the audience.”49 Staging politics is not a planned act by individual authors but an act of transsubjective creation, which is a form of differentiation from everyday life, ideologically saturated and routinized under the sway of hegemonic patriarchal time. It is a way of creating stillness, a new space and temporality that “halts the customary unfolding of everyday life.”50 The Saturday Mothers have staged politics to make sensible M E M O RY A S E N C O U N T E R

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what has been insensible, by giving a conative form to otherwise amorphous traces of memories embedded in everyday life. Yet the report of Hafıza Merkezi on the wives of the disappeared, while weaving the narratives of women with documentary evidence to reveal the dynamics of “holding up the photograph,” chooses to utilize the term “Saturday People” instead of “Mothers.” The gap between the term used when referring to Kurdish Dayikên ߸emiyê (meaning Saturday Mothers) and the general term used in the report, “Saturday People,” remains unremarked. The gap is symptomatic for showing how motherhood has been a problematic category for many feminists. For example, according to Gülsüm Baydar and Berfin ԭvegen the name Saturday Mothers signifies the domestication of the sittings, “renders them safe and harmless in the eye of the public. It turns public attention away from the political content of the protest to the private realm of emotions. That is, possible political outrage is instead channeled toward private sentiments toward a mother who has lost her child.”51 Baydar and ԭvegen interpret the initial reaction of the activists to the term “Saturday Mothers” and the preference for “Saturday People” in light of the Deleuzian concept of deterritorialization. For them, the term “people” has a liberating potential leading to “de-composition of identities that had been based on fixed totalizations. For the protesting mothers, being a person figure rather than a mother figure potentially destabilizes the all-encompassing attributes of motherhood. . . . It also liberates the constitution of the protesting group from any pregiven category, as people is an undetermined signification free of any reference to gender, nationality, or social strata.”52 I find the above arguments problematic on many points. First, maintaining the divide between “the private realm of emotions” and “the political content” has the effect of reproducing patriarchal binaries such as reason/ emotions, mind/body.53 Second, and more importantly, the experience of motherhood is reduced to the concept of the “phallic mother,” the omnipotent and sexually neutral figure, which serves as “the prime support of the patriarchal system and the guarantor of the coherence of the nationstate.”54 Nation-states, including Turkey, have indeed established a powerful ideology of motherhood that regulates the domain of women for consolidating patriarchal structures. However, like nationalism, this is a Janusfaced ideology. On the one hand, the mother is idealized and positioned as sublime; on the other hand, her complex experiences and affects in relation to the world, including her child, are denied. The mother is primarily defined through “the child” who is regarded as the property of the nation.55 [ 144 ]

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The subjectivity of women as mothers is marginalized and cannot be narrated within the patriarchal language of motherhood; it is represented through the eyes of the child, who primarily belongs to the nation.56 The constitutive link between the mother and the child is articulated and made legible by the father’s law, established within the phallic paradigm of subjectivity. How, then, are we, as feminists, going to talk about the subjectivity of women as mothers, particularly mothers who have lost their children because of state violence? Is “the person figure” really a liberating alternative? Does not the history of feminism teach us that indeterminate signifiers such as “person” or “human” disguise the burden of differences like gender and race, operative within power regimes? Saturday People, in all its generality, contributes to erase mothers as subjects from the political scene, obscuring their particular embodied and intimate connection to loss. On the other hand, the slash between Saturday Mothers/People, provides a male supplement to support women as mothers as if they are unable to act on their own, rendering the mothers’ political agency suspect. The introduction of the slash between Mothers/People seems to be an effort to make the movement legible within the hegemonic phallic paradigm. I would contend that the mothers’ intimate connection to the overwhelming loss, the encounters and links they forge with others, and the space they create for political performance provides an alternate model of subjectivity, ethics, and politics. Instead of a mother isolated at home and kept under the impossible patriarchal demand of being an ideal mother to her own child, these mothers connect with unknown others in search of what they have lost. Beyond the thresholds of identity, they reach shared traces and intensities of trauma, thus venturing into a feminine mode of politics. Fathers, uncles, aunts, wives, siblings, nephews, nieces, children, activists, and bystanders, are all invited to join in this movement by activating their own memories concealed under established identities. This is not a static condition but the mobilization of memory traces against the violent centrifugal pull of power. The movement spatializes in stillness “the various ways in which we are impinged on by others, before our knowing, the various ways we receive the imprint of their desire and loss.”57 Bracha Ettinger conceptualizes this very connection as subjectivity-asencounter, which goes beyond the phallic paradigm of subjectivity that pits One versus the Other or the world, through a distinct cut or separation. Instead, Ettinger proposes that the I emerges together with an unknown non-I. The differentiation-in-co-emergence is accompanied by shared and M E M O RY A S E N C O U N T E R

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diffused matrixial affects, like those of awe, alertness, astonishment, or compassion, moving us beyond sentiments of “love” or “hate.” Instead of the binaries of absence/presence or on/off, there is a priori shareability in difference. Feminist scholar Griselda Pollock argues that Ettinger’s propositions for a radical change from within psychoanalysis beyond the phallic paradigm, and her attempts to redefine an aporetic female difference, can have important consequences not only for ethics and aesthetics but also politics. Pollock focuses on Ettinger’s concept of subjectivity-as-encounter, reframed after the matrixial model of prebirth encounter, to reflect on how a new space can be opened for subjective co-emergence and transformation. This is a borderspace of transsubjectivity that enables one to think about “relations between strange, foreign, irreducible elements of otherness in our encounters with human and even nonhuman events in the world.”58 With this new conceptualization, it becomes possible to imagine encounters with unknown others that transcend the borders of identity and connect through shared traces and intensities. One of the most significant outcomes of this perspective regards trauma in a trans-traumatic era in Ettinger’s words, in which trauma is no longer entirely personal. If the traces of trauma are dispersed between several partners, then we unknowingly join in the traumatic events of the other. The traces of sharable trauma are often unthought-of and unrecognized, yet a certain awareness is still possible. Ettinger claims that, “what makes the difference is a certain awareness of this, and as a consequence of it an opening up to possibilities for transforming the ways we join in the traumatic events of others.”59 This may give a new time and place, or in other words, a new form to mobilizing memory. I have argued in this chapter that the Saturday Mothers stage a political performance shaped by divergent influences and encounters against the chronotope of terror in the form of enforced disappearances. Although the movement does not consist of only mothers, the mothers’ particular call for politicizing the shareability in difference radically disrupts the patriarchal boundaries of subjectivity and politics. Thus, I have argued that the attempt to replace the name “Saturday Mothers” with “Saturday People,” or to put a slash in between, is a way of denying the paradox both regarding the ideological role of the mother and her witnessing to trauma. Instead, the Saturday Mothers movement does engage with this paradox and creates a feminine space of politics to accommodate various conative memories through memory-as-encounter. Consequently, the co-emergence of memories produces stillness, a countermovement that unwinds the unified [ 146 ]

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and oppressive time-space of violence.60 Women mobilizing memory stand at a crossroad: molding memories within existing idioms that neglect the paradoxes and tensions within hegemonic patriarchal reality, or to risk embracing difference as “crucial strength” for finding alternate modes of subjectivity, ethics, and politics. Memory as encounter has the potential to animate the discarded fragments of experiences and memories beyond the thresholds of distinct categories, be it nationality, gender, generation, event or identity, thus creating a new political event.

Notes 1. Brad Evans and Bracha Ettinger, “Art in a Time of Atrocity,” New York Times, December 16, 2016 (italics added). 2. The persistence of the movement is impressive despite the recurring unfavorable political conditions. The Saturday Mothers movement had to be suspended in 1999 due to increasing police violence, and it began again ten years later in 2009 and continued regularly until August 25, 2018, when the Saturday Mothers in their seven hundredth week of protest had to contend with a new wave of state suppression and have been de facto banned from gathering at Galatasaray Square.They are now meeting instead in front of the Human Rights Association in Istanbul despite continued harassment by security forces. 3. There has been a relatively wide representation of “Saturday Mothers” in national and international media, including books, documentaries and music. 4. Nadia Seremetakis conceptualizes stillness as nonsynchronous and interruptive articles, spaces, acts, and narratives. Stillness is “the moment when the buried, the discarded, and the forgotten escape to the social surface of awareness like lifesupporting oxygen. It is the moment of exit from historical dust.” See “Memory of the Senses,” in The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, ed. Nadia Seremetakis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 12. 5. Bracha Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, ed. Griselda Pollock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 6. The reported number of disappearances is around 1,000–2,000, yet the lists prepared by human rights organizations are tentative, as there are no official records available. Hafıza Merkezi (Truth, Justice, Memory Center) has published a detailed report on enforced disappearances, Özgür Sevgi Göral, Ayhan Iߞık, and Özlem Kaya, The Unspoken Truth: Enforced Disappearances, trans. Nazım Dikbaߞ (Istanbul: Hafıza Merkezi, 2013), and has established an interactive database about the disappearances since 1991. See the website: http://www .zorlakaybetmeler.org. M E M O RY A S E N C O U N T E R

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7. Hafıza Merkezi had reported in 2013 that 89 percent of the court cases concerning enforced disappearances have been continuing for more than eighteen years with a high possibility of pushing these cases into the “statute of limitations” that sets in after twenty years. For more recent information about the state of the legal cases, see: http://www.zorlakaybetmeler.org. 8. “Hasan Ocak Dosyası Kapandı  .  .  . Ölümün Zamanı Aߞınmaz,” Cumhuriyet, November 22, 2016, http://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/haber/turkiye/634441 /Hasan_Ocak_dosyasi_kapandi . . ._Olumun_zamani_asinmaz.html. 9. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 74. 10. Cited in Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 75. 11. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 78–79. 12. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 112. The movement of what we now call the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo started in April 1977, shortly after the declaration of the military dictatorship in Argentina, when in the beginning only fourteen women carrying the photos of their disappeared children walked quietly in a circle around the Plaza de Mayo, the center of state authority in Buenos Aires. 13. Ece Temelkuran, Ogઅlum, Kızım, Devletim: Evlerden Sokaklara Tutuklu Anneleri (Istanbul: Metis, 1997), 106. 14. Ayߞe Günaysu,“‘Cumartesi’ Nasıl Baߞladı, Neden AraVerildi?” Bianet, October 24, 2014, http://bianet.org/bianet/yasam/159385-cumartesi-nasil-basladi-neden-ara -verildi. 15. Nadire Mater, “Erkekler Yüksek Politikayı Tercih Ediyor” previously published in Pazartesi, July 1996. Republished in Filiz Koçali “Galatasaray’ın Kadınları,” October 25, 2014, https://bianet.org/biamag/yasam/159418-galatasaray-in -kadinlari. 16. “Trauma and Performance: Lessons from Latin America,” PMLA 121, no. 5 (2006): 1674, italics added. 17. Kirsten Mahlke, “‘All Limits Were Exceeded Over There’: The Chronotope of Terror in Modern Warfare and Testimony,” in Space and the Memories of Violence: Landscapes of Erasure, Disappearance and Exception, ed. Estela Schindel and Pamela Colombo (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 18. Taylor, “Trauma and Performance,” 1676. 19. Mahlke, “‘All Limits Were Exceeded Over There,’” 113 (italics added). 20. Mahlke, “‘All Limits Were Exceeded Over There,’” 116. 21. Taylor, “Trauma and Performance,” 1676. 22. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 232. 23. Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 24. Mater, “Erkekler Yüksek Politikayı Tercih Ediyor.” [ 148 ]

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25. Filiz Karakuߞ, “Neden Kadınlar,” previously published in Pazartesi, July 1996. Re-published in Filiz Koçali “Galatasaray’ın Kadınları.” 26. Erkan Kayılı, a male activist in the movement says: “We men cannot speak silently to each other even in the case of a minor conflict, we immediately get ready for a power game.” Erkan Kayılı, “Kadınlarla Çalıߞmak,” previously published in Pazartesi, July 1996. Re-published in Filiz Koçali “Galatasaray’ın Kadınları.” 27. See Meltem Ahıska, “The Power-Drive and the Time of Feminine Politics,” Feministiqa 1 (2018), 89–92, http://feministiqa.net/the-power-drive-and-the-time -of-feminine-politics/. 28. Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 110–13. 29. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 63. 30. Ana Longoni, “Photographs and Silhouettes: Visual Politics in the Human Rights Movement of Argentina,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 25 (2010): 6. 31. Longoni, “Photographs and Silhouettes,” 6. 32. Mater, “Erkekler Yüksek Politikayı Tercih Ediyor.” 33. Taylor, “Trauma and Performance,” 1676. 34. Ettinger, Matrixial Borderspace. 35. Rosa Tarlovsky de Roisinblit has been one of the leading figures of the movement of Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. She was ninety-five years old at the time of the interview in 2014. ÇiОdem Öztürk, “Rosa Arjantin’den Cumartesi’yi Selamlıyor,” Bianet, October 24, 2014, http://bianet.org/bianet /yasam/159393-rosa-arjantin-den-cumartesi-yi-selamliyor. 36. Öztürk, “Rosa Arjantin’den Cumartesi’yi Selamlıyor.” 37. Ross Poole, “Two Ghosts and an Angel: Memory and Forgetting in Hamlet, Beloved, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” Constellations 16, no. 1 (2009): 127. 38. Poole, “Two Ghosts and an Angel ,” 125. 39. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace. 40. Poole, “Two Ghosts and an Angel,” 128. 41. Hatice Bozkurt and Özlem Kaya, “Holding up the Photograph”: Experiences of the Women Whose Husbands Were Forcibly Disappeared (Istanbul: Hafıza Merkezi, 2014). 42. Many women whose husbands have been forcibly disappeared do not have official marriage contracts and lack social security. Consequently, despite the psychological burden and the complexities of the legal procedures most of them have accepted to “hand in his death” for economic support when forced by the state authorities to do so. Bozkurt and Kaya, Holding up the Photograph, 51. 43. Bozkurt and Kaya, Holding up the Photograph, 52. 44. Bozkurt and Kaya, Holding up the Photograph, 52 M E M O RY A S E N C O U N T E R

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45. Bozkurt and Kaya, Holding up the Photograph, 57. 46. The relatives of the disappeared started to organize Dayikên ߸emiyê (Saturday Mothers in Kurdish) protests with the demand of “Find the disappeared, prosecute the perpetrators” in Diyarbakır in January 2009, and then in Cizre. Gradually the protests spread across to cities like Batman and Yüksekova. Bozkurt and Kaya, Holding up the Photograph, 60. 47. Bozkurt and Kaya, Holding up the Photograph, 61. 48. Bozkurt and Kaya, Holding up the Photograph, 62. 49. Susana Torre, “Claiming the Public Space: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo,” in Gender, Space, Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction, ed. Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner, and Iain Borden (London: Routledge, 2000), 144. 50. Seremetakis, “Memory of the Senses,” 12. 51. Gülsüm Baydar and Berfin ԭvegen, “Territories, Identities, and Thresholds: The Saturday Mothers Phenomenon in Istanbul” Signs 31, no. 3 (2006): 696. 52. Baydar and ԭvegen, “Territories, Identities, and Thresholds,” 697 (italics added). 53. For a critical discussion of emotions and new political subjectivities in the case of Saturday Mothers, see Zeynep Gülru Göker, “Presence in Silence: Feminist and Democratic Implications of the Saturday Vigils in Turkey” in Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa, ed. Joel Beinin and Frédéric Vairel (Standford, California: Standford University Press, 2011) 54. Elizabeth Grosz, “Phallic Mother” in Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, ed. Elizabeth Wright (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992); Baydar and Ivegen, “Territories, Identities, and Thresholds,” 696. 55. For example, the Turkish state in consolidating the ideology of gender has addressed women in the following manner: “Hey mothers! Hey future mothers! The child is not only yours. It is the property of Turkish country, an asset to the Turkish nation. It is a national duty to raise these living gems that we have entrusted to your utmost care and effort.” Gürbüz Türk Çocugઅu journal, 1926, cited in a comprehensive article on the construction of motherhood in Ottoman and early republican modernization of Turkey. Tuba Demirci-Yılmaz, “Osmanlı ve Erken Cumhuriyet Dönemi Türkiye Modernleߞmesinde Annelik Kurguları,” Cogito 8 (2015): 85. This nationalist call to mothers in Turkey resonates with many other and very different historical contexts. For example see Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Oakland: University of California Press, 1997) on similar dynamics of construction and regulation of motherhood in Britain, and Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Crafting an Educated Housewife in Iran,” in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998) in Iran most prominently starting in the nineteenth century. [ 150 ]

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56. Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 167. 57. Judith Butler, “Foreword: Bracha’s Eurydice,” in Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, xi. 58. Griselda Pollock, “Femininity: Aporia or Sexual Difference?” in Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, 3. 59. Ettinger, Matrixial Borderspace, 90. 60. See Meltem Ahıska, “Counter-Movement, Space and Politics: How the Saturday Mothers of Turkey Make Enforced Disappearances Visible” in Space and the Memories of Violence: Landscapes of Erasure, Disappearance and Exception, eds. Estela Schindel and Pamela Colombo (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) for a discussion on counter-movement and Saturday Mothers.

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CHA P T E R V I II

Aquí Performing Mapping Practices in Santiago de Chile MARÍA JOSÉ CONTRERAS LORENZINI

I

t’s a warm autumn day in Santiago. I’m dressed in red and my sevenmonth pregnant belly is particularly prominent as I lie on my back on a sidewalk alongside a busy road. I can feel the sun on my face, the dust below my head, the sounds of the Santiago that doesn’t stop. I’m motionless, imagining the last instants of the life of Marta who was killed forty-three years before in that same spot. Was she assassinated at night? Could she feel the sun on her face while lying down dying in the street? Did she know somebody was following her? What was she thinking at the exact moment when she was shot? My action was part of Aquí, which I performed in August 2016 and which I analyze in the following pages. In 2014 I learned about an interactive map that geolocates the exact places where corpses of victims of political executions carried out during the first four months of the dictatorship in Chile (September to January, 1973) were found in Santiago. All of these places remain unmarked in the urban space of the city, so I considered the digital map an innovative tool for mobilizing erased memories. The performance Aquí reverberates with the digital map: it proposes an alternative embodied and ephemeral mapping tactic that contributes to alternate ways of making visible what remains unmarked, expanding the repertoire of protests by which historical political violence has been represented in Chile’s urban space. In Aquí, I reoccupy some of the unmarked spots identified in the digital map by performing a die-in. The gesture is solitary: I just pop up in the [ 152 ]

city and lie motionless in the exact locations where female corpses of the dictatorship’s victims were found. Aarón Montoya-Moraga, using a drone, takes aerial photos of my body lying in these spaces: streets, terrains vagues, riverbanks, and dumping grounds. The performance does not end in the embodied gesture; it is an open-ended practice that continues on the internet, where the photos are exhibited and linked to the map. Beside each photo, we find the name of the victim, the place where her corpse was found, and the time of arrival to the morgue. Aquí is not designed for in-the-moment, present spectators, but rather for internet users, who can get to know both the digital map and the embodied practice of the reoccupation of these spots.1 Aquí problematizes the notion of protest by walking a thin line between a dissenting performance and a protest. Benefiting from a feminist perspective, in this essay I will discuss the relationship between vulnerability and agency in the live performance and also the political efficacy of its photographic documentation in the digital realm. I propose this analysis from my particular point of view as both artist–author and scholar of the performance. Without any intention of installing a distance between my work as a performer and my capacity to reflect on it, I will work from the position of

Figure 8.1 Source: By Aarón Montoya-Moraga, edited by Andrés Cortínez. AQ U Í

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a reflective practitioner, capable both of devising performance materialities and offering conceptualizations about them.

Santiago: The City of Forgetting In the Metropolitan Region of Chile, where Santiago is located, there are more than 240 memory sites related to the dictatorship. According to Piper and Hevia, these places make up a sort of archipelago, “a set of islands where each is itself a territory, but at the same time, and viewed as a whole, make up a larger territory built by each one of them.”2 As the authors indicate, memory locations registered since the end of the dictatorship can be grouped according to different criteria. There are memorials, monuments, walls of names, former concentration and extermination camps, plaques, sports stadiums, bridges, murals, monoliths, and even animitas (roadside shrines). Some are concentrated in the center of the city, while others are housed in more peripheral areas. Some of these places have different uses today and indicate a violent past only by dint of some reminder sign; for example, the Detention Center Tres y Cuatro Álamos, has been transformed into a home for vulnerable children and signals its past with a mural on its outside walls that alludes to the embroidered handicrafts that the prisoners made as an act of resistance and hope. Some of these sites were known even before the end of the dictatorship, as is the case of Villa Grimaldi and Casa José Domingo Cañas, while others were gradually identified thanks only to the testimonies of victims given to the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. These places, be they houses, buildings, or street locations, hold dissimilar relationships with their violent pasts. Memorials sometimes indicate the scene of a crime, such as the Muro de la Memoria (Wall of Rememberance) of Puente Bulnes; at other times, memorials indicate where the bodies of the victims were found, as in the case of the Memorial Las Sillas, a tribute to the murdered members of the Communist Party (Manuel Guerrero, Manuel Parada, and Santiago Nattino), built on the site where the bodies were abandoned north of Santiago. This heterogeneity shows that sites do not per se hold memory, but they become sites of memory when they are given value as places where something happened that is considered worth remembering and when this recognition generates specific practices and uses of the space. From this perspective, as Patrizia Violi suggests, it is important not to think of sites of memory as a geographic morphology; places are memory sites [ 154 ]

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when they include people, objects, and the use of the space around a common political project.3 Thus, as Violi emphasizes, it is essential to approach these places not from an ontologizing or reifying view; a place is never a permanent “deposit” of memory. To be anointed with memory, these sites have to be invested, constructed, and animated to work not only as indices of violence but also as interpretations and political judgments of the past.4 Memory sites respond, then, to a collectivity that gathers to retrieve a trace of the past in a given space. This is the case with most of the abovementioned Chilean sites of memory, which have been driven mainly by nongovernmental organizations, associations of relatives of detenidos desaparecidos, or former political prisoners’ organizations. In Chile, the state’s role has been limited to buying some properties where crimes against humanity occurred in order to loan them to organizations that administer and manage them. Only on rare occasions has the state been involved in the design and implementation of sites of memory. Perhaps the most emblematic example is the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Museum of Memory and Human Rights), which opened in 2010 during President Michelle Bachelet´s first term.5 The state’s failure to take a leading role in rescuing memory sites responds to the politics of consensus established during the transition in Chile.6 Let us remember that after seventeen years of a civic military dictatorship in Chile led by Augusto Pinochet, the so-called “transition to democracy” was negotiated with Pinochet still as commander in chief of the army. The transition, set in motion by the Referendum of 1988, in which the population voted against Pinochet’s regime continuing, was based on a consensus to grant impunity to perpetrators of crimes against humanity. The narrative of reconciliation was possible only because political and juridical institutions validated the military’s pact of silence.7 The state was the principal agent of a misunderstood reconciliation that was undertaken at the expense of the quest for truth and justice. The evident result was the silencing of any countermemory practices and the institutionalization of a sanctioned amnesia that shaped every possible externalization of memory.8 One specific consequence of this politics of amnesia is the way memory was and still is displayed and performed in public space. Along with the memory sites managed by civic organizations, there are thousands of other places where acts of violence were committed that remain unmarked, unseen, and unknown. More than failing to recover spatial memorial heritage, the politics of consensus and the consequent amnesia radically and AQ U Í

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actively contributed to rendering these places and the events that happened in them invisible. This invisibilization was an active operation; forgetting must not be understood as an absence but as a manipulation of the collective memory process. In Chile, the state constructed “a city for reconciliation,” obsessed with appearing as the modern Latin-American neoliberal capital of consumption.9 Places have a performative dimension: they activate practices and behaviors. Communities give life to the memory of places and define, in an always dynamic and ongoing dialogue, their meanings and uses. A politics of amnesia curtails collaborative practices of remembrance and, more importantly, collective practices of protest and resistance that may somehow disrupt the amnesiac status quo. An unmarked city is a city of oblivion, not because it has no monuments but because it does not allow the working–through that necessarily involves mobilizing memory. Ultimately, as Julian Bonder reminds us, memorial, etymologically, means not only “monitor” or guide, but it also refers to the ability of the mind to be alert and lucid, ready for action.10 A city built in the shadow of crimes is a city that cannot make sense of or generate a narrative and collective embodied practices about a violent past—a city where the dead are still haunting.

Digital Mapping: A New Landscape of Memories The National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Report established that 2,279 persons were killed for political reasons during the civic-military dictatorship under Pinochet.11 Almost half of these executions occurred during the first months of the dictatorship in Santiago and they took place all over the city: in universities and hospitals, in the streets, and in the domiciles of the victims. Santiago is full of unmarked places where killings happened for political reasons. In 2012, Gabriel Medina, a journalist from ArchivosChile, elaborated an interactive map of Santiago that displays the sites where the bodies of people executed by the Chilean civic-military dictatorship between September 11 and December 31, 1973 were found.12 Each of these places is marked with a silhouette in the digital map. You can see the map with all the silhouettes at once, or you can play an animation that shows the avalanche of corpses found day after day in streets, rivers, and other places around the city. In some cases, the exact spot is not specified; this is why many of the [ 156 ]

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silhouettes concentrate, for instance, in the Posta Central, where the corpses found in the streets were first transferred. The map shows a total of 1,053 cases of political executions. Of these, 890 correspond to cases registered in the Rettig Report (signaled by black silhouettes), 150 are potential cases of political violence detected by the research of ArchivosChile that do not appear in the report of Truth and Reconciliation (in red), and 13 are indeterminate cases (in blue). The map also allows clicking over the silhouettes in order to obtain information about the victims. The sources of the research developed by ArchivosChile were obtained through the Transparency Law that obliged the Servicio Médico Legal, the Registro Civil, and the Segundo Juzgado Militar to provide official documentation about the places where corpses were found during the first months of the dictatorship. The research also included dozens of interviews with former morgue workers, employees of the Segundo Juzgado Militar, and relatives of the victims. One of the most useful documents was the Transfer Book of the Chilean Legal Medical Service, which comprises the registration of each of the bodies examined by forensic medics in that period. The book contains information (often incomplete) about the cause of death (e.g., “shot,” “hanging,” etc.), the place where the person was wounded or killed, the time of arrival at the morgue, and other information. The interactive map is a powerful tool that makes visible what otherwise remains unseen in the city. Instead of plaques or monoliths that mark the space in situ, the map creates a bi-dimensional graphic representation of the space and then marks it. This map subscribes to the current trend of mapping projects around the world. As Montanari and Frattura suggest, the production, processing, and construction of maps “has become a veritable social, cultural and widespread practice that does not come just from the commercial market, but has also taken on, so to speak, aspects of a widespread grassroots practice.”13 ArchivosChile appropriates this diffuse activity to contest the hegemonic politic of erasure. The gesture is significant since, as Franco Farinelli affirms, maps create habitus in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense, that is, “structuring structures” that both come from practice and shape these practices.14 To Bourdieu, habitus is neither objective nor a product of free will; it works as a set of dispositions rather than as internalized mandates.15 Applying this notion of habitus, one can see how the digital map breeds an alternative geopolitical and affective perspective on Santiago, a city that, despite its aspiration to erase its violent past, is exposed as full of blood-splattered corners. AQ U Í

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The map takes charge of the restrictive possibilities of the externalization of memory in urban space and transfers them to an alternative scenario (the digital), where it is possible to display what has been denied and erased. The animation also provides a rhythmic sense of the quantity and placement of the political executions. The map makes evident the machinery of terror of the civic-military dictatorship. Its web-based interactivity creates a new landscape of memory, one that provides information suppressed by more established media and opens a path to another usage of the space and probably another affective relation to it. The map creates a new spatiality, a new temporality, and also a new perspective to look at, live in, and practice in the city of Santiago. It actually achieves the construction of another landscape that disrupts the national politics of consensus, becoming an effective means of mobilizing memory work for the future.

Aquí (Here): Between Vulnerability and Agency As a performance artist, I was profoundly moved by the interactive map. I thought about all these unmarked places and reflected on the operation of digital marking. I then imagined a further marking strategy that, instead of working in the direction of monumentalization of memory, could propose a practice that, in accord with the performance work I’ve been developing, be both embodied and ephemeral. I thought that an ephemeral performance could act in counterpoint both to the physical unmarking and the digital mark. My first decision as an artist was to work on the cases of women. If erasure and forgetfulness are installed in Chilean society generally, it is well known that the stories of women are even more difficult to retrace and reveal.16 Of the 1,053 cases included in the interactive map, forty-three are women, of which thirty-one are cases registered in the Rettig Report, eleven are indeterminate cases, and one is potential. Of the thirty-one cases included in the Rettig Report, only twenty-three established a defined geolocation. From these cases, I selected eleven (citing the date of the coup, September 11, 1973). My concrete action was very simple: I lay down motionless in the exact spot defined by the map, like a dead body. This action cites a protest tactic, the die-in, that are a widespread practice in protests around the world. In the United States, the first record of a die-in dates from the 1960 environmental [ 158 ]

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Figure 8.2 Source: By Aarón Montoya-Moraga, edited by Andrés Cortínez.

protest in Boston that proposed that a “festival of death” be staged to oppose the pollution caused by the traffic at Logan airport. In 1969, a multitude of demonstrators lay on the grass in Central Park to protest against the Vietnam War, while in 1976 Le Monde à bicyclette performed several die-ins in the streets of Montreal to reclaim the rights of the cyclists. Cyclists have been performing die-ins ever since in many cities throughout the world. In the 1990s, the ACT UP movement performed large die-ins in Washington but also in Paris. More recently protests against police brutality in the United States in Ferguson, Missouri regarding the fatal shooting of Michael Brown and in New York to protest the killing of Eric Garner (both in 2014) included massive die-ins. In Colombia, die-ins have been performed during the last years to call attention to narco violence. In Chile, the most massive die-in was convened by me in 2013 for the fortieth anniversary of the state coup. For eleven minutes, 1,200 people participated in the die-in along La Alameda, the main street of Santiago, creating a two-kilometer line to commemorate the 1,200 detenidos desaparecidos in Chile.17 The citation of specific protest tactics utilized elsewhere is one of the salient features of contemporary social movements. Social media and the AQ U Í

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internet have played significant roles in disseminating actions and gestures within and beyond national borders and across different time zones.18 Digital media have enabled a transnational and transtemporal continuity of memorial tropes and practices, constructing what several scholars have been calling connective memories.19 The re-appropriation of these tactics creates a historical continuity that amplifies the reach of local movements and allows for mutual learning. The citation of the die-in in Aquí subscribes to this transnational trend and connects Chilean local memory politics to global performances of direct action. But it also repurposes the die-in with another way of performing it. While die-ins are typically mass events—the more people the better—in Aquí I perform a “solo die-in.” This choice has to do with the digital map, which renders visible the appearance of individual corpses. As mentioned above, the map allows one to click on the silhouette in order to get more information about that single victim. Aquí echoes the digital map’s interplay between the individual and the collective. As the digital map allows one to visualize both the massive recurrence of state violence and the singularity of the victims, Aquí tries to appeal to both dimensions: the recurrence is expressed in the series of photos while the individuality appears in the solo gesture. As an embodied gesture, Aquí materializes this interplay in its particular way. The human body signifies a single existence, but it also indicates the general type of human being; it works both as a token and type. The dual dimension of showing the body is something that I’ve been investigating in my creative work. In Aquí, I’m not “acting” as the victims, neither am I “representing” them. As an artist, I chose not to know anything about the victims; I knew only what appeared in the map (their age and name). My gesture is plain and simple: I’m occupying the same spot where female victims of the dictatorship were murdered. I’m not dressing as them, I’m not relating to them as “characters.” I’m very careful to prevent “fictionalizing” past events and “acting” as past victims. I’m literally “in the place of ” these women, trying to work as an index, not a symbol. This gesture is performed by the structuring presence of my own literal social identity: I’m a Chilean woman and artist present in the place of a past victim. My body indexes the lack of a physical mark capable of indicating an act of state terrorism committed in public space. The relation to the interactive map was crucial but not always easy. Sometimes it was feasible to lie down in the exact places that the map defined, but other times it became impossible. After forty-three years, the [ 160 ]

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Figure 8.3 Source: By Aarón Montoya-Moraga, edited by Andrés Cortinez.

city has changed notably, so there were many spots that could no longer be reached. This is the case of the place were Isabel Díaz was executed; nowadays a crossroads of highways that were not there in 1973 runs through the location. In this case, I chose the nearest place where it was possible to lie down, which turned out to be a dumping ground. While doing the performance, I experienced firsthand the most concrete evidence of the need to have some kind of sign in order to transform these spots from vernacular places into memorial sites. Aquí provided an alternatively embodied way of marking these places. My presence in each of these spots, even if provisional, was a way of re-inhabiting these forgotten places and performing the political gesture of saying, “here a woman was killed.” The die-in performance became a strong, touching, and sometimes dangerous action. I lay down in the streets where cars sometimes passed by without even noticing me; I stayed motionless in the bank of a heavily polluted river; I rested on a filthy dumping ground and lay down in front of a police car. My seven-month pregnancy made these experiences more difficult, both because I could not move as freely as usual (and that made it even more difficult to reach these places) and because I was more selfconscious of the risks these actions implied. My pregnant condition also AQ U Í

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yielded immediate reactions among the people in the streets who saw me. Many times during the performance, people approached and asked me if I was OK. On one of these occasions, a medical team came out from their polyclinic to assist me. Clearly my pregnancy increased the perception of my vulnerability (and at the same time, problematically eclipsed any other possible symbolic interpretation about the gesture). Aquí also elicited other types of reactions. For instance, inside the ex-Universidad Técnica, where the corpse of Marta Ana Vallejo was found, students kidded about my presence; I could hear a couple of them joking: “Look! I found a Pokémon” (an apt joke, considering that the popular Pokémon Go game arrived in Chile in those same days). At other times, the action just passed without notice and provoked no reaction among passersby. In every single spot, a sense of vulnerability took possession of me. While lying down in these dirty forgotten places, I could imagine the vulnerability of the women who were killed there forty-three years before. The sense of vulnerability that I felt was not only an affective dispositional product of the enactment of the die-in, it also reflected a social ontology that Judith Butler has described well. According to Butler’s conceptualization, “[V]ulnerability understood as a deliberate exposure to power is part of the very meaning of political resistance as an embodied enactment.”20 Studying the forms of political assembly from a feminist perspective, Butler proposes a new way of considering activism, not just in terms of an active body but through the interplay between vulnerability and resistance: “Such collective forms of resistance are structured differently than the idea of a political subject that establishes its agency by vanquishing its vulnerability— that is the masculinist ideal we surely ought to continue to oppose.”21 Aquí responds to this interplay between vulnerability and agency. Instead of performing a protest in which my body could be vigorous, I chose to lie down, motionless, exposing, and enacting the victims’ and my own vulnerability. The performance develops in the liminal region described by Butler in which receptivity and responsiveness are not clearly distinguishable and where the performative gesture is neither fully passive nor fully active. But Aquí does not end with the live action, as noted above; a drone took aerial photos of my action. The use of the drone is more than an aesthetic choice: it also reframes a technological device that has been used as a military arm both to directly attack and to surveil. Far from being innocent toys, drones were created as weapons: let’s not forget that one of the initial names for drones were predators. In Aquí, the drone works both as a military [ 162 ]

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and as an aesthetic tool. Analogously to the replication of the gesture of the die-in, the drone offers concrete ways of juxtaposing past and present vulnerabilities. The photos of my performance are displayed on the internet, linked to the map, and displaying the information of the victim that corresponds to each photo. The aerial photos publicized on the web rhyme with the map’s visuals, which also work with a zenithal point of view. Past and present weave and coincide in a panoptical perspective that installs a space under surveillance. The pictures taken from above also contextualize my gesture in urban space in an attempt to show both my body lying on the ground performing the mark, and the immediate context that appears as not caring, not knowing, not interested. The alternative mapping of the sites of atrocity that Aquí retells is not, then, an independent gesture. Aquí may not be understood without the interplay among the absence of physical signs in these places, the digital mapping, the live performance of reoccupying the unmarked sites, and its last instance: its turn back to the internet. The final addressee, then, is the internet user, who may see the digital and embodied mapping working together both as alternative and complementary tactics.

Figure 8.4 Source: By Aarón Montoya-Moraga, edited by Andrés Cortinez. AQ U Í

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New Forms of Protest: Platforms, Practices, and Political Mobilization What does Aquí do? Is Aquí itself some kind of protest? Does it produce any political mobilization? How can this mobilization be characterized? A protest traditionally is defined as a live event that occurs in a public space and congregates groups of demonstrators. Its political efficacy typically relies on the massiveness of the call or on the creativity of the means of expression that protesters use in order to get the attention of authorities and put pressure on them to achieve certain political goals. Certainly, Aquí does not correspond to this definition. There are two key issues that distinguish Aquí from a traditional protest. The first is its means of expression: Aquí does not rely exclusively on the modality of presence; Aquí uses both offline (the live performance) and online resources (the diffusion of the archive of the performance). The joint use of offline and online resources in Aquí is not an isolated case; it is actually just one example of how the space of appearance of the political has diversified in

Figure 8.5 Source: By Aarón Montoya-Moraga, edited by Andrés Cortinez. [ 164 ]

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recent decades. Recent forms of political assembly no longer take place exclusively in the streets and squares; they also currently rely heavily on the digital. Many authors have discussed the effects of the internet on communication within social movements. It is well-documented that social movements since 2000 have been using the internet, in particular social media, to facilitate the “organizing without organization” or to coordinate collective actions amid a lack of funding and infrastructure.22 The most typical use of social media is to amplify the reach of a preexisting face-to-face community. This is, for example, the emblematic case of the Occupy movements, which, as Kavada explains, had a “core” of participants (people camping) and a large network of digital supporters who were not in situ.23 The role of the digital in Aquí exceeds this instrumental function; it works as a radical tool that reconfigures the politics of memory by allowing forgotten memories to appear and by rendering them available to a larger community. The function of the digital in Aquí is not then only communicative, but it supports the reshaping of an institutionalized politics of memory. The performance not only traces unmarked places; it unfolds new places, practices, and landscapes. Both dimensions, the digital and the embodied, produce a mutual synergetic loop, through which they work together. The live performance cannot be interpreted without reference to the digital map, and it is not complete until it goes back to the web, where it meets its addressee. The live and digital intertwine, generating a hybrid and liminal scenario that is idiosyncratic and that hosts and configures the protest against the hegemonic politics of erasure and amnesia in Chile. If, as mentioned before, the map itself structures another habitus, Aquí radicalizes the gesture by creating another mapping, this time based on the photography of a live performance. Therefore, the political mobilization does not respond to a pre-established mode of organization. The second feature distinguishing Aquí from a traditional protest is its form of political associativity. In the initial live gesture of my lying in the locations where the corpses of women executed during the dictatorship were found, there was no simultaneous assembly of bodies. It was almost a private gesture whose significance was difficult to decipher, even for passersby. But the individuality of the gesture is not absolute: it starts from an individual motivation to project toward other forms of association. Even if other bodies were not there with me, there was an intergenerational aggregation of bodies and memories. I was there precisely because a woman had died in that particular spot, and that place remained unmarked and AQ U Í

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Figure 8.6 Source: By Aarón Montoya-Moraga, edited by Andrés Cortinez.

phagocytized by the rapid growth of the city of oblivion. Therefore, instead of thinking of a simultaneous assembly of present bodies, Aquí performed a time-lapsed accumulation of bodies: My body was there because forty-three years ago the bodies of Noelia, Norma, Marta, Rosa, Isabel, Blanca, Rosa Emilia, Tabita, Irma, Jessica, and Raquel were found without life in these places. The act is not individual; it involves many other legacies and memories that together become an intersubjective palimpsest. Of course, I’m also there with all my own personal memories and oblivions. My body does not carry these as “materials” or “objects,” but they just flow in and out of my body, as rivers and springs that activate and rest in response to that space that for some minutes collapses the past, the present, and the future. There is another form of collectivity that emerges from Aquí and that is constituted by the online spectatorship regime. The associativity that Aquí produces is supported by the digital. This is also a common trait in new forms of political assembly, as Marcela Fuentes affirms: “Convergence is achieved in different spaces and sites through techniques that include the digital and networked modalities of affecting supporters.”24 From this point of view, the co-witnessing process that the performance provokes does not rely on co-presence but on co-knowledge. Through its online register, Aquí [ 166 ]

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may reach anybody around the world who can become familiar with the critique of memory practices in Santiago. The addressee of the performance does not need to be in the physical spot to understand, be informed, and maybe even mobilized for action. Aquí does not put into communication a pre-existing community, but it offers possibilities for creating new communities that, even if they result in more disaggregated communities, probably less conscious of the collective and more centered on the individual, still can spark strong political commitments and alternative modes of solidarity. The solidarity that Aquí allows not only exceeds the physical space of co-presence, it also enables a sort of distributed solidarity that may be both intra- and intergenerational. The digital permits to build a network of solidarity that transcends temporalities weaving nongenealogical and nonlinear forms of mobilization of memory. The blast of both spatial and temporal dimensions is an important characteristic of these new ways of mobilization of memories. Aquí is an example of these new forms of protest—forms that require an urgent revision of the classical definition of protest that relies exclusively on bodily congregation in public spaces. Protests may be characterized by their dissent from and critique of certain institutions, nation-states, social

Figure 8.7 Source: By Aarón Montoya-Moraga, edited by Andrés Cortinez. AQ U Í

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structures, or politics, but they should not be defined by their modes of organization or expression. A looser definition may be more inclusive and effective in understanding contemporary modes of political organization. When studying a protest, one should look case by case at the ways different features combine and appear. Some of these may be, for instance, the platforms in which they operate (e.g., urban public space, private space, digital space), the character of practices they endorse (e.g., collective/individual; artistic/political), the forms of collectivity they configure (e.g., strong/loose membership, definite/permeable limits with other causes or movements, in-face/digital associativity), and finally the strategies by which they generate political mobilization. Aquí does produce political mobilization but according to its own scale and reach. In the first place, Aquí provides a perceptual experience that effectively requires mediatized spectators to adopt a definable position in relation to the assassination of women during the first months of the Chilean dictatorship and at the same time a critical position regarding the lack of any kind of mark in public space that could somehow constitute a micromemorial. Aquí demands that spectators make a cognitive, perceptual, and affective link between those spaces and the violent past that they

Figure 8.8 Source: By Aarón Montoya-Moraga, edited by Andrés Cortinez. [ 168 ]

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housed. In the second place, Aquí mobilizes different ways of congregating and diverse forms of practicing politics. Instead of working the scale of monumental memory, or even its display in public space, Aquí forwards small-scale relations among subjects that come together provisionally to share a new way of understanding the past and projecting the future. Smallscale protests produce intimate networks of solidarity that allow alternative ways of witnessing a violent past. These kinds of practices create micro co-resistances that, as a tissue of tiny capillaries, mobilize memory, and that may, I hope, expand to support a bigger terrain where more and more people bear responsibility for progressive social change.

Notes 1. The images are available in color on my website www.mariajosecontreras.com. In this volume, I include some of these pictures in black-and-white versions, specially prepared by Andrés Cortínez to fit the volume’s requirements. Unfortunately, this format does not provide a complete sense of the pictures. 2. Isabel Piper and Evelyn Hevia, Espacio y Lugar: Archipiélago de Memorias en Santiago de Chile (Santiago, Chile: Ocho Libros, 2012), 16 (my translation). 3. Patrizia Violi, Paessaggi della Memoria: Il Trauma, lo Spazio, la Storia (Milan, Italy: Bompiani, 2015), 23. 4. Violi, Paessaggi della Memoria, 26. 5. Michelle Bachelet was herself a political detainee and torture victim in 1975. 6. See Tomás Moulián, Chile Actual. Anatomía de un Mito (Santiago, Chile: LOM, 1997) and Katherine Hite, “La Superación de los Silencios en el Chile Postautoritario,” in Historizar el Pasado Vivo en América Latina, ed. Anne Perotin Dumon (Santiago, Chile: Editorial Universidad Alberto Hurado, 2007), 1–41, http:// www.historizarelpasadovivo.cl/downloads/hite.pdf. 7. Nelly Richard, Residuos y Metáforas. Ensayos de Crítica Cultural sobre el Chile de la Transición (Santiago, Chile: Cuarto Propio, 1998). 8. For insightful analysis of cultural production in post-dictatorship Chile, see Macarena Gómez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells: Memory and State Violence in Chile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009) and Nelly Richard and Alberto Moreiras, eds. Pensar en/la postdictadura (Santiago, Chile: Cuarto Propio, 2001). 9. This is not the case with other countries in South America, where the politics of memory was driven by an engaged state that responded more actively to the demands of symbolic reparation for the crimes committed in totalitarian regimes. In Argentina, for instance, the construction or restoration of sites of AQ U Í

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memory has been a significant strategy to mobilize memory. See for example Elizabeth Jelin, Los Trabajos de la Memoria (Madrid, Spain: Siglo XXI, 2002). 10. Julian Bonder, “On Memory, Trauma, Public Space, Monuments, and Memorials,” Places 21, no. 1: 67. 11. Gobierno de Chile, “Informe de la Comisión por la Verdad y la Reconciliación” (Santiago: Gobierno de Chile, 1991). 12. ArchivosChile.org is a project funded by the Center for Investigation and Information (CIINFO) of Washington, directed by John Dinges. The map is available at http://archivoschile.org/2012/01/mapa-interactivo/. 13. Federico Montanari and Luca Frattura, “Mapping Cities: The Bologna SelfMapping Project,” Ocula, 14 (2013): 3. 14. Franco Farinelli, “Dove (e Quando) il Luogo Divenne Spazio,” Memoria e Ricerca 45 (2014): 20. 15. Pierre Bourdieu, Raisons pratiques. Sur la théorie de l’action (Paris: Seuil, 1994). 16. My choice of working with women’s cases responded to a necessity that I couldn’t well articulate at that moment. It definitely didn’t respond to an adherence to a fixed gender binarism. When the photos where posted online, many spectators pointed out the resonance between the gesture I was proposing and the femicides that took and continue to take place in Chile. This echo, even if subtle and unarticulated, became meaningful to me too. 17. María José Contreras, “#VouloirNepasVoir ou la Possibilité de Présentifier la Présence Encore Absente de Détenus Disparus au Chili,” in Frontières & Dictatures. Images, Regards—Chili, Argentina, ed. J. Medina, M. Mora, and F. Soluages, (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2016), 81–102. See also Diana Taylor, Performance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 22. 18. Donatella Della Porta and Sidney Tarrow, eds., Transnational Protest and Global Activism (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). 19. See for instance Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Astrid Erll, “Traveling Memory,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 4–18; Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Andrew Hoskins, “7/7 and Connective Memory: Interactional Trajectories of Remembering in PostScarcity Culture,” Memory Studies 4, no. 3 (2011): 269–80. 20. Judith Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” in Vulnerability and Resistance, ed. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 22. 21. Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” 24. 22. Jennifer Earl, Jayson Hunt, R. Kelly Garrett, and Aysenur Dal, “New Technologies and Social Movements,” in The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements

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(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Dontella Della Porta and Lorenzo Mosca, eds., Movimenti Sociali e Globalizzazione (Rome: Manifestolibri, 2003). 23. Anastasia Kavada, “Creating the Collective: Social Media, the Occupy Movement and its Constitution as a Collective Actor,” Information, Communication & Society 18, no. 8 (2015): 884. 24. Marcela Fuentes, “Performance Política y Protesta,” in ¿Qué son los Estudios de Performance?, ed. D. Taylor and M. Steuernagel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

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CH A P T E R I X

#NiUnaMenos (#NotOneWomanLess) Hashtag Performativity, Memory, and Direct Action against Gender Violence in Argentina MARCELA A. FUENTES

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fter learning that the body of a missing fourteen-year-old girl had been found, the Argentine journalist Marcela Ojeda tweeted: “Actresses, politicians, artists, entrepreneurs, social leaders  .  .  . women, all women, bah..aren’t we going to raise our voice? THEY ARE KILLING US.”1 Ojeda’s tweet triggered 252 likes and 197 retweets, a humble beginning for a mobilization that would instigate nationwide massive rallies less than a month later, on June 3rd. It was May 11, 2015 at 11:24 a.m. and, in a matter of minutes, journalists, writers, and celebrities turned indignation over Chiara Páez’s murder into the planning steps for the first Ni Una Menos (Not One Woman Less) demonstration against gender violence in Argentina.2 Addressing specific interlocutors through Twitter mentions, protesters raised their voices and crafted a conversation that lasted all day. Twitter’s hyperlinked textuality enabled social media users to turn the finding of yet another lifeless body, the “day-after” picture, into an unfolding and cumulative mobilization, an insurgent tide. Carried over by the platform’s inquisitive “What’s happening” prompt, impromptu organizers brainstormed ideas in real time, trying to come out with the best collective response to mounting violence against women. Florencia Etcheves urged colleagues and followers to take to the streets while Soledad Vallejos urged for long-term demands.3 When the decision to demonstrate was consolidated, contributors suggested the use of black attire and cited the practice of laying out shoes to mark the victims’ absence.4 Enraged social media users [ 172 ]

employed a rapid-fire medium to spark mobilization towards social change, evoking protest repertoires that made strategic use of symbolic performance, memorialization, and direct action. As people grew determined to put a stop to the normalization of violence, memory, immediacy, and futurity were all suddenly woven together. While discussing aesthetic tactics to mobilize support for the street protest, some of the journalists involved in the networked mobilization recalled the reading marathon that had taken place in March, after the murder of nineteen-year-old Daiana García. This event had also been launched on social media through a Facebook page that invited writers, journalists, activists, and artists to “a marathon of readings, projections, and performance against femicide.” The event was titled Ni Una Menos. Feminist activist and writer,Vanina Escales, had suggested the name to visually capture the urgent need to respond to the almost daily murders of women.5 Two months later, with some of the reading marathon’s participants in the conversation, the Twitter group decided to use “Ni Una Menos” as the slogan for the June 3rd demonstration. Organizers continued using social media to mobilize action towards immediate and long-term solutions. For example, in their selfie campaign “De la foto a la firma” (From picture to signature) activists asked celebrities and public officials to support the movement through more than selfie posts. Organizers requested that electoral candidates sign a five-point document in which they pledged to secure the resources needed to end systemic violence against women. The main areas included in the document were access to justice, sexual education, official statistics, and equal opportunity. Through such campaigns, activists installed the issue of gender violence in the political agenda, crucially during a presidential election year. As these examples show, street assembly, symbolic performance, and digital networking are crucial, intertwined tools to spark protest and sustain social mobilization towards transformative justice.6 This essay analyzes the role of social media and performance in the development of Ni Una Menos (NUM) from a social media outcry to a transnational feminist movement.7 To theorize the tactics through which NUM tackles the deep roots of gender violence in Argentina while opening itself to transnational synergies and alliances, I focus on NUM’s uses of networked and symbolic action. Here, I show how, using hashtags and physically situated performance as both ephemeral and enduring cultural practices, NUM’s activists lay out the building blocks for radical change, linking memory and emergence: that is, learned and improvised tactics. # N I U N A M E N O S ( # N O T O N E WO M A N L E S S )

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As a feminist movement that frames gender-based violence as a human rights issue, NUM builds on the legacy of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. NUM’s slogan, “Not One Woman Less,” resonates with the plight of the Mothers, who demanded “Aparición con vida” (We Want Them Alive) in response to the forced disappearance of their children during Argentina’s 1976–1983 military dictatorship. Like “We Want Them Alive,” a phrase that repudiates state-mandated foreclosure, “Not One Woman Less” transcends a communicative function to become a performative tactic. Whereas critics claim that every new killing proves that the movement is ineffective and the slogan a delusion, by restating “Not One Woman Less” NUM does not merely demand an end to gender violence. NUM builds collective capacity, drawing from genealogies of women’s activism to create a future with “not even one woman less.”8 In this sense, NUM programs the future by actively rehearsing and living social and cultural change: it practices memory and it installs the future in the present. Through the persistent ephemerality of social media and collective performance practices, NUM denounces, interrupts, and challenges social scripts of women’s dispensability and violent disciplining.9

Undoing the “Pedagogy of Cruelty”: Ni Una Menos in Context Since its emergence in March 2015, NUM has evolved from a cultural event (the reading marathon) into a remarkable feminist movement dedicated to the goal of dismantling machismo and patriarchal violence. Initially spearheaded by a small collective of journalists, artists, and activists with decentralized branches across the country, over the course of its rapid development NUM has assembled an impressive repertoire of communicative and action-based tactics.10 NUM’s activist repertoire, tackling issues such as the criminalization of abortion, patriarchal exploitation, and institutional violence includes manifestos, journalistic pieces, open assemblies, rallies, strikes, tuitazos or Twitter campaigns, and performances in shopping malls, financial institutions, and other urban sites. One of NUM’s most ingenious protest performances was their December 2015 escrache or public shaming of the conservative magazine Noticias. Dressed as witches and performing a conjuro or incantation in front of reporters and policemen, the NUM collective repudiated the magazine’s [ 174 ]

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misogynist cover depiction of a group of male politicians dressed as monks burning outgoing President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in a bonfire. NUM announced their escrache as a “witches’ sabbath” and circulated a flyer denouncing the magazine cover as a “murderous pact” against autonomous and rebellious bodies, represented by Argentina’s first female president. Through their performance, the collective transformed Noticias’ deadly bonfire, the witch-hunt, into a cauldron party.11 Social media and performance tactics facilitate the decentralized and distributed networking through which NUM mobilizes responses to specific cases of gender violence as well as instances of institutional patriarchy. NUM’s decentralized operations are exemplified by the way the small leading collective initiates protest actions and campaigns, announcing them on the group’s Facebook fan page. NUM’s informal national branches, social organizations, and local women’s collectives then adjust and replicate them. NUM’s distributed networking is represented, for example, by the use of the #NiUnaMenos (#NotOneWomanLess) hashtag by women and allies who may disagree with some aspects of the collective’s agenda but wish to align with the cause of ending gender violence nevertheless.12 Crossing national borders, the hashtag #NiUnaMenos, particularly after NUM’s first demonstration of June 2015, has also facilitated transnational ties. Using this hashtag, international activists have not only shown solidarity with the Argentine movement but worked to reveal the global dimension of the spike in violence against women in urban and rural locations.The use of hashtags such as #NiUnaMenos, #NotOneWomanLess, and #NonUnaDiMeno demonstrates NUM’s distributed structure as a networked movement that does not necessarily connect to a central node. NUM also draws from other women’s movements from around the world. For its second rally of June 2016, NUM adopted #VivasNosQueremos (#WeWantOurselvesAlive), citing a previous march against gender violence held in Mexico on April 24. Later, on October 19, using the hashtag #NosotrasParamos (#WomenStrike) and #MiércolesNegro (#BlackWednesday), NUM followed in the footsteps of the Polish women who had just conducted a strike against a planned abortion ban using #BlackMonday. Because the October strike in Argentina was a response to the brutal killing of sixteen-year-old Lucía Pérez, once the stoppage was announced it provoked a new wave of replications around the world, with readings, Twitter campaigns, and rallies organized across Latin America, the United States, and Europe.13 As both a decentralized movement and a distributed network that # N I U N A M E N O S ( # N O T O N E WO M A N L E S S )

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converges on specific hashtags, NUM configures a multisited, multiplatform, (a)synchronic performance constellation that aims to hack patriarchy; that is, to override gendered scripts through multiple performative tactics and media.14 According to the Observatorio de la Violencia contra las Mujeres (Violence Against Women’s Watch) ran by MuMaLá, in Argentina a woman is killed every twenty-nine hours by a man from her close circle.15 Even though women are subjected to differential degrees of vulnerability depending on their material and affective resources, these crimes, called “femicides,” cut across class status, ethnicity, age, occupation, and geographic location.16 Crimes against women are perpetrated in private and public spaces, sometimes even in broad daylight, and witnessed by bystanders. In most cases, what we might call the “dramaturgy of femicide” because of the repetition of scenarios, props, and performer and audience set up, starts with the woman’s disappearance and is followed by the media’s dissection of the victim’s lifestyle and the serendipitous finding of her body in dehumanizing conditions. Victims are usually found dismembered, inside suitcases or garbage bags, and in inhospitable although not too remote landscapes. The anthropologist Rita Segato theorizes femicides or the killing of women motivated by their gender as part of what she calls “a pedagogy of cruelty.”17 For Segato, femicides are a political rather than a moral problem and these crimes are the outcome of the perpetrator's desire to inscribe power relations and spectacularize defeat for an audience that includes both women and men.18 This is why, rather than attempting to cover up the crime, victimizers set up complex stagings that underscore impunity and power. The aesthetic ensemble of props and locations that characterize the femicidal scenario—cardboard boxes, garbage processing plants, trash containers, abandoned lots or roads—performs a disciplining, terrorizing message that aims to “put women in their place,” particularly after women witnessed they could become presidents. Murderers are in charge of a grammar of value, they are “world creators” of uncanny dioramas, paradoxically aiming to restore a crumbling status quo. Victims are depleted of their vitality and constrained to tight spaces, placed in material relation with disposable, consumed items. These scenes seek to impact women’s self-understanding and being in the world. This is why NUM embraces a politics of resistance and disobedience rather than grief, aiming to undo the “pedagogy of cruelty” currently at play in Argentina’s misogynist culture. NUM’s core members believe that femicides are not a new phenomenon but an issue that has gained increased attention through media coverage [ 176 ]

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since 2015. What is new, due to NUM’s and other activists’ efforts, is women’s awareness of previously accepted machismo as a form of subjection and exploitation that makes domestic violence a public rather than a private concern.19 In the past, news reports presented gender-based crimes as crímenes pasionales (crimes of passion). This characterization positioned the perpetrator as a victim of volatile emotions, thus downplaying his responsibility in the “tragic” event. Cultural products such as telenovelas and tango lyrics usually narrate the killing of women by their partners as crimes of passion, contributing to shaping perceptions about relationship violence as the effect of the victim’s charms or love’s true nature. Additionally, even though mainstream media attention has contributed to raising awareness about the magnitude of the problem, reports on the killing of women focus on her lifestyle or on her unwillingness to leave abusive relationships as the cause of her demise. In Argentina and other Latin American countries, the conceptual shift from domestic violence or crimes of passion to femicides has been crucial to defining the murder of women as a state matter. In 2012, Argentina amended its legal code to include femicide as an aggravated type of homicide. In political terms, approaching these crimes, and gender violence broadly, as a public rather than private phenomenon is a crucial step, particularly in a period of conservative restoration and neoliberal restructuring that has entailed the drastic reduction of key social programs.20 Moreover, reframing crimes of passion or domestic violence as femicide is a crucial undertaking to treat gender violence as a human rights issue. As part of this effort, NUM has connected crimes against women to those executed during the military dictatorship. This is made explicit in the statement “No hay Nunca Más sin Ni Una Menos” (There is no Never Again without Not One Woman Less) or “Contra nuestros cuerpos Nunca Más” (Against our bodies, Never Again).21 By making this connection, NUM situates the current violence against women in critical connection to the gendered torture tactics employed by the military in the 1970s. Segato elaborates on this idea, placing gender violence as part of a stage of advanced capitalism in which war is a mode of existence.22 In this context, as Segato explains, women have shifted from being the collateral war trophy to becoming the territory of war. Women’s compromised existence manifests the passage from state terror to diffuse terror, from war as a state of exception to war as business as usual.23 In their activism, NUM uses creative communicative and action-based tactics to making these connections # N I U N A M E N O S ( # N O T O N E WO M A N L E S S )

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between past and present regimes of violence visible, focusing not only on specific femicide cases but on the systems that jeopardize women’s lives as part of death-creating political economies.24

Ni Una Menos: Re-Assembling Bodies, Disputing Meaning NUM’s emergence in March 2015 responded to the proliferation of femicides and to the media’s reporting of these cases. Because many of the members of the NUM collective are journalists and writers, they quickly denounced mass media’s coverage of femicides as a form of symbolic violence itself that reaffirms their disciplinary effects. María Pía López, one of NUM’s core members, described mainstream media’s portrayal of femicide victims as “un desguace carroñero” or a vulture scavenging. With this concept, López highlighted mass media’s commodification of the victim as an object of consumption even after her death.25 Mainstream media’s usual vulture scavenging/ victim-blaming coverage is even more pronounced in the era of social media when many news reports appropriate selfies of femicide victims as evidence of “sexually provocative behavior” and as visual pleasure bait. In response to the toxic practices of sensationalist journalism, on March 17, 2015, López and writer Selva Almada sent via Facebook Direct Message an idea for a collective action (a reading marathon) that López (then director of the Book and Language Museum) conceived as a “dispute against the violence inscribed in the killing of women.” Bringing people together via a poetic set up, the reading marathon aimed to undo the isolation and vulnerability of women that characterizes the dramaturgy of femicide. The open call for participants included a text by prominent feminist writer, María Moreno. Posted on NUM’s Facebook page on March 18, Moreno’s text, titled “Mujeres de la bolsa” (Bag Women), prompted 432 likes and 452 shares. The text played with the association between women and trash bags. Invoking the bag man, the folk tale character who kidnaps children when they move away from their parents, Moreno noted that, while the bag man was a solitary, threatening figure, “bag women” are multiple and vulnerable. Moreno’s version of the mythic story shifted the focus from the perpetrator (the bag man) to the victims (the women found in trash bags) in a way that echoed the media’s focus on victims but without victim-blaming. Moreno stated that the reading marathon was an occasion to “activate ourselves from [ 178 ]

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inside the bag . . . so that there is not one woman less.” Framing the marathon as a way of letting victims speak, Moreno linked this performance to the forensic practices of anthropology teams that led to the identification of the remains of the disappeared in recent years.26 López’s invitation to resignify bodies beyond pedagogies of cruelty and Moreno’s association between textual reading and forensic decoding configured NUM’s first action as a performance of memorialization, linking bodies across different periods of state violence. Moreno’s proposal to “get out of the bag” (salir de la bolsa), to not be intimidated, and to give voice to those who perished, constituted the foundation of the collective gesture that characterizes “Ni Una Menos” as a stubborn, determined utterance: Not One Woman Less. Not One Woman Less is a performative statement that interrupts the one more and then another and another disciplinary pedagogies enacted by perpetrators and the media. Not One Woman Less sets a limit (we will not tolerate one more death) and it negates the subtraction (we are still all of us) through the memorialization and resignification of women’s lives. As NUM’s member, Agustina Paz Frontera, asserts “Not One Woman Less” affirms the will to be all (the ones) that we are. It is a call for the persistence of a free life, a call that approaches others as free, living beings, and not as objects or possessions. “Those who say ‘Not One Woman Less’ can never be just one,” explains Frontera, while she asserts that the slogan expresses collective capacities and desires. “The name is so elliptic that there is a world behind it,” she adds.27 Like “Not One Woman Less,” “Salimos de la bolsa” (we get out of the bag, we rip the bag open) announces and materializes a rebellion against the patriarchal mandate to remain domestic, private, confined, and disempowered. “Salimos de la bolsa” erases the limits, the confines set by femicide perpetrators and patriarchal men who seek to assert power over women; it restores women (who might see themselves as potential victims) to the collective, to a culture of mutual care and support. Through a performative collective reading, NUM engaged the ephemerality of lives, of acts, returning to the scene of the crime to infuse bodies with vitality. The reading event staged a reaction to the femicide crisis through a powerful stance of symbolic presence. In response to the message inscribed onto and through bodies as part of a pedagogy of cruelty, the reading marathon installed a new semiosis of self-determination. NUM’s reading marathon inaugurated the Ni Una Menos movement by staging a doing through words that reconnected bodies and stories via performance’s # N I U N A M E N O S ( # N O T O N E WO M A N L E S S )

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liveness and social media’s ripples. By inviting people to gather in a collective reading, and by disseminating the news of the marathon event online, NUM created an experience of embodied, temporal accumulation that challenged the proliferation of femicide news. The marathon gave participants the opportunity to reassemble lives beyond the grammar of fear, impotency, and subjection disseminated by the iterative femicide machine. While femicide as a pedagogy of cruelty aims to curtail women’s autonomy and vitality, NUM’s marathon gave texture and depth to bodies, appropriating public and symbolic space not only to memorialize victims but to actively build livable futures. Through the marathon as a durational performance, the event’s participants interrupted and disrupted femicidal seriality, assembling rebellious gestures that demanded and claimed not one woman less and more life.28

#NiUnaMenos: Words that Act Differently or How To Do Things with Hashtags Another crucial component of NUM’s activism is the use of hashtags. Hashtags are hyperlinked labels or metadata tags preceded by the number sign. Initially advanced by users to organize posts around shared interests, hashtags were officially adopted by Twitter in 2009. Hashtags evolved from performing an indexical and retrieval function to becoming a central propeller of networked protests. Like graffiti, hashtags are gestured texts that transmit affect, argumentation, belonging, and dissensus. As Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa claim, hashtags transform “posting about” an issue into “participating in” a discussion or campaign when users’ individual posts are interlinked as part of a broader conversation.29 However, hashtags not only help people track those who share their current interests; hashtags are also performative, that is, they have material, potentially transformative, effects. Hashtags update J. L. Austin’s notion of the performative statement to the networked era.30 Like Austin’s speech acts, hashtags do things in the world rather than merely describe what exists. What I call “hashtag performativity” aims to highlight the work hashtags do as anchors of digitally networked iterative or citational practices with worldmaking effects. In NUM’s activism, hashtags shape feminist publics, help disseminate counter-pedagogies seeking to debunk patriarchal pedagogies of cruelty, and, ultimately, usher in utopian futures. [ 180 ]

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Hashtags are essential to what Javier Toret calls “technopolitics,” that is, the centrality of uses of technology in the organization, communication, and performance of collective action in contemporary social movements.31 By taking hyperlinked form, #NiUnaMenos became an active slogan that united those enraged by rampant gender violence, even if they were not part of the NUM collective nor felt they belonged to a particular movement. Like in the NUM reading marathon, hashtags materially and symbolically bring together participants during a crisis when murderers stage women in vulnerable and isolated positions. Working as anchors to retrieve what has been said and done in response to femicide or gender violence more broadly, hashtags such as #NiUnaMenos enable movements to expand their base, exploiting dispersion, multiplicity, and a-synchronicity.32 Hashtags not only allow NUM's supporters to find each other or to find information about NUM’s protests. Placed in contiguity, hashtags draw connections among different forms of gendered violence and efforts to discipline women. By pairing up #NiUnaMenos with other hashtags such as #LibertadParaBelen (#FreeBelen) or #AbortoLegal (#LegalAbortion), NUM has shown that femicide is only the tip of the iceberg within a wide range of instances of institutional, cultural, and interpersonal violence.33 Through hashtag contiguity, repetition and recombination activists and participants produce additional knowledge about the extent of the problem. Placing #NiUnaMenos alongside statements such as #FreeBelen or #FreeMilagroSala activists locate the criminalization of abortion and the criminalization of social protest as part of systemic institutional violence.34 Through hashtag contiguity, activists zoom out on the cartography of gender violence in order to situate specific cases within a conglomerate of power relations that benefit capitalism with state complicity. Beyond their spatial role as aggregators of dispersed information, action, and contexts, hashtags perform along a temporal axis.This is reflected through phenomena such as “trending” and “hashtag exhaustion.” The instability of hashtags’ relevance and freshness, which creates a sort of digital rhythm of generation and degeneration, is crucial for sustaining the momentum of networked protests and social movements. Linking a personal social media post to a collective mobilization, hashtags allow movements to capitalize on emergence, on momentum building, as well as on digital memory processes of ephemerality and regeneration. NUM engages social media’s attention economy, taking advantage of what Wendy Chun calls the “enduring ephemerality” of digital memory # N I U N A M E N O S ( # N O T O N E WO M A N L E S S )

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processes.35 As I mentioned before, making use of hashtag memory NUM adopted the hashtag #VivasNosQueremos (#WeWantOurselvesAlive) from the April 2016 march against gender violence in Mexico, which in turn had taken on the degenerating hashtag #VivosLosQueremos (#WeWantThemAlive). This was the statement that had galvanized protesters in response to the disappearance of the forty-three students of the Ayotzinapa rural school in September 2014.36 By recycling #WeWantThemAlive into #WeWantOurselvesAlive, the movement against femicides fueled a digital spark and made an important feminist intervention. In the change of grammatical person, from “them” to “ourselves,” activists drew attention to the structural vulnerability that conditions women’s lives.37 This discursive intervention helped the movement address the situation of very specific bodies. The hashtag also transformed mourning into vitality, into the desire to live, and it asserted a politics of self-care and autonomy that stood in contrast to previous activisms centered on women’s naturalized role as mothers and caregivers.38 Through hashtags that connect on- and off-line mobilizations across time, we can also chart NUM’s development from emotional reaction to human rights claim to political intervention. The hashtags #NosotrasParamos (#WomenStrike) and #NosotrasNosOrganizamos (#WeOrganizeOurselves), used in late 2016, crystalize how NUM’s activists made the connection between patriarchy and capitalism increasingly clearer, as they resorted to classic mobilization tools such as assemblies and strikes to empower women and show their crucial role in productive processes. After the brutal murder of sixteen-year-old Lucía Pérez, NUM and other women’s groups quickly organized a national strike and used the hashtag #NosotrasParamos (#WomenStrike) to promote it.39 This event built on “Black Monday,” the women’s strike organized by Polish women on October 3 which, together with NUM’s transnational activism, became the foundation for the worldwide March 8, 2017 Women’s Strike.40 In Argentina, the idea for a women’s strike gained steam on social media. On October 12 at 9:30 p.m. NUM’s member Florencia Alcaraz tweeted as if simply jotting down an idea: “A labor strike so that they stop killing us.”41 Alcaraz’s tweet seemed unrealistic, particularly in light of the lack of women’s leadership in unions. But the next day, another member of NUM, Marta Dillon, built on this idea and tweeted: “Let’s get out of Facebook! Today we get together!”42 In a public assembly held that same day, the October 19th national women’s strike was born. It took organizers [ 182 ]

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only six days to plan it. Women organizers took pride in the fact that they had launched the first national strike against Mauricio Macri’s government while male union leaders stood by their questionable agreements with the administration despite rising popular discontent. However, even though as a collective NUM determines the appropriate actions and hashtags to be followed, as part of a decentralized, networked, and transversal movement NUM is exposed to a dispute about modes of action and meaning. This dispute, like impromptu organizing, also takes place on social media. While the mobilization for the national strike was well underway, and activists and allies had adopted the hashtag #NosotrasParamos (#WomenStrike), on October 15 @pickandrollera invited Twitter users to adopt the name of femicide victims in their profiles. Her proposal prompted fifteen retweets and eleven likes. A follow-up tweet where she gave clearer instructions for the action and argued for the importance of memorializing the victims prompted 757 retweets and 823 likes.Those who joined @pickandrollera’s Twitter campaign adopted the hashtag #TodasSomosEllas (#WeAreAllThem) in solidarity with victims of gender-based violence.43 Countering @pickandrollera’s campaign somber tone, Alcaraz foregrounded NUM’s vitalist mission: “#WeStrike because we want media to tell people all the things we need to do to remain alive,” she tweeted.44 And she concluded: #WeWantOurselvesAlive #NotOneWomanLess. Meanwhile, the social media proliferation of pictures of femicide victims and gruesome details of their murder quickly mirrored mainstream media’s sensationalism. Whereas it is impossible to control the circulation of images depicting women as victims or to curtail activists’ aesthetic choices that emphasize loss rather than feminist interventions, NUM’s collective, as evidenced in Alcaraz’s tweets, has favored signifiers such as “celebration,” “assembly,” “joy,” and even “gossip” (or cotilleo in Spanish).45 In this way, besides emphasizing life over death to avoid revictimization, NUM reclaims these terms from their negative association with dishonest competition, betrayal, and “looseness.” Building on #NosotrasParamos (#WomenStrike), NUM presented their next action for November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, as #NosotrasNosOrganizamos (#WomenOrganizeOurselves). This action and hashtag foregrounded public assembly and striking as integral tools of political intervention. NUM invited women to get together in plazas and public buildings to discuss issues that affected them and to denounce institutions that block their access # N I U N A M E N O S ( # N O T O N E WO M A N L E S S )

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to safety and autonomy. NUM’s manifesto released on Facebook for the #25N action stated: #NiUnaMenos #NotOneLess manifesto on the global action 25N The International Feminist #WomenOrganizeOurselves On the 25th of November we, as women, reclaim our time; we stop doing what we are required to do and do what we want.To meet, think together, speak out, occupy the streets, the city squares, appropriate public space for our own means and convert it into a space of hospitality and open circulation for ourselves. We will put in place our antipatriarchal utopia. To invoke the fear, to make our claims visible, and actualize our power in every territory.To create links of solidarity, webs of self-protection and care among ourselves.We find in the other woman not a rival, as the patriarchy postulates, but instead a partner: we become accomplices in an unprecedented revolutionary alliance.46 As the document makes clear, #WomenOrganizeOurselves enacts women’s autonomy and feminist futurity through the very action of getting together to occupy public space. Building on #WomenStrike, #WomenOrganize Ourselves was a way to denounce the state’s accountability in the femicide crisis while actively working towards a different world. The strike and the public assemblies were expressions of direct action, not only vehicles but sites of social and cultural change where women could actualize an antipatriarchal horizon. #WomenStrike and #WomenOrganizeOurselves generated networks of collective agency through direct action.These hashtags configured an evolving narrative that exploited the ephemerality of social media and collective action as stepping stones in a revolution in motion. Starting with #NiUnaMenos and #VivasNosQueremos (#NotOneWomanLess and #WeWantOurselvesAlive), in NUM’s feminist mobilization hashtags map out on and off-line actions that propel the collective’s work across media and platforms.

#JuntasSomosInfinitas (#TogetherWeAreInfinite) As stated, NUM emerged as a response to the proliferation of news about the killing of women in Argentina. Focusing on grisly details of gender [ 184 ]

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violence and sensationalist victim-blaming profiles, mainstream media accounts replicate the pedagogy of cruelty at play in femicides. Through their social media and performance-structured actions, NUM interrupts the procession of death, inaugurating a very different performance in which women take center stage as political subjects. Drawing on the legacy of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, by claiming #NotOneWomanLess NUM created a movement of shifting contours that feeds from multiplatform actions and transversal dynamics. In NUM’s bold, revolutionary program to take down patriarchy, social media platforms are, entangled with streets and squares, key sites for mobilization and intervention. Through the impermanent flows and happenings that characterize social media and performance, NUM has built a repertoire of actions that are crucial for dismantling patriarchal scripts and prefiguring social change. Putting in conversation on and off-line modes of action, NUM intervenes in the logic of news outbursts, directing affective intensity toward a sustained and transformative political intervention, as demonstrated by the “Ni Una Menos” marathon event and the hashtag sequencing #WomenStrike and #WeOrganizeOurselves. The striking growth and development of the movement can be visualized through the arc that goes from #NiUnaMenos to #JuntasSomosInfinitas (#TogetherWeAreInfinite), the hashtag with which activists celebrated one of the movement’s most striking accomplishments on Twitter. The trajectory that goes from #NiUnaMenos to #JuntasSomosInfinitas shows the development of an alchemic formula that transforms resistance to loss (Not One Woman Less) into a celebration of the potentiality and power of collectivity (Together We Are Infinite). Denying perpetrators of gender violence and patriarchal states the power to “put women in the bag” in order to discipline them, NUM affirms itself as it takes risks, inventing new paths while following in the footsteps of the human rights movements that preceded them. To say Not One Woman Less was not, and is not, a plea or a request. It is to stand in the face of what we do not want: not a single victim more, and to say that we want for ourselves to be alive, autonomous, sovereign. Owning our bodies and our life trajectories. Owning our choices: how we want, when we want, with whom we want. To say Not One Woman Less was, and is, to weave a fabric of resistance and solidarity against the patriarchal scripts of women’s rivalry and of moral panic in the face of those who do not define themselves # N I U N A M E N O S ( # N O T O N E WO M A N L E S S )

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as men or women. We all know that these networks of love, that are also political, allow us to make oppressions visible, to move out of the circle of violence, and give each other the strength and enthusiasm we need to live the lives we want.47 Through shared documents, public assemblies, hyperlinked tags, inspired tweets, marches, songs and choreographies of excitement and exhaustion, NUM affirms women’s right to life, pedagogies of care, and insistent dignity.

Notes 1. Ojeda, Marcela @Marcelitaojeda). 2015. “Actrices, políticas, artistas, empresarias, referentes sociales … mujeres, todas, bah.. no vamos a levantar la voz? NOS ESTAN MATANDO.” Twitter, May 11, 2015, 11:24 a.m., https://twitter.com /marcelitaojeda/status/597799471368564736?lang=en. 2. In Mexico, activists use the slogan “Ni Una Más” (Not One Woman More.) “Ni una mujer menos, ni una muerte más” (not one woman less, not one more death) are verses in a poem by Mexican activist Susana Chávez Castillo, murdered in Ciudad Juárez in 2011. Chávez Castillo became known for her work in response to the dramatic increase of violence against women since the 1990s proliferation of maquiladoras or assembly line factories in Juárez. See Elizabeth Jay Friedman and Constanza Tabbush, “#NiUnaMenos: Not One Woman Less, Not One More Death,” NACLA. Report on the Americas, November 1, 2016, http://nacla .org/news/2016/11/01/niunamenos-not-one-woman-less-not-one-more-death. 3. Florencia Etcheves (@fetcheves), @Marcelitaojeda se me ocurre mujeres referentes grosas convocando a mega marcha. No sé si sirve, pero visibiliza.”Twitter, May 11, 2015, 11:28 a.m. https://twitter.com/fetcheves/status/597800565779890176; Soledad Vallejos(@solevallejos). 2015. “@fetcheves @Marcelitaojeda y que se sostenga el reclamo en el tiempo. Que se implemente bien la ley, que haya estadísticas, refugios, ayudas.” Twitter, May 11, 2015, 11:44 a.m. https://twitter .com/SoleVallejos/status/597804471540932608. 4. Organizers probably referred to Zapatos Rojos (Red Shoes), a participatory piece by Mexican artist Elina Chauvet. First installed in Ciudad Juárez in 2009, the piece has been replicated in El Paso (United States), Zaragoza and Málaga (Spain), Milán (Italy), and Chubut (Argentina), among other sites. Abandoned shoes are often the first remains found from victims of gender violence. For her installation, Chauvet asks people to leave a note with thoughts or concrete demands to public officials. This resonates with the silhouettes used to give visibility to those abducted and disappeared during the military dictatorship in [ 186 ]

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5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Argentina. Both are material strategies for engaging absence politically and thus resist the normalization of violence as a mechanism of social control. Vanina Escales, interview with author, Buenos Aires, September 9, 2017. For earlier work on the relationship between digital networking and street mobilization, see Paolo Gerbaudo, Tweets and Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (London: Pluto Press, 2012) and Zizi Papacharissi, Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). See also Rossana Reguillo, Paisajes insurrectos: Jóvenes, redes y revueltas en el otoño civilizatorio (Madrid: NED Ediciones, 2017). For histories of transnational feminist work and its challenges, see Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham; London: Duke, 2003) and “Transnational Feminist Crossings: On Neoliberalism and Radical Critique,” Signs 38.4 (2013): 967–991. Writer and activist Agustina Paz Frontera explains that even though “Not One Woman More” is a more straightforward demand than “Not One Woman Less,” this counterintuitive phrase has been picked up by many women’s movements around the world. According to Frontera, “Not One Woman Less” represents “a distorted, heterogeneous, inclusive, paradoxical grouping of all the women that we are, [of all the women] that are part of [Not One Woman Less].” See “Ni Una Menos es Todas Más,” Periódico Vas Buenos Aires, June 29, 2015, http://www .periodicovas.com/ni-una-menos-es-todas-mas/. Feminist theorist Monique Wittig and others have questioned the use of the “woman category,” claiming that it perpetuates gendered oppression within the heterosexual system. As part of this argument, Wittig contends that lesbians are not women. See Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). While NUM centers “women” as victims that are targeted because of their gender, the collective has denaturalized this category and names trans women as well as lesbians as differential members of their base as a way to attend to their concrete identities, subject positions and vulnerabilities within patriarchal culture. Until August 2017, when they expanded their membership to friends and colleagues, the collective had fourteen members. After a brief overlap in May 2015 toward the planning of the June 3rd march, the Facebook group that planned the reading marathon and the Twitter group that called for the massive rally parted ways because of disagreement over political positions and modes of action. I focus on the Facebook group, “Ni Una Menos,Vivas Nos Queremos,” or “Not One Woman Less, We Want Ourselves Alive,” because of their sustained collective work, their creative bridging of online and offline platforms, and their articulation with social organizations on the ground. The strength of the Twitter group lies in their participants' role as influencers, given their status as media celebrities. # N I U N A M E N O S ( # N O T O N E WO M A N L E S S )

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11. NUM’s member, Cecilia Palmeiro, credits Silvia Federici, whose book Caliban and the Witch they were reading at the time, as a direct influence for what Palmeiro calls their “feminist action.” Cecilia Palmeiro, interview with author, Buenos Aires, August 1, 2017. 12. Followers’ comments on NUM’s Facebook page show divisions over some issues that are central to NUM’s political agenda, such as reproductive rights, the release of incarcerated populist leader Milagro Sala, and the use of feminism as a political framework (which those not familiar with this term and its politics see as mirroring machismo). 13. For a timeline tracking the transnational development of Ni Una Menos through hashtags and protests, see “Ni Una Menos: la Cuarta Ola del Feminismo,” LatFem, June 2, 2017 http://latfem.org/ni-una-menos-la-cuarta-ola-del-feminismo/. 14. On the concept of “performance constellations,” see Marcela A. Fuentes, “Performance Constellations: Memory and Event in Digitally Enabled Protest,” Text and Performance Quarterly 35, no. 1 (2015): 24–42. 15. MuMaLá stands for “Mujeres de la Matria Latinoamericana” (Latin American Motherland Women). For statistics about gender-based murders compiled from print and digital media sources, see http://www.observatorioniunamenos.com .ar/2018/01/26/1-femicidio-cada-29hs-en-el-2017/ 16. The term “femicide” was coined by Diana Russell, a U.S. theorist who conceptualized violence against women through a feminist lens, focusing on power relations. Mexican feminist anthropologist Marcela Lagarde contributed the term “feminicide” to address the “ensemble of violations of women’s human rights” that she places as part of crimes against humanity. Lagarde claims that feminicide is a form of genocide that takes place under specific historical conditions that foster violent practices against women’s integrity, health, and liberties. As a legal term, “feminicide” highlights women’s subaltern status as a major factor in their exposure to oppressive conditions. In this sense, terms such as “feminicide” or “feminicidal violence” hold the state accountable (by direct complicity or omission) for the human rights violations that lie at the core of the broad feminicide spectrum. See Marcela Lagarde and Marcela de los Ríos, “Preface: Feminist Keys for Understanding Feminicide,” in Terrorizing Women. Feminicide in the Americas, ed. Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cecilia Bejarano (Durham: Duke, 2010): xv. 17. Rita Laura Segato, “Patriarchy from Margin to Center: Discipline, Territoriality, and Cruelty in the Apocalyptic Phase of Capital,” South Atlantic Quarterly 115, no. 3 (2016): 615–24. 18. Rita Laura Segato, Las Nuevas Formas de la Guerra y el Cuerpo de las Mujeres (Puebla, México: Pez en el Arbol, 2014) and “El problema de la violencia sexual es político, no moral,” Página 12, December 16, 2018, https://www.pagina12 .com.ar/162518-el-problema-de-la-violencia-sexual-es-politico-no-moral. 19. Escales, interview with author, August 28, 2016. [ 188 ]

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20. Most notably, the program for Educación Sexual Integral (Integral Sexual Education). 21. Nunca Más (Never Again) is the title of the historic truth commission report issued by the National Commission on the Disappearance of persons on September of 1984.This report of human rights abuses contributed crucial evidence that would be used in the civil trials to the military juntas in 1985. 22. Segato, “Patriarchy from Margin to Center: Discipline,Territoriality, and Cruelty in the Apocalyptic Phase of Capital,” South Atlantic Quarterly 115, no. 3 (2016): 615–24. 23. Segato, “Patriarchy from Margin to Center,” 622. 24. In their document read during the October 19, 2016 rally that concluded the #WomenStrike NUM stated: “Because behind the increase and viciousness of femicide violence, there is also an enormous economic plot; the lack of women’s autonomy leaves us unprotected when it comes to saying ‘no.’ In consequence, this lack of autonomy turns us into moving targets of trafficking networks or ‘cheap’ bodies that are used for trafficking and retailing.” Cited in Kimberly Lawson, “Women Strike in Argentina After the Brutal Rape and Murder of a 16-Year-Old Girl,” Broadly, October 19, 2016. https://broadly.vice.com/en_us /article/3k8nd3/women-strike-in-argentina-after-the-brutal-rape-and-murder -of-a-16-year-old-girl/. 25. Ni Una Menos, “Maratón Ni Una Menos 26 de Marzo de 2015,” YouTube, March 26, 2017. Video, 2:58:44. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JX7Vim GjXG4&list=PLAQzAozfOaaon9ngvKrdQlI8xg_gy7uFW&index=14. 26. See María Moreno, “Elogio de la furia,” Página 12, June 10, 2016, https://www .pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-301412-2016-06-10.html and Escales,Vanina. 2016. Facebook, March 26, 2016. https://www.facebook.com/NUMArgentina /posts/y-c%C3%B3mo-empez%C3%B3-niunamenos-habr%C3%ADa-que -remontarse-a-la-historia-del-movimiento-de-m/465200360337818/. 27. Frontera, “Ni Una Menos es Todas Más.” 28. On the concept of “more life,” see Joshua Chambers-Letson, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life, (New York: New York University Press, 2018). 29. Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa, “#Ferguson, Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States,” American Ethnologist 42, no. 1 (2015): 4–17. On Twitter’s functioning, see José Van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 30. For J. L. Austin’s definition of the performative utterance, see How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). 31. Javier Toret et. al., “Tecnopolítica: La Potencia de las Multitudes Conectadas. El Sistema Red 15M, un Nuevo Paradigma de la Política Distribuida,” Tecnopolítica, June 15, 2013, http://tecnopolitica.net/node/72. # N I U N A M E N O S ( # N O T O N E WO M A N L E S S )

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32. Bonilla and Rosa draw attention to the fact that, because activists do not have a proprietary hold on them, hashtags can also be appropriated by the opposition. Additionally, bots can “drown” hashtags though speedy overuse, prompting Twitter to take them down from the Trending Topics list when the algorithm recognizes abnormal activity. On the use of trolls and bots in the Mexican context, see Erin Gallagher, “Mexico: Articles about Bots & Trolls,” Medium, January 1, 2017, https://medium.com/@erin_gallagher/news -articles-about-bots-trolls-in-mexican-networks-7b1e551ef4a6. 33. Belén was the name used to protect the identity of a twenty-seven-year-old woman imprisoned on murder allegations after having a spontaneous abortion in 2014. Belén’s two-year imprisonment began when she was taken from the hospital, where she had sought medical attention for a hemorrhage, to jail by police at dawn. This modus operandi triggered traumatic memories of past human rights abuses, as it resonated with the 1970s military abductions of political dissidents. Highly circulated phrases such as #LiberenABelen and “A Belén la sacamos entre todas” (#FreeBelen and “We will free Belén together”) propelled and kept activists mobilized for months until Belén was liberated in August 2016 and finally absolved of charges in March 2017. 34. Milagro Sala is a community leader and head of the Tupac Amaru grassroots organization from Jujuy, a province in the northwest of Argentina. Sala became the first political prisoner under Mauricio Macri’s administration on January 2016. International human rights organizations, such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, have declared Sala’s imprisonment illegal and demanded her immediate release. 35. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 1 (2008): 148–71. 36. Activists, relatives, and supporters used the slogan “Vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos” (They were taken alive, we want them back alive) as a central demand in their protests and campaigns. This not only evokes the activism of families of the disappeared within the context of the “Dirty War” in México (1968–1982), it also resonates with the call for “Aparición con vida” (We want them alive) from the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. Drawing from this lineage, on April 24, 2016 Mexican women used “We Want Ourselves Alive” to draw attention to women’s extremely precarious condition in Mexico’s contemporary violent climate fueled by deeply ingrained machismo. 37. Vivas Nos Queremos (We Want Ourselves Alive) evokes the phrase “We cannot live without our lives” from the Combahee River Collective Statement. The Combahee River Collective was a black feminist group active in Boston from 1974 to 1980. To learn about their transnational impact, see Leslie Bow et.al., “Combahee River Collective Statement: A Fortieth Anniversary Retrospective,” Frontiers, Volume 38, no. 3 (2017): 164–89. [ 190 ]

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38. See Diana Taylor, “Trapped in Bad Scripts: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo,” in Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 39. News of Lucía Pérez’s murder broke out while activists dealt with the police repression and negative media coverage that followed the thirty-first Encuentro Nacional de Mujeres, a weekend-long meeting that gathered 70,000 women. The National Women’s Meeting has a thirty-year history that NUM’s members acknowledge as part of the genealogy of the movement against gender oppression in Argentina. 40. See Angela Davis et. al.,“Beyond Lean-In: For a Feminism of the 99 percent and a Militant International Strike on March 8,” Viewpoint Magazine, February 3, 2017, https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/02/03/beyond-lean-in-for-a-feminism -of-the-99-and-a-militant-international-strike-on-march-8/. 41. Florencia Alcaraz (@floralcaraz), “Una huelga para que dejen de matarnos. #NiUnaMenos.” Twitter, October 12, 2016, 7:30 a.m., https://twitter.com /florencialcaraz/status/786363505607925760 42. Marta Dillon (@martadillon), “¡Salgamos de facebook! ¡Hoy nos juntamos! No es casual que haya sido en Mar del Plata, nosotras conocemos de las… http:// fb.me/8eDbU1OZs.” Twitter, October 13, 2016, 10:34 a.m. https://twitter.com /martadillon/status/786590898201255937 43. In my first meeting with the Ni Una Menos collective in August 2016, María Pía López brought up the term “cotilleo,” a word that evokes socializing practices by migrant women in tenement houses in Buenos Aires at the turn of the twentieth century. “Cotilleo” is usually deemed morally wrong as confabulation or gossip. 44. Nina (@pickandrollera), “Usemos la foto de una víctima de violencia de género, y ponemos nombre y edad. Hagámoslas visibles. Las víctimas de violencia de género no pueden ser sólo un número más en las estadísticas.Tienen un nombre, un apellido y una historia. Contemoslá.” Twitter, October 15, 2016, https://twitter .com/i/moments/787360661827452928 45. Florencia Alcaraz (@florencialcaraz), “#NosotrasParamos porque queremos que los medios cuenten todo lo que hacemos por estar vivas.#VivasNosQueremos #NiUnaMenos,” October 16, 2016, 7:09 a.m., https://twitter.com/florencialcaraz /status/787626473989472256 46. Palmeiro, Cecilia. 2016. “#NiUnaMenos #NotOneLess manifesto on the global action 25N.” Facebook, November 24, 2016. https://www.facebook.com/hashtag /womenorganizeourselves?source=feed_text&epa=HASHTAG. 47. “The Collective Scream.” Unpublished translation by Ni Una Menos. To see the original in Spanish, see “El grito en común,” Ni Una Menos, May 9, 2016, http://niunamenos.org.ar/manifiestos/el-grito-en-comun/.

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CH A P T E R X

Mobilizing Academic Labor The Graduate Workers of Columbia Unionization Campaign A N D R E A C ROW A N D A LY S S A G R E E N E

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ur biggest cause of stress and anxiety in starting PhD programs at Columbia had nothing to do with teaching or research. It came from the growing sense that we were entering a line of work that was facing imminent structural collapse.1 From the beginning, it was apparent to us and our fellow graduate students that universities were being managed in a way that seemed designed to undermine the ability of academic workers at all levels to fulfill their missions of teaching and research. We saw university departments having little control over the distribution of financial resources, the availability of tenure lines, or even basic employee benefits, like the means to afford housing and childcare. We saw an increasing reliance on adjunct professors who were denied any real means of supporting themselves despite performing a substantial amount of the labor that kept the university running.2 We saw graduate and postdoctoral students struggling to stay financially afloat and putting off the lives they wanted to live in the hopes that they might land a tenure-track job, even though data showed that most of them would not. As graduate students at Columbia, we faced an additional problem: although most PhD and master’s students held teaching and research positions, our work was not being recognized for what it is—labor. Legally speaking, graduate student workers were defined as students only and not workers, making it even more difficult for us to fight for a better working environment. Not only were our wages inadequate to the cost of living in [ 192 ]

New York, but we had no real way of affecting compensation levels, nor of reliably addressing workplace grievances. Even graduate students fortunate enough to have good relationships with sympathetic faculty advisors were reluctant to introduce concerns about our material insecurity into mentor-mentee relationships, both because faculty and individual departments often have little control over these issues and because graduate students are intensely aware of how dependent they are on those relationships for future job prospects. None of the methods that we saw being employed— trying to get on the good side of administrators, promoting alt-ac career paths, or working eighty-hour weeks in the hope of getting an edge on the competition—really addressed the core problem: as graduate students, we did not have the power to shape our working conditions. This, coupled with our awareness of the precarity of employees throughout the university system, fueled both anxiety and alienation. In 2013, when the Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC) at New York University (NYU) became the first recognized graduate union at a private university, graduate workers at Columbia University saw, for the first time, a potential solution. Although federal labor law still defined graduate workers as students only, after years of committed organizing, NYU won voluntary recognition of their union from the NYU administration and began bargaining for a contract. With majority support and legal backing, a labor union offered us hope that we could earn real, long-lasting gains instead of flimsy reassurances or stopgap responses to our concerns. NYU’s historic unionization and the beginnings of Columbia’s organizing campaign also occurred around the time that we joined the Women Mobilizing Memory working group (Andrea in 2013 and Alyssa in 2014). The group examined activist responses to political and institutional violence in a diverse swath of geographical regions throughout the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. While we initially joined the group out of our own interests in comparative academic work, as we became increasingly involved in the organizing campaign and other efforts to improve labor conditions at Columbia, so too did our intellectual focus in the context of Women Mobilizing Memory change. The theoretical paradigms discussed in the working group often centered on the strategic mobilization of histories, images, and the performance of identity to address injustice in international contexts. Rather than sticking to our initial academic research, we increasingly used our work with the group as a space for thinking through the power structures and hierarchies we encountered at Columbia, and how theoretical M O B I L I Z I N G ACA D E M I C L A B O R

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paradigms of activism were sometimes at odds with our own institutional and historical context, as well as the practicalities of organizing. The group’s focus on memory also brought into sharp relief something we encountered frequently in our organizing: a complete lack of institutional memory about former unionization campaigns among current graduate students. Most graduate students (including ourselves) were not even aware that graduate workers at more than sixty public institutions (including the Universities of California and Washington, in our home states) already had unions. The transient nature of graduate work, we learned, promotes a lack of historical memory among graduate workers. University administrations, however, have longer memories, by nature of the more permanent nature of their jobs. This, combined with widespread fear and anxiety about job insecurity among graduate students, gives university administrations tremendous power over their nonunionized workforces.

The Fight for Graduate Worker Unions Graduate worker unionization in the United States began in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The City University of New York (CUNY), Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Oregon, the University of Florida, Florida A&M, and the University of South Florida were among the first to have unionized graduate labor forces. Graduate workers at public universities were recognized as employees and had the same right to organize as public sector workers. (These rights vary from state to state, and they have been affected by the deceptively-named “right to work” movement and other antilabor measures.) The status of graduate workers at private universities, however, was limited by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which deemed them, for legal purposes, students only and not workers, though they perform the same duties as their publicly-employed counterparts.3 In the late 1990s, a flurry of successful union drives culminated in the Clinton-appointed National Labor Relations Board’s NYU decision (2000), which ruled that graduate employees at private universities are workers as well as students, and therefore protected by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). In the wake of this historic decision, NYU’s graduate workers organized a successful union drive, negotiating a contract that significantly increased stipends and benefits in 2002. In turn, their efforts drove up [ 194 ]

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stipends and benefits at Columbia and other universities so that they could remain competitive and combat ongoing organizing campaigns. However, in 2004 the NYU decision was reversed by the Bush-era NLRB. In a case involving Brown University, the NLRB ruled that graduate teaching and research assistants were, once again, legally considered students only, not workers—and therefore ineligible to unionize. Graduate workers at many public universities across the country continued to enjoy union benefits; however, their counterparts at private universities, subject to federal policies, as well as many public universities in states hostile to labor, were denied collective bargaining rights. At the time of the Brown ruling, graduate workers at Columbia and a number of other private institutions were organizing their own unionization drives, but Brown shut down these efforts. With no legal obligation to continue to recognize their union, NYU refused to renegotiate GSOC’s contract when it expired in 2005. Organizing nonetheless continued, and in 2013, GSOC successfully pressured NYU voluntarily to recognize their union and begin contract negotiations. Building on GSOC’s momentum, graduate workers at Columbia began again to discuss the possibility of forming our own union and, hopefully, restoring the right of graduate workers across the country to bargain collectively. In January 2014, Columbia graduate workers from about a dozen departments gathered to talk about how to take this next step forward. Although there had been an active organizing drive on Columbia’s campus only a decade prior, most current graduate students were completely unaware of these efforts. Structurally, the temporary nature of graduate school and its high rate of turnover work against the creation of institutional memory. Part of the ongoing discussion about unionization involved learning and teaching one another about the activists who came before us. Lessons of this earlier era frequently came from members of the United Auto Workers-Local 2110 members, who make up the support staff at Columbia University. When Columbia staff unionized with Local 2110 in 1985, they negotiated a historic contract that guaranteed equal pay for women and people of color. Many current members, including Local 2110 president Maida Rosenstein, assisted in the earlier graduate organizing efforts at Columbia, including organizing a strike in support of graduate workers in 2004.This institutional memory of how recent the last campaign at Columbia had been—and how so many of the benefits current graduate students enjoyed were concessions the university made to that struggle— became important to our organizing conversations. The ongoing historic M O B I L I Z I N G ACA D E M I C L A B O R

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work of Local 2110, whose trailblazing and support made our campaign possible, continues to be occluded at every turn by a continually antilabor university administration. In fact, the Columbia administration goes out of its way to downplay any history of activism at the university: for example, though many people know Columbia for the historic protests of 1968, in the university’s official portrayal of its own past, this history is sometimes treated as a point of embarrassment. In the Columbia business school building, for example, a timeline of the last 100 years at Columbia notes only one event of interest in 1968: the installation of the Clement Meadmore sculpture, The Curl, on the lawn in front of the building. (A similar erasure of important, radical histories is taking place through Columbia’s ongoing efforts to buy up property using eminent domain; residents of the community continue to resist the university’s expansion into Harlem, and its rebranding of the neighborhood as “Manhattanville.”4) Most organizers on the current Columbia graduate unionization campaign learned these histories on the job, through other union members. In the process, we learned not just about the past but about strategies for the present—about what had worked before and what we could expect from the university’s efforts to stop us.

The Labor of Labor Organizing Our movement grew rapidly, from a few dozen to few hundred active supporters in only months. We began by mapping out whom we knew in as many departments as we could think of, how we could talk to them about unionization, and, in turn, involve them in organizing their colleagues.When we estimated the size of our potential bargaining unit, we realized we would have to reach more than 2,000 individuals: far more people than the first organizers knew. The early organizers came from across all disciplines in the university, from math to genetics to social work. A fairly consistent group of one to two dozen organizers (including ourselves) attended weekly crosscampus meetings to talk about strategy, contacts, and how to move forward; others preferred to organize within their own departments or social circles rather than attend meetings. One of our biggest strengths early on was that we kept focus on establishing a sizable democratic majority of supporters. A hurdle that consistently emerges in unionizing academic workers is a tendency to turn theoretical: [ 196 ]

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understandably, many enthusiastic supporters are drawn to a union because they want to discuss radicalism or organizational structures. However, without first creating and then maintaining an active network among all members of the unit, debates and decisions among organizers over those issues are not only undemocratic, they are also toothless—a union’s power comes from an organized rank and file. Without that, the best ideas remain unimplemented. We experienced firsthand in our own campaign—and heard from organizers on countless other campaigns—how much strife has been caused in academic organizing by derailments in meetings by those—often white, straight, cisgendered U.S. American men—who believe they know what is best for the union despite being consistently unwilling to make the time to talk to other workers on the ground and find out their needs. In fact, in our campaign, it was the groups that faced the most workplace pressures and insecure conditions—women, people of color, international students, LGBTQ people, and students supporting families—who were willing to give time and take the personal risks to make our unionization effort a success. The important work of the early months of the campaign involved having conversations with other graduate students about our working conditions. Once we had tapped out our own contacts, and our friends’, this meant physically going to different buildings on campus and knocking on strangers’ doors. By building contacts within and across departments and schools, we were able to build a large network of communication within a matter of months. Through the ensuing hundreds of conversations, we not only mobilized new organizers, but we developed a sense of what our shared needs were. Research and teaching assistants face different day-to-day challenges, but we all struggled with the problem of our rent rising faster than our stipends did (even for those of us in university-subsidized housing), late paychecks, and issues with health insurance. From the outset, we knew that the first thing we needed to do was build a community of actively-connected members: we felt that we had no right to set up a formal organizational structure or institute bylaws until we had truly established ourselves as a democraticallyelected union through making sure that all graduate workers had the opportunity to vote on unionization; if that vote were successful, all workers could participate in setting up any formal structures and policies. Until then, we held open organizing meetings that any graduate worker could attend. Responsibilities were taken on a volunteer basis; those who wished M O B I L I Z I N G ACA D E M I C L A B O R

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could come to meetings and participate in decision-making, as well as liaise with other supporters who could not or did not want to attend meetings (usually, an organizer or group of organizers would be responsible for specific departments or, in some cases, entire schools). Organizers both communicated what was discussed at meetings to supporters, and in turn reported individual and department-level concerns back to other organizers at weekly meetings. These discussions made clear how atomized even current students were from one another (let alone from more distant historical events on campus). When we talked with our peers from across the university, we heard our own struggles to pay rent and afford health care bills echoed by graduate students in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, engineering, and professional schools. We also heard grievances specific to different student populations: international students being told by their supervisors that they couldn’t leave the country; teaching assistants having their course loads doubled with no increase in pay; graduate students with children receiving a paltry subsidy that would get them no more than ten days of childcare in New York City. Although some of our particular needs varied, many were shared, and all of them could be addressed through acquiring the power to negotiate a contract. From the very beginning, we knew that we could mount a successful campaign only through on-the-ground, face-to-face organizing. On a practical level, during the first phase of the union drive, we wanted to keep our organizing off of the administration’s radar for as long as possible, which meant limiting our use of Columbia’s email system and avoiding public platforms like Facebook and Twitter. But even after the first months, when we did create a website and social media pages, we insisted on maintaining our ethos of emphasizing the personal over the digital. Mass emails get deleted, especially if they’re from strangers. Moreover, our goal was to create new networks that didn’t already exist—making connections among workers whose interests were shared but who were separated by departmental divisions. This effort was, from the beginning, feminist. One of the most notorious problems at Columbia has been the failure of existing policies to address cases of sexual assault adequately.We talked with currently-unionized graduate students at schools like the University of Connecticut, who told us how their contract gave them the right to neutral arbitrators in order to ensure that cases were handled fairly. But in addition to addressing specific issues, [ 198 ]

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we took the lessons of intersectional feminism—examining the interaction and layering of different forms of oppression and marginalization (such as sexism, racism, and classism), and the varieties of experiences that layering creates—as a structural model for organizing. As a union, we sought to build solidarity and coalitions based on shared interests that nonetheless respected the specificity and difference of issues faced by different groups. The union was a site open to all graduate students, where anyone could raise an issue and mobilize peers to assist in their struggle. Beyond assisting workers with problems they currently faced, our long-term goal of collective bargaining could allow us to take concrete steps to make an academic career path accessible to people other than straight, cisgendered, white U.S. American men by giving us a path to equitable pay, means of addressing grievances, secure parental leave, affordable dependent health insurance, access to birth control, support for individuals going through gender transitions, and the right to gender-neutral bathrooms. For us, and for the Graduate Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers (GWC-UAW), unionization of graduate labor is not only about so-called “bread and butter issues;” it’s about making academia a fundamentally more equitable and accessible space.5 In order to address the very different needs of our members, we also reached out to existing campus groups, Columbia’s Graduate Student Advisory Council (GSAC), a graduate student government body serving in an advisory capacity to the university administration, as well as various oncampus activist organizations. We partnered with GSAC to learn what their Steering Committee had discovered through its Quality of Life research and its meeting with administrators; we were also able to help that organization push for reforms such as an increased child-care subsidy for graduate student parents. Activists with Student-Worker Solidarity helped us book meeting and rally spaces (something we were unable to do without official recognition from the university). In academia, we often talk about the need for interdisciplinarity and collaboration; efforts at collaboration, however, are often undermined by institutional precarity. From the first day of graduate school, it is ingrained in us that there is not enough to go around—not enough funding, not enough attention, not enough positions—thereby turning our colleagues into our competitors. Many graduate students also feel too intimidated to ask for help—because of the power professors and advisors wield over their futures, many struggle rather than risk provoking annoyance or appearing unprofessional. By building connections across departmental and disciplinary lines, M O B I L I Z I N G ACA D E M I C L A B O R

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our union also created the kind of intellectual, mutually supportive community that so many of us had come to graduate school hoping to find. We organized around shared needs and cooperation rather than competition. For many graduate students, recognizing that problems were structural rather than individual helped empower them to work for change. The opportunity to get to know our colleagues and their work also enriched us academically, enabling interdisciplinary collaborations and work.

Demanding Recognition In the fall of 2014, we organized a card drive, in which we asked colleagues to show their support for unionization by signing a union authorization card. In a matter of months, we had signed a strong majority of all eligible graduate workers.6 In early December, we took our campaign public, with more than a hundred graduate students from virtually every department on campus mobilizing to march together across campus and rally on the steps of the Columbia administration building. Despite the fame of 1968, during our time at Columbia, we had encountered little graduate student activism and instead felt an overwhelming atmosphere of fatigue and pessimism. Coming out that day, not knowing how many people would show up, and seeing the hundreds of graduate workers gathering to march together made that memory of 1968 Columbia not seem quite so irretrievably past. Despite our massive mobilization of support, Columbia refused to recognize our union, and so we filed for recognition with the regional NLRB. Once we had gone to the NLRB, we knew that one of the university’s key anti-union measures would be to drag the fight out as long as possible. Graduate work is by nature temporary, with new students entering and old ones leaving every semester. The university’s campaign was one of attrition: if the university waited long enough, it calculated, organizers would leave and momentum would flag. It took over a year for the regional board to hear our case, and it was nearly a year after that when, in August 2016, the federal NLRB overturned Brown, restoring graduate employees’ status as both students and workers. The new decision, known as the Columbia decision, allowed us to hold an election in which our colleagues would officially vote on whether or not they wanted GWC-UAW to represent them as their union. In the months leading up to the election, the university attempted to divide and conquer, pitting faculty against students, STEM against humanities [ 200 ]

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and social sciences, international students against domestic students. The administration cynically exploited the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty created by the election of Donald Trump in November 2016, spreading erroneous claims about the UAW’s stance on visas for international students and workers.7 Fighting the university’s anti-union campaign with a fraction of its resources was difficult, but it would have been far worse had we not been actively organizing in the years between the card drive and the election. During that time, we had indeed felt the effects of fighting a long fight. Some grew tired and burned out; at times, the bulk of the work of sustaining the campaign fell onto the shoulders of a few people—often women, international students, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals, just as affective labor so often does. Even among organizers, there could be tension. When Alyssa pointed out to a male colleague that women took minutes at the overwhelming majority of meetings and suggested he do so that day, he informed her that this was “an abuse of feminism.” During the critical, final weeks leading up to the union election, several self-described progressive male organizers declined to help phone bank because they “didn’t like talking on the phone.”Yet several of these same organizers were only too eager to explain materialist feminism—one lectured Andrea at length about why, as a feminist, she shouldn’t wear high heels, even though his Sperry topsiders didn’t seem to be able to get him out to knock on lab doors. Despite the inevitable moments of friction, a shared sense of purpose, as well as the feeling that what we were doing was critical to the survival of academia as an institution, kept us going. We continued to cultivate relationships with graduate workers across the university, including mounting specific issue campaigns, all of which kept the union going and bolstered our credibility in the eyes of our colleagues. We worked on behalf of a student who had been wrongfully terminated from his TA position; fought for travel funding for international students; and held information sessions and advocated for students when Optional Practical Training (OPT), a program allowing international students to remain in the United States beyond the expiration of their student visas, was jeopardized. We were able to address so many issues even before we had been recognized because an increasing number of graduate workers had realized that power comes from being organized. Many of us had had the experience of trying to deal individually with issues at Columbia and getting nowhere; as a collective, we were a force that could not be ignored. M O B I L I Z I N G ACA D E M I C L A B O R

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Despite the years of delay and Columbia’s aggressive anti-union campaign, we won our election by a margin of nearly 1,000 votes (1,602 to 623). Experience repeatedly showed us that real power lies in faceto-face interactions and conversations. This kind of majority-building cannot be accomplished over email, through clever graphics or memes, or through flashy demonstrations. While these strategies were useful for making our presence visible to the larger public and for fostering community among already supportive graduate workers, without a strong, active base of interpersonal networks, they could never win a vote. Our campaign was won through cultivating relationships and communities, through listening to what our shared and individual needs were, and working together to make lasting material gains through institutional and structural change. The campaign continues: at the end of 2017, the NLRB finally rejected Columbia’s objections to the election and certified the union. The university is now legally obligated to sit at the bargaining table with representatives of the people who enable it to run by performing research and teaching courses. Graduate workers have the right to an equal, legally-backed part in those negotiations. However, on January 30, 2018, the Columbia Provost, John Coatsworth, sent an email to the graduate community declaring the university administration’s official refusal to fulfill their legal obligation to negotiate. It seems a sad and telling coincidence that this statement was delivered on the same day as Trump was scheduled to deliver his first State of the Union address: Columbia administration’s tactics transparently point to their hope that a Trump-appointed NLRB will bail them out of their obligation to respect Columbia workers’ democratic choice.8 Though we have now graduated from Columbia, GWC-UAW’s fight is ongoing. A contract has not yet been won, but GWC-UAW has already changed the culture of the university for the better. In response to the university’s refusal to come to the table, the union voted overwhelmingly to strike in the spring of 2018. GWC-UAW members went on strike at the end of that semester. As of this writing—winter of 2019—in response to the threat of an additional strike, Columbia agreed to a provisional framework for bargaining, which the union voted to accept, and the union’s first-ever contract negotiations will soon begin. Across the United States, graduate workers are legally recognized for the labor they perform at both public and private universities. At Columbia, unionization brought about connections among graduate students across [ 202 ]

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departments who would otherwise never have had an opportunity even to speak with one another. It has also created alliances with other workers on campus, such as the clerical workers’ union and the Faculty House workers’ union, as we have exchanged strategies for effective mobilizing and turned out in support of each other’s campaigns. The union effort also connected students to other struggles in the city of New York, including the campaign for a living minimum wage (the Fight for $15) and with graduate unionization campaigns across the country. In 2015, we organized a national day of action with more than fifteen campuses across the country, in which we held coordinated events ranging from public panels to work-ins to rallies to call attention to the graduate labor movement. Through this process, we have seen glimpses of what the university could be if it were led by the people who make it run and whose priority is supporting its missions of teaching and research. At Columbia, we’ve already seen how prioritizing cooperation can ameliorate the alienation that comes from competitiveness; how disciplinary boundaries can be traversed by an emphasis on shared interests; and how, given the chance, graduate workers’ lives—and the university in general— can be made better.

Notes The views expressed in this chapter are based on the authors’ experiences as central organizers in the Graduate Workers of Columbia (GWC-UAW) unionization campaign from 2014–2017. These views are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the official stances of GWC-UAW. 1. The corporatization of the university has been ongoing for decades, but, as many have noted, it has become increasingly untenable, especially following the 2008 economic crash. See, for example, David Schultz, “The Rise and Coming Demise of the Corporate University,” Academe 101, no. 5 (September–October 2015); Dan Nemser and Brian Whitener, “The Tuition Limit and the Coming Crisis of Higher Education,” The New Inquiry, March 26, 2018. 2. According to data collected by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), currently more than 50 percent of faculty appointments are part-time and over 70 percent of part- or full-time instructional positions are nontenuretrack. See “Background Facts on Contingent Faculty,” American Association of University Professors (website), accessed December 7, 2018, https://www .aaup.org/issues/contingency/background-facts. Adjunct teaching at Columbia M O B I L I Z I N G ACA D E M I C L A B O R

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3. 4. 5.

6.

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is on par with these figures: according to a report by The Atlantic, as of 2012, approximately 60 percent of Columbia instructors were adjunct faculty. See Laura McKenna, “The College President-to-Adjunct Pay Ratio,” The Atlantic, September 24, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/09 /income-inequality-in-higher-education-the-college-president-to-adjunct -pay-ratio/407029/. These decisions were rendered in the 1951 Columbia decision and the 1972 Adelphi decision. See, for example, Steven Gregory, “The Radiant University: Space, Urban Redevelopment, and the Public Good,” City & Society 25, no. 1 (2013): 47–69. A frequently-raised question throughout our campaign was why we affiliated with the United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers (more commonly known as the United Auto Workers or UAW). We chose the UAW because they represent more higher education workers than any other international and because they were the only international to have successfully negotiated a contract for private university graduate workers. This affiliation also reflects the fact that we think about the graduate unionization movement as part of the labor movement more broadly and have worked hard to combat attitudes of academic exceptionalism that would try to frame university teaching and research as anything other than labor. The number of eligible workers at Columbia was, as has been the case in all graduate unionization campaigns, a matter of contention. Our goal was to sign as many graduate students as could be considered workers, i.e., those who had taught or served as research assistants or in some other paid position, such as hourly work. At the time of our card drive, we estimated approximately 2,800 eligible workers, signed over 1,700 during the semester of our card drive (Fall 2014), continued to sign workers throughout the subsequent years leading up to our vote, and are still signing workers up as new employees enter the university to this day. According to the policies we have voted on as a now-certified union, we are arguing that those who have signed a union authorization card and are working, have worked, or will work as part of their graduate program requirements in any of the categories included in the Columbia decision (graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants, teaching fellows, preceptors, course assistants, readers, graders, and graduate and departmental research assistants) are eligible to vote as members of our union. However, formal membership cannot be ratified until we have secured our first contract. For a trenchant explanation and critique of the Columbia administration’s misleading claims about the effect of unionization on graduate workers, see Evangelos Atlidakis, Tania Bhattacharyya, Olga Brudostova, Sandra Chiritescu, Andrea Lottarini, Mostafa Mobasher, and Takaya Uchida, “Letter to the Editor: [ 204 ]

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Voting ‘Yes’ for Unionization at Columbia to Improve the International Student Experience,” Columbia Spectator, January 31, 2017. 8. Although the Columbia graduate union has been certified by the NLRB, successful graduate worker union votes are currently being contested by university administrations at the University of Chicago and elsewhere. Any of these cases could potentially overturn the Columbia decision and strip graduate workers of their hard-won federal right to collective bargaining.

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CH A P T E R X I

“Nobody Is Going To Let You Attend Your Own Funeral” A Funeral for a Trans Woman and Naming the Unnamed D ԭ L A R A Ç A L I ߸K A N

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n 2007, when I was eighteen years old, I became a part of trans politics and the struggle for the recognition of sex work as work in Istanbul. It was also the year that I met Alev, who later became a close friend. She was a self-identified trans woman and was doing sex work to sustain herself. We used to meet in the office of the association for the struggle against criminalization of sex work, where we were organizing workshops to provide assistance, especially for trans people, on issues regarding sexual health and the legal system. At the time, Alev was visiting us once in a while in the office. She would typically come around 3 or 4 p.m. with a bag of simit (a circular bread covered with sesame) and black olives. To find a crispy and warm simit is never an easy job in Istanbul. Alev was an expert at it. Working hours in the office were from nine to five and Alev would always make fun of us for being “too normal” and ask if we could change the hours so that she could come after working almost the whole night as a sex worker. We were never able to change the schedule, but nonetheless, Alev started to come to the association every Wednesday. With time, we started to talk more and meet in the association at least two times each week; meanwhile she was taking an active role on hate crime legislation campaigns and becoming a part of a larger struggle against the systemic silencing and erasure of trans bodies in Turkey’s social, legal, and cultural contexts. It was five years later, the winter of 2012, when I began to know her better. I started to understand what she called her “frustrated soul.” One day, [ 206 ]

while we were walking on Istiklal Street—the most crowded and central street of Istanbul’s Taksim neighborhood, significant for decades in opening spaces of struggle and resistance for many groups (including trans women) who were labeled “deviant” or “marginal”—she told me that sometimes she felt like a ghost as a trans woman in Turkey. She told me that she couldn’t exist anywhere as she was. Not in the family, not in the law, not in the society. On a Tuesday in the same year, late in the evening, my telephone rang. It was a call from a friend who was working as a sex worker with Alev. She was sobbing and was not able to speak clearly. I can’t remember the words anymore, but what I knew after the phone call was that somebody had hurt Alev in the hotel room where she used to work. And everything that happened after that phone call on the following day would show me that not only the next day, but also all other Wednesdays to come, were going to come without Alev.

night During the night, together with Alev’s friends, we tried to reach her family to give them the news and direct them to the Forensic Medicine Institution (Adli Tıp Kurumu) to claim her body. First we talked to Alev’s mother. She said they don’t have a daughter called Alev; instead they have a son called Berk. Then we called her father. He said that they were not going to claim her body, so the forensics department should feel free to donate her body to any medical school. Mostly, stories tend to end or remain unfulfilled here, with death. At the time, I didn’t know that this would not be the case for Alev. I wasn’t aware that Alev’s struggle was going to spark collective resistance against the state’s disrecognition1 of trans people, nor that this was also going to be the case for other funerals of trans women that I would attend in the following years. And with time I was going to realize that these struggles would bring many people together to raise their voices not only for more livable lives in which their identities are recognized but also for—as many of my interlocutors put it—more “normal” ways of dying. They would demand recognition of the dead bodies of individuals whose appearance does not conform to that of a “proper citizen” (who is heterosexual and gender-conforming). Within this context, while this article is about trans necropolitics and the importance of exploring the processes, conditions, and histories that underpin and sustain a range of “unequal regimes of living and dying,” it is also “NOBODY IS GOING TO LET YOU ATTEND YOUR OWN FUNERAL”

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about consolidating and exploring the links among the politics of life, death, memory, and resistance.2 It is about Alev: her life, her death, and the life of her death. It is about the everydayness of death in trans lives in Turkey, and how past, present, and future combine in the memories, actions, and archives of feeling shared among trans women. And also about time and the temporality of death, and archives of resistance that blur the borders between past, present, and future. It shows how through the shared experience of working out how to live—and die—as a trans woman in Turkey, the community creates forms of intimacies that do not care about spatial or temporal proximity; they create collectivities to demand not only more livable lives but also modes of death that do not erase the self-identification of trans individuals through intentional disrecognition. In large part, they are mobilized to make these demands in company with the memories of those who have died. Drawing on my memory of Alev and her loss, my experience within Turkey’s trans movement since 2007, and my interviews from 2014 to 2017 with twenty self-identified trans women in Istanbul and Izmir, I focus here on modes of mobilization that both depend on and form networks of relations among living people and also between those living people and memories of the dead.3 In doing so, I hope to move toward an understanding of the quotidian that contains not only life and living but also death and dying. Through narratives of trans women, my own memory of Alev, and recent work on trans and queer necropolitics, precarity and resistance, I will be looking at Alev’s death, funeral, and the events that followed that ceremony. Dean Spade and Viviane Namaste, among others, have examined the codes within legal, health, and education systems that turn trans individuals into impossible subjects4 As Spade puts it, looking at these systems reveals how “trans people are told by the law, state agencies and families that they are impossible. They are impossible subjects to exist. They cannot be seen, they cannot be classified, and they cannot fit anywhere.”5 This is very much the case in the way Turkish authorities refuse to recognize trans people in life and death; and as Esen Ezgi TaߞçıoОlu reveals, specifically legal institutions become the dominating form of violence in trans women’s lives in the context of Turkey.6 C. Riley Snorton’s idea of “queer persistence in life and death” has resonances in the case of the trans women in Turkey as well.7 In an essay written in collaboration with Jin Haritaworn, Riley states that a discursive [ 208 ]

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understanding of a transgender body as “unnatural” reveals how the biopolitics and necropolitics of everyday life blend into each other and how a transgender body turns into an unruly body “which only in death can be transformed or translated into the service of state power.”8 In the case of Alev and her community, that service comes not through the kind of appropriation that Haritaworn and Riley examine but through the state seizing the occasion to display its unyielding power. These processes continue to “kill” trans individuals even after they literally have died, leaving them unmournable and even unburiable. This paper looks at funerals as events that typically assume pre-established repertoires of grief and mourning but that also can become spaces for claiming disowned bodies; demanding livable lives and die-able deaths; and resisting the social, cultural, and legal processes of erasure in Turkey. My aim is to open a space for the discussion not only of the dynamics that cause the social and material death of certain bodies, but also of the dynamics that keep surveilling, “correcting,” and disowning those bodies. In an interview in the summer of 2017, addressing the daily experiences of trans women, Burçin, a self-identified trans woman in her late forties doing sex work in order to sustain herself, told me that their lives were centered on staying alive. “It is also full with fighting for the friends that we lose,” she added. She told me she wondered if she would ever attend a funeral of a trans woman who died of “natural causes.” “I am even okay with cancer,” she said. “But I am very tired of losing my friends to murders or suicides. And I am frustrated with the state, which does not give a fuck.” After a few minutes of silence, she took a deep breath and continued: “As if everything ends when we die.” Even if trans women can “manage to die normally,” she explained, the state would always find a way to intervene. Sometimes, funeral services personnel, she said, “even cut a trans woman’s hair before their funeral and they bury them as a man.”9 The structural oppressions that pervade trans lives do not end with their deaths. Dean Spade writes powerfully about the role of states and legal systems in the “distribution of life chances” for trans people; one might also speak of the distribution of “death chances.”10 Indeed, following Achille Mbembe, who argues in Necropolitics for an extension of Foucault’s concept of “biopower” into the realm of death, one can trace how legal, religious, medical, and psychological discourses “produce” and “manage” trans bodies in life, death, and after-death.11 Funeral ceremonies, as Martin-Baron states, are prominent stages where normative “NOBODY IS GOING TO LET YOU ATTEND YOUR OWN FUNERAL”

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systems of belonging—to a family, a community, a nation—are played out. They invoke normative relations that render invisible particular gendered, sexualized, and classed bodies.The politics of presence and visibility become, Martin-Baron writes, “essential for determining whose lives and bodies are understood as mournable and therefore as ‘proper citizens.’”12

morning The next day, we met in front of the hospital at 8:00 a.m. Alev’s friends and many activists from different LGBTI organizations waited in front of the Forensic Medicine Institution. I remember calling one of the newspapers that had used the name that was assigned to Alev at birth in their report of her death on their website.The reporter told me that as journalists they had to give correct information about the deceased, which was “Transvestite R. V. 24 years old.” I talked with the reporter for an hour trying to explain why self-recognition is also important and how the term “transvestite” was not an identity claimed by Alev. It didn’t work. I was devastated. I also remember taking random walks around the hospital, looking around and thinking to myself how the activists and Alev’s friends so clearly knew what to do. They organized a division of labor for various tasks without even having to discuss it. At the time, I wasn’t aware that the clear and fixed steps taken during Alev’s funeral were charged by the struggle and resistance that had taken place in every previous funeral of a trans individual. Ülkü, who was a very good friend of Alev, was inside the building, talking with police officers and authorities from the Forensic Medicine Institution about taking Alev’s body. Meanwhile Alev’s friends were calling other trans women from their community and letting them know about the situation and telling them to spread the news. After a routine collection of potential evidence, Alev’s body was ready to be taken for the funeral ceremony.We arrived at the building where the personnel from the funeral services took her body into a room to clean and cover her with burial rope before the funeral. Ülkü and Alev’s best friend accompanied her body. When I heard Ülkü, arguing with the funeral service personnel, I went in and asked what was going on. The worker said that she couldn’t wash Alev, in order to prepare her body within Sunni-Islam burial practices for the funeral, because Alev was not a woman; only a man could wash a man. [ 210 ]

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She asked for the next of kin to confirm “what Alev really was” while making it very clear that no one else could change her mind. The worker disrecognized Alev not out of ignorance, but to her, Alev was a “stranger” in the sense that Sara Ahmed describes (in a different context): someone “produced as a category within knowledge, rather than coming into being in an absence of knowledge.”13 She told us that they needed to inform the imam who was going to lead the funeral prayers. If the next of kin were not present to confirm Alev’s identity, she said, the burial would be postponed. But was it even possible to “confirm” Alev’s identity in any way the authorities would accept? Documentation of gender is not regulated in Turkish law; gender is so naturalized as not to require a set of rules.Whoever is on duty when a deceased person arrives at the funeral home (gasilhane) where the deceased are bathed and prepared for rites and burial, checks the box—male or female—having made the determination based on whatever markers they happen to deem dispositive. That classification, based on physical observation and subjective normative judgment, turns into fact. Meanwhile, Turkish law related to gender reassignment requires that for a person to be “reclassified” as male or female they must provide a letter from a doctor about their “psychological identity.” Though it exceeds the scope of this paper, it is important to clarify that these letters on “psychological identity” almost always follow the binary sex/gender roles for living bodies. But we also need to ask what happens when the person dies and their “psychological identity” becomes impossible to investigate? What is the role of next of kin in relation to marking the gender box? Why did the funeral services personnel keep insisting on talking to Alev’s next of kin in order to find out “what she really was”? Public health policies and regulations for funeral services are uniform throughout Turkey. In all cities and regions, regulations require that a dead body be “inherited” by the next of kin, who is obliged to dispose of it in a manner consistent with the law. If a person does not have a next of kin, a person who can prove his/her state-sanctioned relation to the deceased may inherit the body. If the body is not claimed by anyone, then the corpse, as well as all personal effects, escheat to the state, which can make any lawful use of them it chooses. Looking at these regulations and thinking about “NOBODY IS GOING TO LET YOU ATTEND YOUR OWN FUNERAL”

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Alev left me with endless and frustrating questions that the law could not answer. How can someone prove a relationship? Whose relationships are considered legitimate? What does “inheriting” a body mean? What kind of rights does the “inheritor” have over the body?

noon We were waiting for the midday prayer for Alev’s funeral. More and more friends started to come. One approached and said that a few minutes earlier she had gone to see the imam and he refused to talk to her and just said that he would not bury her if we kept insisting on naming Alev as a woman during the funeral. It was obvious, he insisted, that Alev was a man and was going to be buried as a man. Everybody was frustrated. One friend said that if the authorities did not accept Alev as a woman then all trans women attending the funeral were not seen as women either. So that meant—following Sunni Muslim practice that puts men in the front of funeral ceremonies and women in back, and that permits only men to perform the salaat—that Alev’s trans friends could all stand in front and carry Alev’s coffin after the prayers. Everyone loved the idea. So, the trans women went into the front line for the prayers and afterwards, they did not let any man touch her coffin. They carried her on their shoulders to the hearse, a duty typically assigned to men. (Though it is not illegal or named as “sin,” women’s involvement in carrying the coffin is considered “inappropriate.”)14 After the burial of Alev, one of her friends told me that we needed to collect money to order a tombstone that would not have the name that was assigned to her at birth, but instead the one Alev had chosen for herself. Self-naming and being hailed by the name one has chosen is crucial for the trans women I interviewed. To deny that name is to deny the person and her self-sovereignty. And to call a trans woman by the birth-name she has deliberately discarded has hostile impact. To do so intentionally has the effect of an epithet. As Judith Butler states, through exposure to name-calling one undergoes linguistic vulnerability “and in this sense who we are, even our ability to survive, depends on the language that sustains us.”15 According to Butler, name-calling demonstrates an important dimension of the speech act throughout the course of life. Thinking through the funeral of Alev and the words of my interlocutors, and following Butler, I agree that “we do not only act through speech acts; speech acts also act [ 212 ]

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on us.”16 However, drawing on Alev’s funeral and the collective resistance that brought many trans women together against certain name-calling practices that erased Alev’s self-identification during her funeral, I argue that name-calling also demonstrates a vital dimension of the speech act that acts upon us not only throughout the course of life but also in the moment and aftermath of death. According to Melis who is a self-identified trans woman in her thirties, “the situation is very simple to understand”: You spend all your life as someone right? Then you die. Mostly murdered in our case. Then those fucking people, who have no idea about who you are, come and change everything about you.There were even examples in which they [referring to the workers at the unit in the cemetery where the deceased are bathed before the funeral] tried to remove the breast implant of our trans friend. They cut their hair. And in here nobody sees the dead body like in Christian funerals. So it is really sick. Why are you doing that to me? Why are you calling me by the name that I don’t want to be addressed by? This is the state, you see, that intervenes in every single moment of life and death. She is already dead. Why are you doing all this? Why?17 This moment when we started talking about funerals of trans women was the most difficult one for both of us in our two-hour interview. Filled with rage, our voices rose together. After her last question she hit the table with her fist, took a deep breath and continued in a tone more confident than angry: That is why we try our best to go to the funerals. That is why we find non-transphobic imams. That is why we come and change the tombstones of our friends with the names that they chose for themselves. That is why we know each step to take after a trans woman dies. Because it’s your funeral and it’s important.18 The experience of the constant erasure of trans bodies that do not fit into “a single pre-established archive of evidence” turns funerals into possibilities for challenging the “official” and almost universalized expectations of the family and its gendered role in creating “the natural” body for living—and for dead—citizens.19 While discipline and control mechanisms failed to recognize Alev’s identity through managing her body and her name, and by “NOBODY IS GOING TO LET YOU ATTEND YOUR OWN FUNERAL”

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disowning (or threatening to disown while determining who can own) her body, the trans community “documented” and “archived” different means of resistance and practices of connectivity that mobilize not only bodies but also memories of the lost ones. They create resistance and solidarity to bury the unburiable, name the unnamed, and mourn the unmournable. This archive doesn’t seek completion and organized knowledge storage, but instead remains unfinished and messy.

evening I was sitting next to Ülkü in the office after Alev’s funeral. My memory of that day is still vivid. I remember how everyone was putting money into a little wooden box for Alev’s tombstone and sharing their memories about Alev. At the same time, we were talking about what we have to change in the organization of funerals. Some people were sharing contact information for imams who do not refuse to lead the funeral rites of trans individuals. Others were talking about other trans women that they have lost. They were introducing them to those who had never had the chance to meet them. As we also see in Aslı Zengin’s work on funerals of trans women in Turkey, here the memory of loss and systemic disrecognition after loss was opening spaces of connective commemoration, mourning, and resistance20. Ülkü told me: In that moment, it was Alev’s funeral, but we were also commemorating other people that we lost. I didn’t know some of the trans women that people were talking about, but I could relate to them. It was Alev’s funeral and we were there, but it was like we were more crowded than it seemed. We had the company of all of our other friends that we had lost.21 Pelin echoed that same sense of connection among trans women sharing memories and experiencing a sense of “postmemory.”22 We [trans women] even resist when we die. We show that all other forms of being are possible. I never met Alev, but I know her. Because we talk about her. We talk about how people resisted for her body. Or I know how once all trans women collected money among themselves [ 214 ]

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to re-make the tombstone of one of their friends with the name that she chose for herself, written on her tombstone. These are not onetime incidents. If somebody dies now, they will happen again. Because when it doesn’t happen then you really die. Nobody lets you attend your own funeral here.23 In Pelin’s recounting of Alev and her funeral, she collapses past, present, and future and unsettles the strong connection between unilinear temporality and remembering, just as Alev’s community crossed into the space that typically separates the mourners from the deceased at the funeral. Their mourning, like that which Marita Sturken described in the context of the AIDS crisis in the United States, brought the act of protest into the process and transformed it into action.24 I believe that even after four years, the range of emotions experienced at Alev’s funeral—sadness, rage, resistance, solidarity—remain fresh especially because of the constant repetitive cycle of deaths of other trans people. Early and violent death, and “terrifying forms of intimacy” that “take routinized and governed forms of violence” in funerals are so central in trans women’s lives that they perceive these experiences to be tenacious, inevitable, a fact of life, and a part of the everyday.25 Death and being surrounded by the memories of the dead turn the notion of death into a commonplace one for many trans women and disturb the promise that mourning will bring closure. Alev’s funeral mobilized the memories of those who had been lost before and introduced those memories to individuals who had not lived them. Her funeral became a space where demands for the living and the dead came together against the regimes of “explicit non-caring.”26 The trans community challenged the moral economies that declare which bodies are possible and grievable; they rejected the tacit assertion that the murder of a trans woman is acceptable; they combined their bodily presence with the presence of the memories of lost trans women and the struggles over their earlier funerals. In this act of resistance, trans women came together transtemporally and trans-locally. Their actions repeated those familiar from too many other funerals of trans women: gathering together, claiming the body, going to the graveyard, talking with personnel, and trying to convince them to name the person according to their affirmed gender identity and name, and sharing thoughts and feelings not only about loss but also about better ways of organizing and acting up against the state and the law’s erasure of trans women. I believe “NOBODY IS GOING TO LET YOU ATTEND YOUR OWN FUNERAL”

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that these collective archives that are mobilized with each loss inspire possibilities for “a radically different script of historical continuation.”27 The reaction of the trans community against legal, social, and material death encourages us to think about forms of creating new life narratives and alternative relationships to death and resistance through new modes of memory-making that challenge conventional ways of relating to life and death. Alev’s funeral made palpable the sense of the past and the future existing within the present, and it invites us to think about ways the dead and the living join together in the collective struggle for more livable lives and also, as Ülkü put it, for “less violent ways of passing away.”

Notes 1. Drawing on the difference between prefixes “mis-” and “dis-,” here I use “disrecognition” to emphasize the links between systematic politics of erasure and identity politics. Instead of discarding the term “misrecognition,” my main aim is to add another angle to the oppositionary relation between recognition and misrecognition to think more critically about seemingly ordinary but intentional and institutionalized patterns of erasure, displacement, and dispossession toward certain groups in everyday life. 2. Eithne Luibhéid, “Queer/Migration: An Unruly Body of Scholarship,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14, no. 2 (2008): 170. 3. Since 2014 I have been working on the mother-daughter relationship that is formed through mutual consent among trans women in Turkey. In 2014, I interviewed thirteen trans women who identified themselves as trans mothers and/or daughters, and I revisited their narratives for this chapter. I specifically looked at the narratives in which the focus was on the everyday understandings of death and how it occurred in the narratives of trans women. In the summer of 2017, I interviewed seven self-identified trans women who had been my friends since 2007 about their memories of funerals of trans women. Each interview was recorded with an audio recorder and informed consent was verbally obtained from each interviewee. All interviews were conducted based on the principle of confidentiality that I discussed with each informant before turning on the digital voice recorder. I asked each interviewee to pick a pseudonym that I could use to identify them in my research material. In addition to narratives of trans women, throughout the paper I will be also referring to my field notes, which I have been keeping since 2014. 4. Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence: Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011);Viviane Namaste, Invisible [ 216 ]

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Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 5. Spade, Normal Life, 54. 6. TaߞçıoОlu, Esen Ezgi, “‘I Lived and Learned’: Violence, Survival and Self-Making in Trans Women’s Lives in Istanbul, Turkey,” Oñati Socio-Legal Series 5, no. 6 (2015): 1452–1470. 7. C. Riley Snorton, and Jin Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection on Violence, Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, Vol. 2 ed. Susan Stryker and Aren Aizura (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2013), 69. 8. Snorton and Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics,” 68. 9. Burçin, interview by author, August 2, 2017, Istanbul. 10. Spade, Normal Life, 17 11. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” in Foucault in an Age of Terror: Essays on Biopolitics and the Defence of Society, ed. Stephen Morton and Stephen Bygrave (Berlin: Springer, 2008), 152–82. 12. Michelle R. Martin-Baron, “(Hyper/in)visibility and the Military Corps(e)” in Queer Necropolitics, ed. by Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Sylvia Posocco (London: Routledge, 2014), 51–71. 13. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2000), 55. 14. Herein it is important to remember that turning funeral ceremonies into womanonly spaces where women carry coffins on shoulders has been a significant practice of feminist resistance in Turkey for many years. It may not have been the first time that it was practiced, but the first publicly known case of the feminist resistance during a funeral of a woman was after Duygu Asena’s death (due to brain cancer) in 2001. She was and still is a very important figure in Turkey’s women’s movement and during her funeral ceremony a group of women carried her coffin on their shoulders while singing the song, “There are women, women are everywhere,” which is one of the most well-known feminist songs of Turkey. 15. Butler, Judith, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance” in Vulnerability in Resistance, ed. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016): 16. 16. Butler, 16. 17. Melis, interview by author, May 25, 2017, Istanbul. 18. Melis, interview. 19. José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (1996): 8–9. 20. Aslı Zengin, “Sevginin Ölüm Dünyası: Aile, Arkadaߞlık ve Trans Kadın Cenazeleri” in Queer Temaߞa, ed. Leman S. DarıcıoОlu (Istanbul: Sel Yayıncılık, 2016), 128–145. “NOBODY IS GOING TO LET YOU ATTEND YOUR OWN FUNERAL”

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21. Ülkü, interview by author, August 11, 2017, Istanbul. 22. Inspired by Marianne Hirsch’s work, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), since 2014 I have been working on the shared experience of “queer postmemory.” It refers to fragments of traumatic events that echo in the narratives of individuals who were never there to live those events, while unsettling the pre-established itineraries of “intergenerational” transmission of memory and destabilizing unmarked temporal and familial dimensions of collective and personal memory. 23. Pelin, interview by author, March 25, 2014, Istanbul. 24. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Oakland: University of California Press, 1997). 25. Aslı Zengin, “Violent Intimacies: Tactile State Power, Sex/Gender Transgression, and the Politics of Touch in Contemporary Turkey,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 12, no. 2 (2016): 233, 240. 26. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 147. 27. Anjali Arondekar, “Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 1 (2005): 18. Acknowledgments: I first would like to express my appreciation to Ayߞe Gül Altınay for encouraging me to follow my curiosity on memory. I am deeply thankful to Chantal Nadeau for the support and patience that made (re)encountering Alev’s loss and writing this piece possible. I am grateful to Jessica Greenberg, Jenny Davis, Aslı Zengin, and Ghassan Moussawi, for their insightful comments. I would like to thank Alisa Solomon for her generous support and significant advice. I also thank María José Contreras and Banu Karaca for their comments.

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CHA P T E R X II

Black Feminist Visions and the Politics of Healing in the Movement for Black Lives D E VA WO O D LY

The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel; therefore, I can be free. —AUD RE LO RD E

S

halon Irving was an epidemiologist who studied inequality in health provision and outcomes. At thirty-six, she was a lieutenant colonel in the uniformed ranks of the U.S. Public Health Service. She had a BA in sociology, two master’s degrees and a dual-subject PhD. In the summer of 2016, she found, to her delight, that she was pregnant. However, after giving birth to a healthy daughter, Soleil, she hadn’t been feeling well. She was lethargic and swollen. So she called on the excellent team of doctors she had assembled for treatment. Shalon was prosperous, she had education, extensive knowledge, and a “rock solid support system.” None of that mattered. Her concerns were not treated with urgency.Three weeks after giving birth to her baby she collapsed on the floor of her home and died. Erica Garner, an impactful activist in the Movement for Black Lives and daughter of Eric Garner, who was strangled by a police officer on the street for selling loose cigarettes while pleading “I can’t breathe,” had a heart attack after the birth of her second child, a son, named Eric for her dad. She survived, and doctors discovered she had an enlarged heart. Erica was a new mother, but she didn’t stop working for justice for her father and the one black person killed every twenty-one hours by police in this country.1 In a radio interview in November of 2017, Garner reflected on her health, noting that political struggle takes a personal toll. “Look at Kalief Browder’s mother, she died of a broken heart. She had heart problems because she kept fighting for her son. Like I’m struggling right now with the stress and [ 219 ]

everything.”2 Three weeks after saying these words and three months after giving birth, Erica Garner suffered a fatal heart attack. Dr. Shalon Irving and Erica Garner are both victims of a growing crisis of maternal mortality in the United States. America, rhetorically possessed of the most “advanced” medical apparatus in the world, nevertheless has the worst maternal mortality rate among industrialized nations, with almost 27 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. The next worse maternal mortality rate among peer countries, held by Britain, is only one-third that rate, with 9 maternal deaths per 100,000. As with all things American, race is the decisive factor in the likelihood that a new mother will have poor access to healthcare, that her care will be impacted by racial prejudice, and that she will die within the year of her child’s birth.3 Black mothers are three to four times or 243 percent more likely to die during birth or the postpartum period than their white counterparts. As with the illustrative stories of Dr. Shalon Irving and Erica Garner, the statistics bear out that this discrepancy is in no way tempered by economic or educational advantage. In New York City, for example, the Department of Health found that black college-educated mothers are more likely to have serious complications in pregnancy and childbirth than white high school graduates. They are also twelve times more likely to die.4 And trends in maternal morbidity have been worsening since 2000. Health researchers suggest that neither access to care nor prejudice in care providers can explain the whole of this colossal discrepancy. Instead, the culprit in the lethal heartbreak of new black mothers is chronic stress brought on by racism and sexism, a process that Dr. Arline Geronimous calls “weathering.” This weathering changes the biology of black women, accelerating aging at the cellular level, making black women more susceptible to infection and causing the early-onset of chronic diseases, particularly hypertension and diabetes.5 The “weather” that comprises the nexus of structural oppression that black women have experienced since the dawn of modernity, marked by the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, has given rise to a distinct political philosophy. Black women have been situated as the gendered victims of domination perpetrated by white men and women and by black men, as well as the racialized carriers of the oppressive burden of care-for-others through the reality of a lethally disciplinary state and a political economy that proscribes, devalues, and excludes them from prosperity. This essay proceeds in two broad sections: The first focuses on the longterm trauma of black women’s oppression, an oppression that operates in [ 220 ]

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the interlocking registers of gender, race, and class and is both carried as a bodily and psychic memory and reinforced by daily experiences of devaluation, discrimination, domination, and exclusion.6 The second part explores the kind of mobilization that acknowledges and names this trauma as well as charting a course toward recovery, healing, and justice. Under these two broad sections, I examine four distinct phenomena. In part one, I discuss the theory of historical trauma and its embodied impacts. I also review the empirical deprivations that black women suffer because the interlocked social forces of race and gender, operating as gendered racialization, damage their life chances via the mechanisms of both domination and oppression. In part two, I discuss the political implications of these realities and elaborate the idea that black women’s situations at the juncture of interlocked oppressions has given rise to a political philosophy that understands justice as a state that can arise only from confronting the lived experience (as opposed to the abstract conditions) of those at the margins of political, social, and economic rights; concern; and privilege. Finally, I undertake an explanation of the ways that the Movement for Black Lives, popularly known as #BlackLivesMatter,7 is seeking to institutionalize both the recognition and treatment of racial trauma and the margin-to-center conception of justice that has long animated black women’s political thought, into a set of beliefs and practices that participants call “healing justice.” In sum, I argue that the Movement for Black Lives has developed a political philosophy, organizational practices, and mobilization strategies aimed at achieving these goals. The political philosophy is rooted in the insight that centering the most marginalized is the only path through which just practices and policies can be obtained. This view inspires both social practices and political action that are meant to answer the structural oppression that the most marginalized face. To do so, movement actors begin by acknowledging that feelings are not the opposite of intellect and that care and affirmation are not only personal but, critically, political resources. The social practices that characterize both individual orientation and organizational approaches to the contemporary black freedom struggle include encouraging what activist Elle Hearns calls “collaborative solidarity” and unapologetically defending black joy.These social practices support political action that consists in first changing the mainstream American political conversation about white supremacy and antiblackness, organizing direct action both on and offline, crafting the Movement for Black Lives political platform, and recruiting and supporting candidates to run on that platform. The movement’s approach, which B L AC K F E M I N I S T V I S I O N S A N D T H E P O L I T I C S

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self-consciously integrates affective sustenance and practical politics, is one that twenty-first-century politics cannot do without if we hope to confront the most vexing problems that the last century has left to us.

Part I: Memory, Trauma, and the Concept of Justice Iris Marion Young writes that oppression is “the disadvantage and injustice some people suffer not because a tyrannical power coerces them, but because of the everyday practices of  .  .  . society.” These “systemic constraints . . . are not necessarily the result of the intentions of a tyrant” they are instead “embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols, in the assumptions underlying institutional rules and the collective consequences of following those rules.”8 Oppression, then, is “the institutional constraint on self-development,” which always operates in concert with the related social condition of domination, which is “the institutional constraint on selfdetermination.”9 These collective consequences accrue in an intersectional hierarchy with relative privilege coalescing at the top and lethal disadvantage pooling at the bottom. It is important to note that these consequences are not only distributive—that is, oppression’s harm is not only that it results in the maldistribution of rights and wealth. Additionally, oppression prevents self-development. One of the ways this happens is through the trauma that oppressive conditions inflict on those on the wrong slope of the hierarchy of privilege. Likewise, this trauma is not only something that afflicts individuals; there are individual and familial traumas that are so severe and persist for so long that they have broad social and political consequences. We call such effects generational trauma. Though we often locate the political genesis of the Movement for Black Lives in police shootings, a more accurate assessment of movement motivations must consider what Audre Lorde calls the “institutional dehumanization” that plagues black life.10 This institutional dehumanization includes racism, but it also incorporates other fulcrums of oppression such as sexism, classism, and state and social violence predicated against people with nonconforming gender identities and manifests empirically in bodies and lives of people who belong to the marked social groups. Although I speak specifically of black women here, psychologists note that any group of people who suffer long-term or ongoing systemic oppression may exhibit symptoms of generational trauma. Indeed, the bulk of [ 222 ]

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the research on historical trauma focuses on postgenocidal societies including the “soul wound” sustained by the indigenous people of the Americas and the psychic strain borne by Jewish people after the holocaust.11 Recently, “researchers have . . . identified race-related historical trauma as a large-scale, systems-related macro-stressor that adversely impacts both the physical and mental health of the affected racial/ethnic group” This kind of generational trauma “originates with the subjugation of a population by a dominant group.”12 To exhibit measurable effects, this subjugation must include: (1) sustained physical and psychological violence, (2) segregation and/or displacement, (3) economic deprivation, (4) cultural dispossession. Under these conditions, the trauma of oppression can be so severe that it is passed down epigenetically from one generation to the next. For example, “Type 2 diabetes in adults may be caused by metabolic adaptations of the fetus in response to maternal malnutrition. The disorder is then propagated throughout subsequent generations via hyperglycemic pregnancies.”13 In this way, the experience of subjugation affects an entire population.14 What generational trauma theory enables in public health is contextualization; it connects the past with the present and “creates an emotional and psychological release from blame and guilt about health status, empowers individuals and communities to address the root causes [rather than proximate causes] of poor health and allows for capacity building unique to culture, community, and social structure.”15 By the same token, the acknowledgement of generational trauma can improve both our understanding of current political and socioeconomic phenomena and inform our responses to those realities. The Movement for Black Lives is one of the first to take up this insight and center it in their political philosophy, organizational practices, and mobilization strategies. In this sense, the movement mobilizes the memory of trauma and dehumanization for change. What movement participants know is that it is impossible to organize people at the margins—those subject to oppression and its generational effects—without considering “the impact of oppressive trauma [that] creates cultural and individual wounding. [. . . Such wounding] becomes an impediment to the individual and collective’s ability to transform and negotiate their conditions.”16 As a result, many of the organizations leading the work in the Movement for Black Lives, such as Black Lives Matter Global Network and BYP100 have official positions for “healing justice” directors, coordinators, and councils who draw personnel, inspiration, and knowledge from professional therapists, social workers, and other healers such as B L AC K F E M I N I S T V I S I O N S A N D T H E P O L I T I C S

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members of the Kindred Collective, a group founded in 2007 to provide counseling to victims of Hurricane Katrina. Healing justice then, is a collection of commitments and movement practices promoting the health, healing, and joy of black people, by acknowledging the trauma that oppression and domination cause, and by trying to understand and address both the historical root and proximate causes of the structural violence that impacts black lives.

Black Women’s Empirical Deprivation Black women’s trauma has been specific—characterized by domination and oppression that is enacted in line with racialized and sexist beliefs about what black women, often defined by their bodily capacity, are and are not good for. Shatema Threadcraft argues Scholars of black women’s history agree that the development of a “distinctly feminist consciousness” among black women began during the period of enslavement. [. . .] enslaved women devoted considerable attention to liberation from constraints on their bodies, which limited their ability to make choices regarding whether or not to engage in sexual relations, to reproduce, and to provide care. [.  .  .] they were expected to relinquish the most feminine capacities of their bodies to the use and control of white men, to make the most intimate capacities of their bodies available to slave masters and in truth, with regard to sexual relations, to all men. They were compelled to provide sexual services, they were forced to reproduce, they were forced to provide care, often wholly inadequate, to enslaved dependents and to provide far better resourced care to white children.17 She goes on to say that “racialized labor arrangements ensured that the white body had received far more than the physical and emotional support it was due while, conversely, the black body had received far less—a justice claim, and noticeably one that is not wholly about the problematic redistributive aspects of the arrangement.”18 Today, the gendered racialization of the labor market continues to disadvantage black women due to race, sex, and, for gender nonconforming women, transphobia. Black women make 67 cents for every dollar given to non-Hispanic white men. The Economic [ 224 ]

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Policy Institute notes that, though the gender wage gap has decreased overall in the past forty years, progress is actually slowing for black women. In a recent report, the researchers find that despite the large gender disadvantage faced by all women, black women were near parity with white women in 1979. However, in 2016, white women’s wages grew to 76 percent of white men’s, compared to 67 percent for black women relative to white men.” In other words, for black women, the “trend is going the wrong way.”19 This trend obtains even though black women work more hours, that white women and two-thirds of those in the workforce have undertaken some post-secondary education. “Between 2004 and 2014, median annual earnings for black women who worked full-time, year-round, declined to $34,000, lower than for most groups of men or women in the country.”This is partly because 28 percent of black women are employed in the service sector, which tends to offer low wage jobs that often have unpredictable hours and offer neither healthcare coverage nor sick leave. This means that “while many black women have jobs that involve caring for the children and family members of others, they often can’t afford the same services for their own families.”20 As the structure of gendered racialization in the labor and care that has occupied black feminist political thought since at least the nineteenth century remains largely the same, it serves up an historical oppression that lives not only in the social and epigenetic memory but in the current lived experience of black women. Gillian White notes that these economic problems are compounded by social inequities: “black girls are more likely than their white counterparts to be disciplined within public schools and punished within educational institutions; they’re also more likely to be arrested or experience domestic violence.” In addition, “they are more likely to be afflicted with serious illnesses and less likely to have the health care coverage to treat themselves.”21 Additionally, sociologist Matthew Desmond has found that “in high-poverty black neighborhoods, one male renter in 33 and one woman in 17 is evicted. In high-poverty white neighborhoods, in contrast, the ratio is 134:1 for men and 150:1 for women.” Eviction is an economic stain that can be as detrimental to achieving basic needs as a felony conviction. Desmond reports “landlords like to say, ‘I’ll rent to you as long as you don’t have an eviction or a conviction.’ These twinned processes—eviction and conviction—work together to propagate economic disadvantage [. . .] poor black men are locked up while poor black women are locked out.”22 B L AC K F E M I N I S T V I S I O N S A N D T H E P O L I T I C S

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A less discussed but no less materially relevant deprivation suffered by black women is violence perpetrated by black men. Black women are battered by their partners at a rate 35 percent higher than white women, making domestic violence the leading cause of death among back women under the age of 34. However, “they are seldom viewed as proper victims and are rarely cast as total innocents.” To wit, “when black women defend themselves, they are more likely to be criminalized, as per the example of Marissa Alexander, who was infamously slapped with a mandatory minimum twenty-year prison sentence after firing a warning shot at her abusive ex-spouse.”23 As the #Metoo movement (itself started by a black feminist organizer Tarana Burke in 2006) reveals, any woman can be subject to male harassment or attack; however, due to the shared condition of racial oppression and its traumatic impacts on all black people, black women may be less inclined to report the patriarchal violence they might endure at the hands of black men. Brittney Cooper writes, “Black women’s knowledge production has always been motivated by a sense of care for black communities in a world where non-black people did not find value in the lives and livelihoods of these communities”24 That means that it can be difficult to forego the care and love for black boys and men who, we know, are both under attack and attacking us. Mayisha Kai reflects, “I never told my parents about the first time I was hit. Not because I thought I wouldn’t be believed, but because even at 11, I understood that I was to protect this boy, even above myself.”25 These data show both the logic and vital necessity of black feminist political philosophy and a black feminist oppositional movement. Given the way that black women are situated at the conjunction of oppressions, it makes sense that when they consider what justice consists in, they are moved to center the most vulnerable.

Part II: Healing and Justice from Margin-to-Center In her influential book, Feminist Theory from Margin to Center, bell hooks describes the special perspective of those who are positioned at the margins of society. “To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body.”26 She contends that this marginality is reinforced daily as black people move through the world. In the small Kentucky town where she [ 226 ]

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grew up, the railroad tracks were the physical symbol of the margin. She writes, “across those tracks were paved streets, stores we could not enter, restaurants we could not eat in, and people we could not look directly in the face.”27 Today, the margins are marked differently, by neighborhoods that are neglected and derided by city officials; stores that offer fewer choices yet charge higher prices; restaurants that serve food that leads to obesity, disease, and premature death; police who shake down and shoot bystanders and people suspected of minor crimes on sight and with impunity; and people who deny that any of these racialized phenomena amount to more than problems of personal responsibility. “Living as we [do] on the edge,” hooks explains, “we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. hooks characterizes this awareness as a “mode of seeing” that reminds black people “of the existence of the whole universe,” a perspective that is “unknown to most of our oppressors.”28 By these lights, those who are relatively more privileged in the hierarchy of intersectional oppression lack a perspective that can inform them about the lived experience of the marginalized. Such a perspective is necessary to imagine and apply transformational, yet practical, corrections to institutions that will otherwise (re)produce debilitating, often lethal, unfairness. Alicia Garza, one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, explains, When we think about how we address problems in this country, we often start from a place of trickle-down justice. So, using white folks as the control, we say that well, if we make things better for white folks, then everybody else is gonna get free. But actually, it doesn’t work that way.We have to address problems at the root. And when you deal with what’s happening in black communities, it creates an effervescence— so, a bubble up, rather than a trickle down.29 However, organizing people who suffer the effects of generational trauma is no small task. The question is: What is required for healing justice to be possible? Nigerian-British journalist and activist Esther Armah argues that the path toward emotional healing begins by “finding and creating the language to describe [generational] trauma and articulating it as a reality; creating space to explore it; dealing with it by developing a counter-narrative.”30 The Movement for Black Lives attempts to create language, make space, and B L AC K F E M I N I S T V I S I O N S A N D T H E P O L I T I C S

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build counternarratives in a variety of ways. One is by cultivating practices of collaborative solidarity, another is by encouraging self-care, and a third technique is by unapologetically celebrating and defending black joy. Each of these practices is undertaken with the guiding margin-to-center ethic as a foundation. This foundation is critical because it both helps to keep the reality and effects of trauma in view and avoids what Cathy J. Cohen calls “secondary marginalization,” which is the practice of defining certain members of a marginalized group as “innocent and worthy of mobilization, while others [are] labeled deviant, immoral, and bad.”31 Secondary marginalization is the name of a social dynamic in movements that causes them to reproduce the privileged to oppressed social hierarchy that exists in the wider society. For example, in the American civil rights movement of the 1960s, LGBTQ people were marginalized in this way; in the feminist movement’s “second wave” women of color and their concerns were often forced to the sidelines; and, in the gay rights movements of the 1980s and 1990s, queer people of color were often excluded or ignored, with deadly consequences.

Collaborative Solidarity The shaming of certain black people in an attempt to uphold the moral rightness of others takes place in both colloquial exhortations to “pull your pants up” and “take off that hoodie” and the practices movement organizations employ to distribute resources—toward college funds and job training rather than support for sex workers or the incarcerated, for example.32 The Movement for Black Lives endeavors to avoid this pitfall by demanding that social problems be approached with an intersectional lens from the point of view of the most impacted. “Intersectionality” and its theoretical “grandmothers,” as Charlene Carruthers puts it, “double jeopardy,”33 “triple oppression,”34 “simultaneity,”35 and “interlocking oppressions,”36 all arise from black feminist theory and describe the same social fact: that is, oppressive institutions and dominative arrangements of power are interconnected and cannot be examined separately, especially because their effects are impossible to disentangle in people’s lived experiences. To accomplish this goal, the movement has developed the language of “unapologetic blackness” to ensure that “disreputable” black folks will not be cast from the circle of movement concern, political analysis, and [ 228 ]

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organizational work. This is the reason that the Movement for Black Lives deliberately foregrounds issues such as violence against trans black people, support for sex workers and the incarcerated, as well as the abolition of police and prisons. The movement endeavors to avoid secondary marginalization not only in its public campaigns but also in its internal organizational practices. This requires participants and leaders to “make space” for and be willing to learn from those whose voices are not often heard—this is the heart of the process of what Elle Hearns, a black trans woman and activist calls “collaborative solidarity.” Charlene Carruthers, the National Director of BYP100, explains it this way: It is a difficult and heart-wrenching struggle, [because] when you commit black queer feminist values, you actually have to struggle with [people] and not throw them underneath the bus or throw things under the carpet. You must name what you don’t know and go to people who do know way more than you know and we have a responsibility to actually put our values into practice and to struggle with that and not be perfect. Perfection isn’t the goal, but integrity and accountability to our values is.37 Kei Williams, an organizer with Black Lives Matter Network New York, interprets it this way: we need to center to the most marginalized and the most marginalized need to lead the work [. . .] Collaborative solidarity says whenever we build, from the beginning you must center those most marginalized. [. . .] In practice, this looks like always going to the community that’s being impacted and never speaking on their behalf. Or coming in our capes and saying “this is the work that we’ve been doing, you guys get on board with this.”38 For example, Williams reports: recently, [. . .] the confederate flags that were hanging up in [an apartment building] on the Lower East Side was a hot topic.Those flags had been there for more than five months. All of a sudden, someone took a picture and it went viral and then there was a community call out for B L AC K F E M I N I S T V I S I O N S A N D T H E P O L I T I C S

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what should happen. And some white allies of mine reached out to me and their response was, “we want a build a huge sign, lit up with lights, that says Black Lives Matter and put it directly across the street from this apartment building.”What I urged them to do was actually contact a community liaison—someone who lives in that building. Because yes, you might come down here with that sign, but once you leave that sign, what is the impact it’s going to have on that community? [. . .] At the end of that block, there’s already a police precinct. And so police are commonly driving up on the sidewalks, undercover cops are commonly riding around in that area [. . .] there are huge flood lights that beam into the windows every single night—they come on at about 11 o’clock and they don’t go off until about 5:30 in the morning.This community is already hyper-policed. So, you bringing this huge sign and bringing more attention—how does that impact the community once you go back to your apartment in your gentrified neighborhood of Brooklyn?39 Centering the marginalized is not a matter of designating the winner of what is sometimes derisively called the “oppression Olympics,” because it is not a matter of determining whether one individual or group’s pain is more valid than another’s. Instead, the centering of the marginalized is a pragmatic, experience-based solution to the problem of how to envision and enact a more just society given that abstract universalisms have a track record of failing all those who do not inhabit the specific body and structural position of white upper-class manhood that stands-in for the universal human.

Defending Black Joy Black joy is the defiant affirmation of blackness in spite of the material and psychic deprivation that often marks members of the group. Importantly, this kind of joy is experienced by both the individual and those participating in the group. It is what Emile Durkheim called “collective effervescence,” a sensation of euphoria that one feels in the presence of others who are aligned in thought and action. Deborah Gould notes “such happenings have an almost sacred quality to them.”40 They induce participants

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not only to cognitively realize but to feel the potential power to affect change that they might wield, if they continue to act in concert—with and for each other. Alicia Garza writes, “Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.”41 It is the anchoring of the movement for black lives in this defiant affirmation that undergirds the group consciousness of the movement participants. And the willingness to participate in this affirmation is one of the defining practices of membership in the collectivity. Whether at organizational meetings, movement-wide convenings, at demonstrations or on social media, organizers are intentional about making space for language and practice that celebrates black joy and develops a narrative to counter antiblackness. For example, a common chant at protest begins with the call “unapologetically” and is answered “black!” and continues from the caller “unapologetically” bringing the answer from the crowd “black, black, black, black!” Another goes, “I love black people! You don’t love black people? What’s wrong with you?” The last line is repeated in a polyrhythmic round that circles the crowd, which acts as a chorus, until a caller anchors the chant again with, “I love black people!” starting the joyous communal claiming of black-identity over again. This kind of affirmation of blackness is not entirely new. For example, the négritude movement, an African diasporic movement of the 1930s and 1940s, expressed an artistic aesthetic that aimed to uplift the beauty of black cultures and point out their profound influence on the world. Likewise, the slogan “black is beautiful,” which rose to popularity in the late 1960s, along with the afro hairstyle, marked a period in which black Americans sought to deliberately embrace phenotypical characteristics that have come to define blackness and to develop a loving aesthetic celebrating these traits in the face of the devaluation and disparagement aimed at them under white supremacy. However, the current movement’s approach to this affirmative politics is distinct in that it is avowedly feminist and centers the most maligned—the dark-skinned, those with the kinkiest hair, those who are fat, those who are disabled, those who are gender nonconforming, and those who have offered their bodies to the labor of sex work. In the contemporary movement, the affirmation of black beauty and brilliance begins

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with the illumination and celebration of those who have, in the past, been hidden from view, thus offering standards of beauty and value that emanate from the margins. Declarations like this one penned by social justice educator and blogger Cody Charles are common practice among people immersed in the cultural tide created by the movement. He writes, This world tells me constantly that this Black, FAT, queer body does not deserve joy. Not ever. It tells me that my trauma should consume me. It tells me that I should wait patiently, expecting violence at any moment. It tells me that joy can never reside here, in my body; only shame, guilt, and struggle can sleepover. But I got another plan in mind. I’m going to claim joy for myself. [. . . because] Black Joy is resistance. And Black Joy is tradition. Today I’m not interested in exploring struggle, I’m choosing to center Black Joy.42 This frank declamation of unapologetic black beauty is, in the margin-tocenter philosophy, the only way to defend black joy and, in turn, harness that joy as a mobilizing resource. Importantly, this bedrock commitment is not to the “inclusion” of the marginalized among the rest but instead a mandate that serves both the ethical and political purposes of preventing secondary marginalization and therefore constructing a politics in which “justice for all” is a real possibility rather than a rhetorical recitation. Another example of the affirmative social practice of the movement is exhibited on social media. The unremitting tide of stories documenting the abuse and killing of black people is pushed back by hashtags like #BlackGirlMagic, which caption images and descriptions acknowledging and praising the accomplishments of black women or, #MelaninOnFleek, which captions pictures of black people dressed up, expressing their personal style. #YouGoodMan, encourages black men to reach out to each other and check in regarding stress and mental health, and #ThanksgivingWithBlackFamilies is a hilarious parade of memes and gifs that lovingly poke fun at common colloquialisms and cultural habits that black people are likely to encounter on the last Thursday of November. Importantly, this joyous affirmation is not just about making people feel good. Its more precise impacts are that it, first, helps black people understand themselves in the world in a different way and, second, acts as a tool

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for mobilization. Gould explains, “in a world where impersonal, abstract forces” of oppression “shape daily lives and can generate sentiments of being out of control, of inefficacy, of helplessness and hopelessness, social movements are often a space that engenders rich and textured counterfeelings.”43 As Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes, “most folks I know come to activist spaces longing to heal  .  .  . The good kind of healing. Healing that is affordable, has childcare and no stairs, doesn’t misgender us or disrespect our disabilities or sex work, that believes us when we’re hurt and listens when we say what we need.”44 Critically, this kind of affirmation helps to build and maintain organizations. We know that selective incentives help people to participate in activities that are costly and may be dangerous—there is always a pleasure in solidarity and the technology of social media have allowed the movement to reshape even casual observers’ relationship to blackness. A movement culture like that in the Movement for Black Lives, which self-consciously understands collaborative solidarity and the defense of black joy as part of the purpose of their political action, provides a unique opportunity for participants to heal themselves in and through the political work of securing justice for the most marginalized. To defend black joy, in this sense, is a political act of not only joy, but jouissance, which, in this context, is the feeling of mastery in being the author of one’s own experience and having the authority to explode the taken-for-granted. This is what allows people involved in the movement to create a political program that challenges and changes the terms of the American political conversation on racism and white supremacy, to have the audacity to collectively author a policy platform that is available online in six different languages, and to establish initiatives like the Electoral Justice Project,45 which seeks to recruit and support black candidates who advocate for those policy proposals in running for political office. These kinds of practices, in combination with the official institutional space that movement organizations have made for healing practitioners of various kinds—from licensed therapists to masseuses, chiropractors, and intuitive witches—are an essential, yet often overlooked and devalued part of giving movement participants the individual capacity, organizational strength, and ideational clarity that can help them find practical political paths through the world as it is, toward one that is capable of justice, properly understood.

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Notes 1. Sam Sinyangwe, “The Police Violence Report: March 2015,” Mapping Police Violence accessed on January 4, 2018, https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/. 2. Katie Mitchell, “After Erica Garner We Need to Talk about How Maternal Mortality Affects Black Women,” Bustle, December 30, 2017, https://www .bustle.com/p/after-erica-garners-death-we-need-to-talk-about-how-maternal -mortality-affects-black-women-7739678. 3. Joia Crear Perry, “The Black Maternal Mortality Rate in the U.S. is an International Crisis,” The Root, Sept. 30, 2016, https://www.theroot.com/the-black -maternal-mortality-rate-in-the-us-is-an-inter-1790857011. 4. Wendy C. Wilcox, Severe Maternal Morbidity in New York City, 2008–2012 (New York: New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, 2016), https:// www.acog.org/-/media/Districts/District-II/Public/SMI/v2/SMM.pdf?dmc =1&ts=20181208T2149157766. 5. Nina Martain and Renee Montagne, “Nothing Protects Black Women from Dying in Pregnancy and Childbirth,” ProPublica and NPR News, Dec 7, 2017, https://www.propublica.org/article/nothing-protects-black-women-from -dying-in-pregnancy-and-childbirth. 6. Interlocking or intersectional oppression and its structural consequences is a hallmark of black feminist philosophy. See Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Fourth Edition (New York: SUNY Press, 2015) and Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 7. #BlackLivesMatter is the popular hashtag that catalyzed the current iteration of the black freedom struggle in 2014; it is also the name of one organization involved in the movement. However, beginning in 2015, individuals and organizations involved in this movement have introduced the name the Movement for Black Lives in order to acknowledge that the movement is broader than either the hashtag or the organization that bears its name. In addition, in 2016 the Movement for Black Lives, which is a de-centralized collective of organizations and individuals working in myriad capacities from communications to law and education, released a policy platform that serves as the codified collection of movement positions on contemporary issues, including both short and longterm policy proposals: https://policy.m4bl.org/platform/ 8. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 41. 9. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 37. 10. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Speeches and Essays (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), 39. [ 234 ]

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11. For reference see: Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, “Oyate Ptayela: Rebuilding the Lakota Nation through Addressing Historical Trauma among Lakota Parents,” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 2, nos. 1–2 (1999): 109–126; Rachel Yehuda et al., “Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects on FKBP5 Methylation,” Biological Psychiatry 80, no. 5 (2016): 372–80; Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 12. Michelle Sotero, “A Conceptual Model of Historical Trauma: Implications for Public Health Practice and Research,” Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice, 1, no. 1 (2006): 96. 13. Sotero, “A Conceptual Model of Historical Trauma,” 99. 14. See also, DR Williams, HW Neighbors, and JS Jackson, “Racial/Ethnic Discrimination and Health: Findings from Community Studies,” American Journal of Public Health 93, no. 2 (2008): 200–208; Larry Higginbottom, Omar Reid, and Sekou Mims, Post Traumatic Slavery Disorder (New York: Xlibris, 2004); Rachel Yehuda, et al., “Transgenerational Effects of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Babies of Mothers Exposed to World Trade Center Attacks During Pregnancy,” The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism 90, no. 7 (2005): 4115–4118; Steven Southwick et al., “Resilience Definitions, Theory, and Challenges: Interdisciplinary Perspectives,” European Journal of Psychotraumatology 5, no. 1 (2014): 25338. 15. Sotero, “A Conceptual Model of Historical Trauma,” 102. 16. Yolo Akili, “The Immediate Need for Emotional Justice,” Crunk Feminist Collective, Nov 16, 2011, http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2011/11/16/the -immediate-need-for-emotional-justice/. 17. Shetema Threadcraft, Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016): 10. 18. Threadcraft, Intimate Justice, 14. 19. Valerie Wilson, Janell Jones, Kayla Blado, and Elsie Gould,“Black Women Have to Work 7 Months in 2017 To Be Paid the Same as White Men in 2016,” Economic Policy Institute, July 28, 2017, https://www.epi.org/blog/black-women-have-to -work-7-months-into-2017-to-be-paid-the-same-as-white-men-in-2016/. 20. Gillian B.White,“Black Women: Supporting Their Families with Few Resources,” The Atlantic, June 12, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017 /06/black-women-economy/530022/. 21. White, “Black Women.” 22. Matthew Desmond, How Housing Matters: Poor Black Women Are Evicted at Alarming Rates, Setting Off a Chain of Hardship (New York: MacArthur Foundation, 2014). 23. Siklvu Hutchison, “The Wars Inside: Black Women and Deadly Intimate Partner Violence,” Huffington Post, May 15, 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost .com/entry/the-wars-inside-black-women-and-deadly-intimate-partner_us _58f0644fe4b048372700d72a. B L AC K F E M I N I S T V I S I O N S A N D T H E P O L I T I C S

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24. Brittney Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Bloomington, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 2. 25. Mayisha Kai, “Dancing with the Devil We Know,” The Root, July 26, 2017, https://www.theroot.com/dancing-with-the-devils-we-know-what-the-cdc-s -new-in-1797219681 26. bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 2000). 27. hooks, Feminist Theory, xvii. 28. hooks, Feminist Theory, xviii. 29. Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, “An Interview with the Founders of Black Lives Matter,” filmed at TEDWomen October 2016, accessed December 8, 2018, https://www.ted.com/talks/alicia_garza_patrisse_cullors _and_opal_tometi_an_interview_with_the_founders_of_black_lives_matter. 30. Dalila-Johari Paul, “Emotional Justice: What Black Women Want and Need,” Guardian, December 3, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec /03/emotional-justice-what-black-women-want-and-need. 31. Cathy J. Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 346. 32. Respectability politics and secondary marginalization are a common feature of the way social movement organizations prioritize issues, frame issues, and distribute resources. It is not a phenomenon limited to black social movements. See: Deva Woodly, The Politics of Common Sense (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015), Chapter 3, on the gay respectability politics that undergirded the turn toward marriage in gay politics during the late 1990s and early 2000s. 33. A reference to the pamphlet “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female” by Frances M. Beal (1969). 34. Phrase attributed to Claudia Jones, a prominent member of the Communist Party in the U.S., discussed at length in Angela Davis’s Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). 35. Combahee River Collective Statement, April 1977, accessed December 8, 2018, http://circuitous.org/scraps/combahee.html 36. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990). 37. Barbara Smith, Charlene Carruthers, and Reina Gossett, “Black Feminism and the Movement for Black Lives,” (recorded remarks), National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Creating Change Conference 2016, accessed December 8, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV3nnFheQRo. 38. “The Movement for Black Lives Now,” Museum of the City of New York, September 19, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j1Eh6fG1QQ&list =PLgiWIwewdeHlSaCWZCFdE5gAh_EbDu-V8&index=10. [ 236 ]

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39. “The Movement for Black Lives Now,” Museum of the City of New York. 40. Deborah Gould, Moving Politics: Emotions and ActUp’s Fight Against AIDS (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 2009), 208. 41. Garza, Alicia, “A Herstory of the Black Lives Matter Movement,” The Feminist Wire, October 7, 2014, https://thefeministwire.com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2/. 42. Cody Charles, “Black Joy,We Deserve It,” Medium, Feb 17, 2017, https://medium .com/reclaiming-anger/black-joy-we-deserve-it-1ab8dc7569b1. 43. Gould, Moving Politics, 210. 44. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, “A Not-so-brief Personal History of the Healing Justice Movement 2010–2016,” MICE Magazine, accessed December 8, 2018, http://micemagazine.ca/issue-two/not-so-brief-personal-history-healing -justice-movement-2010%E2%80%932016. 45. Electoral Justice Project: Building Civic Power for Black Lives: https://ejp.m4bl .org/.

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CH A P T E R X III

Instilling Interference Lorie Novak’s Frequencies in Traumatic Time L AU R A W E X L E R

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orie Novak’s photo-based works focus on the ways in which documentary photographic practice connects public life to private memory. By means of a recurring number of her own as well as other people’s personal and family photographs and an extensive collection of public media images, Novak prints, montages, projects, pairs, and parses many of the relationships between the public and the private. It’s a given that our inner demons and desires influence what we see and make of the external world, but Novak’s inquiry extends attention to how (and if) images get “in” from the “outside” in the first place. The work poses vital concerns for a visual politics that is focused on media archives of atrocity: Is there a threshold to provocation? How little is too little, and how much is too much? When will we viewers close, and when will we open, our eyes? Is it necessary to have a buffer? What serves as a buffer? When it serves, what do we allow ourselves to notice? What happens when the buffer stops working? The questions are universal. The concrete propositions Novak explores are individual and exemplary; no other person’s answer will be the same as hers. But taken altogether, her multifaceted examination of the process of instillation—how images get in—makes visible critical aspects of the temporality of looking.What might be inferred from them for a feminist politics of recovery is the subject of this essay. In 1999 when NATO started bombing Serbia, Novak began collecting the front sections of the New York Times, an international publication that is [ 241 ]

Figure 13.1 Lorie Novak, Medicated, 2011, Color Ink Jet Photograph, 40 × 24.4”.

also her hometown paper. She planned to measure, in the periodical time of a newspaper, the duration of hostilities.1 Eventually, a considerable pile of newspapers came to occupy the center of Novak’s studio. “My original idea,” she wrote in 2012 “was to have a stack of newspapers that signified a war that I would photograph.” But though the war officially ceased, the fighting did not end, so neither did Novak’s collecting. “When the cease-fire was signed it did not seem like a true resolution had been reached, so I kept collecting. The World Trade Center was attacked, and I kept collecting, and I have not stopped.”2 Novak’s premonition in 1999 that something needed to be tracked was correct. The expectation of an end date was not. The surface of the pile took on the ruffled semblance of feathers or fallen leaves, a reference to the natural world from which the paper came. On parts of the outside layer, photographs were legible. A viewer could grasp that the Times made an enormous effort every day to use pictures to show its readers what is going on in the world. The pile was also—unexpectedly—rounded and molded like a haystack. Did the haystack suggest that something of significance could be found within, like the proverbial needle . . . or was

Figure 13.2 Lorie Novak, April 1, 1999–September 7, 2011, Color Ink Jet photograph, 30 × 45”. INSTILLING INTERFERENCE

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that too simpleminded an idea? What might be the future harvest of the violence that was being sown? As the newspapers multiplied, Novak refused to aggrandize either the pile or the kinds of questions that it might imply. The eventual accumulation was not as big as one might imagine, considering that the duration it represented was so long. Growing in her studio, the pile of papers also showed a surprising scale: wider, but not taller, than a person. Novak’s record of this consequential historical period is so powerful an intervention because she turned the archive physically against the monumental mythmaking of demagoguery. The papers remained individual things, objects with a texture to encounter and hold in the hand. They easily occupied the intimate space of her studio even though the events they portrayed were singly and cumulatively formidable. As large geopolitical forces buckled and surged, and the New York Times documented the wreckage in lower Manhattan and in Virginia, Novak continued to add to her private pile. A ritual practice, it counter-posed quiet and steady regularity to the eruptions of the news. This foundational insistence on a personal reconstruction of photographic time by slow periodic accumulation that remained at a personal scale was the initial feminist thrust of the project. For a while after 9/11, photojournalists in the New York Times also showed people trying to use photography as a route to personal reconstruction, the public shattering having already taken on a ghastly political materiality. During that time, thousands of people interleaved family photographs with the mediated events in “wanted” posters that were public acts of reclamation. These were images of horror, too, but not in the way of the news. Whereas journalism pictured atrocity, these photographic tributes labored to interrupt the nightmare images of the last moments of a loved one’s life and insert more acceptable visions, taken from the personal archives of family and friends. In so doing, they claimed public space and attended to the dignity of that need. Poignant handwritten messages marked the passage of grief as ordinary snapshots turned in retrospect into mourning pictures— the transformation using yet another kind of recursive photographic time. Some writers even came back again and again, relieved to find these fragile papers still in place, to leave layer upon layer of comment. Rather than avoiding photographs, these mourners wrote upon images that they very much hoped to see of loved ones they had lost. For almost a year after September 11, Novak photographed the missing posters displayed around the city.This work is an inquiry into a different kind of repetition, a lapidary rather than a ritual return to pain. It addresses much debated assumptions [ 244 ]

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Figure 13.3 Lorie Novak, Grand Central Station, October, 2002.

about visual empathy and the ways that images of suffering accumulate their emotional weight.3 Once again, although the archive numbered in the thousands of items and existed in public, its poignancy derives from its elemental individuality, its human scale, and its associations with the domestic, here the art of scrapbooking. After a long while, Novak also began to interrogate what was under the surface of the pile by reaching in and pulling issues out. Contemplating them took yet more time. In 2011, over a decade after she began to collect the papers, Photographic Interference emerged. For this project Novak made and exhibited a set of large-scale photographs that joined images of her own eyes and hands with images of tragic events that she found when she pulled out the papers. In Photographic Interference, Novak sutured public and private images together, some taken from the pile and some from a personal archive of images she had been photographing from the newspapers over the years and grabbing from the internet. That the personal is political and the political personal, an axiom of feminism, was already more than clear. The intensity of the joining represents both the amplification and the dissolution of meaning—of making sense—that Novak and so many others INSTILLING INTERFERENCE

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Figure 13.4 Lorie Novak, Bodies, 2012, Color Ink Jet Photograph, 20 × 30”.

experienced as the time of the pile of papers grew. Yet by the time of this project, ten years after 9/11, a terrible kind of cultural paralysis had set in. Despite the best efforts of the Times photojournalists among so many others, public opposition to the malign consequences of perpetual war was barely evident. In Photographic Interference, Novak drew on her earlier engagements with the pile and the posters to inquire more deeply into the reasons why. What is “interference”? The answer depends on one’s perspective in asking the question. According to Merriam-Webster, if you are thinking of physics, interference is “the mutual effect on meeting of two wave trains (as of light or sound) that constitutes alternating areas of increased and decreased amplitude (such as light and dark lines or louder and softer sound).”4 If you are an athlete, interference may be “the legal blocking of an opponent in football to make way for the ball carrier” and simultaneously “the illegal hindering of an opponent in sports.”5 Geneticists encounter “interference” as “partial or complete inhibition or sometimes facilitation of other genetic crossovers in the vicinity of a chromosomal locus where a preceding crossover has occurred.”6 Astronomers experience “confusion of a received radio signal due to the presence of noise (such as atmospherics) or signals from two or more transmitters on a single frequency.”7 Neurologists refer to a [ 246 ]

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debilitating competition between “cognition and locomotor tasks” as interference. Everyone is familiar with “interference” as “the disturbing effect of new learning on the performance of previously learned behavior with which it is inconsistent.”8 Novak’s haystack shaped pile eventually came to embody every one of these meanings. It was clearly a physical obstruction in the middle of the studio. But the pile conveyed images of physical waves as well: light and dark moire patterns created by and vibrating in the columns of type; rhythms over time of colors of the ink in the photographs above the fold; and sounds silenced in photography but implied, rising and falling, sometimes obscured by static, of the screams and cries portrayed in the photographs themselves. As the days of war became months and the months years, it challenged the salience of rules and laws, be they in sport or war. And monstrous forms emerged. It is very difficult to pay sustained attention in the contemporary media environment. Attention is a commodity and images of violence circulate very rapidly. Our understanding lags behind the constant pulses of new stimulation. When our attention is captured, we often do not fully register the pain of what we see. Photographic Interference foregrounds this dynamic both thematically and visually. An elegantly designed blister pack for painkillers lies on top of a page of newsprint. Each burst bubble is a portal to more suffering—in a visible face; in legible words such as “soldiers,” “killed,” “revolt.” Compared to the pile of newspapers, which seems diminished from what one imagines given the scope of the archive of brutality, the scale of these photographic insertions is huge. Perhaps their size references the internalized enormity of trauma. Do the painkillers enable or disengage the look? Are they signs of what it takes to function in the news cycle or what it takes to stop? I believe that Novak, who suffers from migraines, another subject of her work, here signals yet another meaning of “interference.”9 It is again a neurological one, in which an overly stimulated pulsing of neurons is said to create a rapidly progressing syndrome of extra-sensitivity to pain in particularly susceptible persons. But none of us ever looks without our analgesic filters. In 2012, at the invitation of the online journal e-misferica, Novak also launched Random Interference (www.nyu.edu/projects/novak/randominterference/), an ongoing web project that was inspired by the still version.10 The web-based Random Interference animated the conjoined cohabiting fragments of Novak’s earlier Photographic Interference project along with images INSTILLING INTERFERENCE

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Figure 13.5 Lorie Novak, Look/Not/Look, 2011, Color Ink Jet Photograph, 40 × 28.4”.

from online and print news sources so that the dimension of time is also conveyed by continual change. In Photographic Interference, Novak had deliberately made the sutures, but in Random Interference, the images are constantly conjoined and remixed by a randomizing script. Still using found and premeditated images, the time-based medium allowed her to allude to an image of conjunction without freezing a moment in time. The algorithmically varied iterations expand even further upon the vocabulary of violent juxtaposition she has long employed to illuminate disruptive disturbance— but in the Random Interference installation everything is looping, turning, and nothing is at peace. It is agonistic time, and it cannot be scripted. The papers are sometimes shown in close-up. With indeterminate rotation, the single rounded haystack appears and disappears. As Random Inteference has evolved with new images added by Novak, the haystack has disappeared, and the viewer is confronted with closer views of the often horrifying images of current events. In one viewing, Novak’s eyes penetrate two pictures of fleeing persons. The depth of perspicacity inferred is uncanny and a little frightening. In another, the viewer comes face to face with precisely squared-off layers, like the case files of a government archive. Remarkably, the texts near the fold of those orderly papers are legible. Repeatedly they announce terrible acts of destruction. The one view we never escape is that of the papers themselves, which fade into and out of everything we can see. The images yield random encounters, of varying weight, but there is also no outside to the loop. The project claims further ground by joining images of the newspaper collection to a headline banner proclaiming that someone “plans to send troops to Sudan” and then to a photograph of a weeping woman, her eyes blinded by tears. The woman, in agony, is pulling down a brightly colored head cloth that someone else’s hand is trying to lift up to expose her face to the camera. Later, a self-portrait of Novak covering her eyes with her hands bursts into its own negative frame, as if reflecting an atomic explosion, or at least how we have come to imagine such an explosion. Looking is pain. Seeing is danger. Being seen seeing is also a crisis. The eyes want something behind which to hide, like the tears of the weeping woman in the previous image. But Novak, unlike that woman, can block her eyes. Her hands are in her own control, and they work like the shutter of her camera. How did this violation come to be possible? Ought we to be surprised? Do viewers even spend enough time with the photograph to see in it the third, violating, hand? INSTILLING INTERFERENCE

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Figure 13.6 Screen Grabs from randominterference.net, 2012ongoing (https://www.nyu.edu/projects/novak/randominterference/).

Even when we succeed in paying attention, do we watch the photographs, to use Ariella Azoulay’s term of art, a moral compass that would allow layers of meaning to resolve, or do we merely look?11 In Photographic Interference, images of destruction were held in the hand and looked at over a period of time. But in Random Interference, no such accumulation of contemplative time prevails. By the rules of the presentation itself, one disaster follows the next and the timing of looking is not in one’s own control. Fathers hold up images of murdered children, ripping the domestic from its phantom shell in a grim mockery of the presumption of civilian safety. A man holds his hands in horror to his mouth. Novak holds hers to her eyes. Beyond the United [ 250 ]

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States, the array of images of violence is also unrelenting: El Heraldo de Mexico, for example, shows a barbaric attack in Iraq. And Novak’s migraines continue, as the web delivers a physical as well as psychical assault. Primary again in this electronic circulation is the notion of interference—here to be parsed as the physical pulses of the internet itself, the digital bare life of 1s and 0s rather than the “content” that the medium conveys. Throughout all of this body of work, from the pile to the towers, there is the suggestion that periodicity—journalism, or vibration, or the creation of a pulse—is the line along which photographic meaning is instilled. In the thirteenth year of collecting, Novak was invited to exhibit the project in a shipping container at Photoville in Brooklyn, New York.12 Novak dismantled the pile from its physical place in her studio and transported it

Figure 13.7 Lorie Novak, Random Interference, installation with projection, Photoville, Brooklyn, NY, 2012. INSTILLING INTERFERENCE

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to a different place and a more analytical form of looking. When the newspapers returned to her studio, she began sorting the newspapers according to the content of the central photograph on the front page of the Times. Above the Fold, her most current and ongoing part of the project, continues the inquiry about pattern and repetition into the realm of statistics—how many of what kind of images of violence did the New York Times present in the space on page one that may or may not accompany the prime news story and is visible when the folded paper is stacked or displayed on a rack? After a tedious process of taking apart the original pile and sorting all the papers into smaller groups, she settled upon thirty-three categories.13 But it bears remarking that in so doing, she also reconfigured the original pile itself into a new series of stacks, like the towers of lower Manhattan now rebuilt. It turns out that Novak had kept the images of 9/11 in a separate box; they were never in the original pile, now potentially reframed as a heap of rubble as much as a haystack. After a very long interval of shock and grief, the 9/11 images are back and distributed in the piles: Terrorism, Grieving, War & Conflict, Photos of Photos, and more.

Figure 13.8 View of Above The Fold in Novak’s studio, July 2018. [ 252 ]

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In her recently published book, Listening to Images, Tina Campt has proposed a theory of frequencies—waves of sound—as a haptic dimension of the photographic visual image. Building on and departing from the work of Paul Gilroy on musical “transfiguration,”14 and on Fred Moten’s question, “what is the sound that precedes the image,”15 Campt refers to the following definitions: Frequency: In acoustics the number of complete vibrations or cycles occurring per unit of time in a vibrating system such as a column of air. Frequency is the primary determinant of the listener’s perception of pitch. (Harvard Dictionary of Music Online). Audible Frequency: A periodic vibration whose frequency is audible to the average human. The generally accepted standard range of audible frequencies is 20 to 20,000 Hz. Frequencies below 20 Hz are generally felt rather than heard, assuming the amplitude of the vibration is great enough.16 Campt writes of a “haptic mode of engaging the sonic frequencies of photographs.” For her, they are available to the body, “at the haptic frequency of vibration, like the vibrato of a hum felt more in the throat than in the ear.”17 For Novak too, frequency is a sensible thing, a repeated pace of images that return. Her engagement with frequency occurs in what feminists have long understood as “woman’s time,” enmeshed with domestic ritual, repetition, transformation, and bricolage.18 That is to say, like the sound of which Campt writes, it manifests in modalities and temporalities that precede the images. It is available to the body—to the eyes as an organ, the often painful way that light rays eventually get “in”; and it is also orchestrated by the hands that sort or program. Ultimately not focused on the isolation, particularization, and amplification of any particular image, or set of images, Novak works instead to juxtapose these frequencies so as to make them interfere with one another. Novak registers these patterns of interference in each of the various forms of her engagement. For Novak, their varied amplitudes suggest a path of deliberate resistance as a new sense of the dimensions of “now” can arise from each result. When did the hostilities within which we are ensnared actually begin? Were we—that is to say, a particular “we,” the readers, writers, and editors of the New York Times—paying attention? What form did the attention take? In his book, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon INSTILLING INTERFERENCE

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Figure 13.9 Screen Grabs from randominterference.net, 2012–ongoing (https://www.nyu .edu/projects/novak/randominterference).

writes of a procession of events that necessarily is resistant to the spectacular single image or origin.19 Novak’s dedication to the time of this provocative project is another expression of that idea and its consequence. In her piles, transports, and timelines, evidence of disaster steadily accretes but nearly imperceptibly, like traditional women’s work, as one day’s news cycle fades into the next while readers strive to avoid conclusions. Was 9/11 just one day Americans were finally forced to pay attention? Novak’s achievement is to have produced a visual analytic that measures the duration and the pulse of this enormous periodic assault vis-a-vis the human scale of body and brain. Her photographs propose no hierarchy. There is no originating flash; there is no state of exception. They do not monumentalize or homogenize or aestheticize or anaesthetize memory. Rather, they remediate it. In their attention to repetition and routine they suggest that, despite forced forgetting, the rebellion of mind and body, and the drive for homeostasis in daily life, a feminist visual politics of the everyday can help to reconstruct, curate, and display the frequencies of these eruptions, both informing and amplifying resistance.

Notes 1. Benedict Anderson made the key proposition about periodical time: that the newspaper creates our imagination of community. “The significance of this mass ceremony—Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers—is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull.Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned?” Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006), 35. 2. Lorie Novak, “Photographic Interference,” in Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis, ed. Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley, Nancy K. Miller, and Jay Prosser (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 285. 3. Within a considerable body of literature, the following are major texts: Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977) and Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003); Susie Linfield,

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

The Cruel Radiance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Courtney R. Baker, Humane Insight (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015); Sharon Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera (Chicago: University Press, 2011); Saidiya Hartmann, Scenes of Subjection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Judith Butler, Frames of War (London:Verso, 2009); Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 2008) and Civil Imagination (London: Verso: 2012); Christina Sharpe, In the Wake (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). Merriam-Webster, s.v. “interference (n.),” accessed December 8, 2018, https:// www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/interference. Merriam-Webster, s.v. “interference (n.).” Merriam-Webster, s.v. “interference (n.).” Merriam-Webster, s.v. “interference (n.).” Merriam-Webster, s.v. “interference (n.).” “One aspect of migraine pain theory explains that migraine pain happens due to waves of activity by groups of excitable pain cells.” Johns Hopkins Medicine, “How a Migraine Happens,” Johns Hopkins Medicine Health Library, accessed December 8, 2018, https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/healthlibrary/conditions /adult/nervous_system_disorders/how_a_migraine_happens_85,p00787; Novak has been photographing herself every time she has a migraine since 2009. See www.migraineregister.net. Random Interference was created for é-misferica 9, nos. 1 and 2, Summer 2012. “On the Subject of Archives,” edited by Marianne Hirsch and Diana Taylor, http:// www.hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-91. Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 16. Photoville is an annual photography festival produced by United Photo Industries in Brooklyn Bridge Park and built from repurposed shipping containers. See http://photoville.com. Above The Fold, Front-Page Photo Categories, Listed in order of priority if an image falls in more than one category: Men & A Few Women With Guns, Dead Bodies, United States Protests, International Protests, Refugees & Immigrants, Photos of Photos, Grieving, Memorials, War & Conflict, Terrorism, Shootings, Natural Disasters, Man-Made Disasters, Sexual Harassment & Assault, Arts & Fashion, Prisons & Prisoners, Crime, U.S. Elections, U.S. Presidents, U.S. Politicians & Judges, International Elections, Foreign Politicians, Poverty, Life in Conflict Zones, Science & Health, Troops without Guns, Sports, Weather, Business, Celebrations, Human Interest U.S., Human Interest International, Unable to Categorize. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). [ 256 ]

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15. Fred Moten, In the Break:The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 16. Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 6. 17. Campt, Listening to Images, 8 18. The key feminist text that juxtaposes “cyclical” and ”monumental” time is Julia Kristeva’s ”Women’s Time.” See Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7, no. 1 (Autumn, 1981), 13–55. Additionally, Tillie Olsen in “I Stand Here Ironing” renders the repetitive nature of women’s domestic work in its relation to traumatic memory. Tillie Olsen, “I Stand Here Ironing,” Tell Me a Riddle (New York: Dell, 1961). 19. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

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CHA P T E R X IV

Siting Absence Feminist Photography, State Violence, and the Limits of Representation N I C O L E G E RVA S I O

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n a photograph of a seemingly ordinary living room, a couch the color of potato skin slumps lopsidedly against the bottom of the frame. The photo is one of eight in On the Wall, a 2014 multisensory installation by Turkish artist Aylin Tekiner that combines interiors of family homes with audio testimonies from relatives of forcibly disappeared people in Turkey.1 Plush despite its apparent age, the furniture pictured has survived at least one family; buttons still tightly pucker couch cushions. The image registers the wear of time yet also freezes the family home in time; although the roses on the upholstery have faded, the vases on the end table gleam as if recently cleaned. A houseplant straightens its spine behind a chair whose arm reaches toward the viewer.The prominent veins in the fern’s broad green leaves make it difficult to tell if the plant is real or artificial. The ambiguity highlights the living room’s constructed nature. Familiar traces in the image call to my mind hand-me-down furniture and immortal silk flowers in my own workingclass childhood. This representation is both universalizing and particular: so generic, the manufactured sofa belongs to no culture, yet the bowl strewn with colorful tesbih, or prayer beads, reminds me that the worries in this house are not mine. The bare white walls ominously catch shadows like scrubbed bone as a white clock hangs on the wall, stuck at forty minutes past four. The living room’s vulnerability to decontextualization and misrecognition provokes viewers like me to project ourselves into the depopulated frame. But this representational ambivalence produces both ethical risk and political [ 258 ]

Figure 14.1 Hayrettin Eren, photograph by Fatih Pınar from Aylin Tekiner’s On the Wall series (2014). Source: Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

agency. These conditions enable the photograph “to travel across media and space, thereby appealing to a broader national and international community of viewers,” to borrow Andrea Noble’s definition of “political agency” in human rights photography.2 The photograph thus wrestles with a productive tension between locality and globality, estrangement and familiarity. Were it not for one object—a girl’s portrait resting between two wilting bouquets—the quotidian domesticity otherwise imbuing the interior might go undisturbed. The child smiles in a graduation cap and gown, her face partially obscured beneath the plants’ shadow. Her image seems to affirm the household’s ordinariness, the family’s celebration of their daughter’s future. But the caption reveals that the child is related to a missing person believed to be a victim of forced disappearance in Turkey. His name is Hayrettin Eren.3 As his sister—the child’s mother, ԭkbal Eren—states in the audio accompanying the image, their parents “do not have the heart to hang [his] picture”; in her culture, hanging a photo high on a wall commemorates the dead—a possibility they refuse to believe while his body remains missing.4 Shortly after the military coup d’état on September 12, 1980, Eren was detained at a police station and then transferred to Istanbul’s Counter-Terrorism Branch (CTB).5 SITING ABSENCE

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His mother spotted his car in the CTB’s backyard, but on-duty officers denied his arrest. Even though five witnesses saw Eren being interrogated and tortured, his family’s case was halted. According to the captions in On the Wall, the case was not dropped due to “lack of evidence,” a common evasion tactic, but because the public prosecutor refused to indict the state for fear of losing his job. Meanwhile, government officials maintained that Eren, still wanted for questioning, had never been arrested. On the Wall includes photographs of family interiors from the survivors of eight different victims of forced disappearance in Turkey. The installation features ethnic Kurds amongst other Turkish nationals, with occupations ranging from university student, to teacher, shepherd, and more, and disappearances occurring between 1981 and 1995. Fragmented oral testimonies narrate survivors’ indignation and grief alongside each photo. As a feminist intervention, Tekiner’s multisensory project wakens viewers to their own embodied precarity while critiquing the absence of two other bodies from state recognition: the disappeared but also the women who wait for their return. The repetition of On the Wall reflects political scientist Banu Bargu’s insight that “although each disappearance is singular, the script of disappearances is strikingly uniform.”6 Each photo in the series centers another framed photograph as its focal point; consequently, jarring incongruities unsettle the viewer. On neutral walls, clocks accompany portraits of the missing and their loved ones.The time of a man’s disappearance protracts in the absence of justice, stalling in each snapshot. The flowers signify celebration, condolences, an anniversary, a good day; thus, they underscore the instability of feelings permeating this home. Despite the simplicity of its domestic settings, On the Wall confronts an ethical quandary for activist and feminist art practices that critique authoritarianism. How can visual art counteract erasure after forced disappearance? How can art capture lives effaced by state terror without reproducing the epistemic violence that enabled their loss from the start? And how might absence constitute a strategy for resistance? I examine how photography “sites” absence after political violence: how art situates, in a specific time and place of grief, the embodied presence of ineffable loss while rendering that loss so familiar that strangers, like me, cannot help but recognize another’s pain. Etymologically, the verb “to site” carries a double meaning in English. Archaically, its nominal form denotes “care or sorrow; grief, trouble of any kind.”7 Mourning strangers’ losses activates our own vulnerability, which makes social transformation possible.8 Siting absence also means citing it—compelling the crime of forced disappearance (and its perpetrators) [ 260 ]

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to materialize. To site, in the sense of situating, citing, and seeing anew, is the goal of art-activism in On the Wall. By exhibiting violence haunting unpopulated space, Tekiner’s work provocatively plays on a politics of sight: the vulnerability of the gaze in human rights photography, where an outsider viewing private grief automatically risks voyeurism. Framed photographs of forcibly disappeared people and their descendants in Tekiner’s installation constitute “structuring absences” in these seemingly empty family homes. She leverages a feminist critique of authoritarianism within the walls of one of the state’s most enduring institutions: the family itself.9 On the Wall offers strategies for siting, citing, and sighting the ongoing violence of forced disappearance not only in Turkey but also in repressive regimes elsewhere. In Tekiner’s praxis, feminism is not simply a matter of centering women’s perspectives and domestic space in a debate that privileges men’s views but a critique of state power. I argue that the capacity for Tekiner’s artistic practice to resonate broadly while maintaining its context epitomizes a feminist ethics of representation that recognizes intersecting structures of power without eschewing cultural specificity. Tekiner exposes absence as a material violence permeating victims’ families’ most intimate spaces; absence is matter in and of itself, not nothingness or emptiness. The project appeals to a global audience to confront our own disengagement from the legacies of authoritarianism. Friends, relatives, and allies of the disappeared, publicly called Saturday Mothers, constitute a grassroots movement that demands legal recognition for politically disappeared people in Turkey.10 Every Saturday, these protesters quietly interrupt pedestrian traffic on Istiklal Street in Istanbul, holding signs with the faces of their lost loved ones like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina have for their disappeared children.11 By returning the photograph of a disappeared person to the family home as a tool of street protest, Tekiner’s installation pulls outsiders into an intimate setting only to push us out of our depoliticized comfort zones.

Historical Trauma: Forced Disappearance and the Family as Statist Institutions Since the 1980 coup in which Eren disappeared, the Turkish government has unofficially utilized forced disappearance to promulgate terror in the name of national “security”; indeed, this tactic arguably dates back to the Armenian genocide in 1915, an atrocity cited in many Saturday Mothers’ protests. SITING ABSENCE

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On the Wall includes images and stories of forced disappearances from the 1980s coup to the 1990s to criticize the state’s history of legitimizing violence in the name of counter-terrorism. In designing On the Wall, Tekiner focused on victims from Eastern Turkey, a Kurdish region hardest hit by overlapping political and socioeconomic oppressions, in addition to forced disappearances in the 1990s; their villages razed, many families have been displaced to Istanbul as cheap labor.12 The U.N.’s Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance defines the crime as the unlawful arrest, detainment, and/or involuntary abduction of people by government officials or groups acting on behalf of the government, “followed by a refusal to disclose the fate or whereabouts of the persons concerned or a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of their liberty, which places such persons outside the protection of the law.”13 In the wake of the coup, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) emerged, willing to deploy violence to achieve political and cultural recognition for Turkey’s disenfranchised Kurdish minority. Subsequently, in the name of “restoring order,” the military government targeted leftist organizations, the PKK, and other groups defending Kurdish rights as dangers to national security.14 According to Umut Arifcan, Turkey survived this period as “an anxious state re-inventing itself through ‘spectral’ politics, not actually fulfilling certain goals but rather invoking multiple, ever-lurking dangers that await the state’s weak breath.”15 Although the military government ended in 1983, repressive politics stretched into the 1990s. Forced disappearances increased to 400 documented cases by 1996 in what was long called “a lowintensity war” between Turkish Armed Forces and the PKK.16 According to a 2013 report by the Truth Justice Memory Center in Istanbul, disappearances more than tripled, with at least 1,353 cases in fifteen years.17 In an interview, Tekiner suggested that even these numbers are conservative: the studies she cites count more than 20,000 disappearances in Turkey.18 Only twenty-six years old when he disappeared, Hayrettin Eren had been missing for thirty-four years when Tekiner exhibited On the Wall in 2014. Eren’s sister, ԭkbal, comments on the intimacy amongst Saturday Mothers, who provided testimonies, homes, and knowledge foundational to On the Wall, compared to her family’s suffering: “Here at the Saturday Mothers, we are many in numbers; we are together, mutually empowering each other. Yet as a family, it is not so.” Whereas ԭkbal can find solidarity in the street, her brother’s unsolved disappearance has fractured the family unit; in the absence of closure, “mutual empowerment” remains unrealizable. How can art begin to intervene in such an intimately personal situation? [ 262 ]

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The lingering presence of forced disappearance in family homes is a collective source for grief, an open secret practically “written on the wall” in Turkey. Like the mothers and other protesters who convene on Saturdays, Tekiner’s activism stems from personal trauma. In 1980, her father, state prosecutor and politician Mehmet Zeki Tekiner, was publicly assassinated after a failed attack at their family home three months earlier; his murder remains unsolved. In reaction to the state’s manipulation of facts to justify terror, Aylin Tekiner alters viewers’ relationships to institutions that reproduce social and political norms, like family, but for the opposite purpose of exposing the state’s duplicity. According to her artist statement, strategically manipulating state institutions, like the patriarchal household, exposes “the sheer vulgarity and destructiveness of [the state’s] manipulation.”19 Repositioning the family home as a site for political critique does not distort anything. Rather, her photographs reframe tranquil domesticity as a site of insidious collective trauma.Visual emptiness mobilizes the memory of former presences haunting vacant (and forcibly vacated) spaces. Tekiner thus contests the obfuscating, contradictory discourses that prevent public recognition of (and moral outrage against) Turkey’s forced disappearances.

Figure 14.2 Fehmi Tosun, photograph by Fatih Pınar from Aylin Tekiner’s On the Wall series (2014). Source: Reproduced with the permission of the artist. SITING ABSENCE

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One brighter picture captures a bookshelf filled with awards and journals in a pastel hallway. Displayed accolades—an International Hrant Dink Award; a trophy angel hoisting a globe; a gold-plated plaque; Kurdish flagcolored ribbons; a placard proclaiming, “Protect the Human”—announce activist pride.20 But these achievements recede against two portraits on the top shelf. Fehmi Tosun, an ethnic Kurd who disappeared on his way to work in 1995, stares hard within an off-center photograph; positioned at an angle that seems to mirror Tosun’s portrait, the second photo shows two family members in hooded jackets carrying his portrait at a Saturday Mothers sit-in. According to the caption, Tosun’s disappearance happened “right in front of the eyes of his family and neighbors.”21 In a hearing with the European Court of Human Rights demanded by his wife, Hanım Tosun, and the Human Rights Organization (IHD), the AKP government “acknowledge[d] that the misconduct investigation is a violation of the second article of the European Convention on Human Rights” but never revived the investigation as promised.22 Tekiner’s visual representation of Tosun’s case reveals the precariousness of recognition when official utterances do not guarantee political accountability. Capturing inanimate rooms ever more forcefully affirms the grim political histories suppressed in this apparent ordinariness. In the home as an institutional site, citizens negotiate, defer, and process relationships to state politics that reproduce patriarchy and authoritarianism. Dominant ideologies are both transmitted and contested within the family, which can function as a refuge from state violence. But political repression places the family itself under siege, as Marianne Hirsch notes of the posttraumatic family setting in Art Spiegelman’s Maus: In the postmodern moment, the family occupies a powerful and powerfully threatened place: structurally a last vestige of protection against war, racism, exile, and cultural displacement, it becomes particularly vulnerable to these violent ruptures, and so a measure of their devastation. But . . . these external perils do not disguise the violence and destruction that occur within the family itself, the power of the father to silence the mother’s voice, the power of the son to rewrite the father’s words.23 The Saturday Mothers critique the effects of state violence on the family, as a social institution, by highlighting persistent inequalities within the family [ 264 ]

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home, as a space for reproducing national values. At the same time, the protesters openly invite the participation of men and others who are not personally affected by state violence. Their desire for a political role outside the home lies at the heart of their collaboration with Tekiner. Whereas a portrait hesitantly placed high acknowledges the dead, a portrait of an unburied person becomes a demand for recognition of victims’ lives. Translating political protest into art not only validates survivors but also asks bystanders to reimagine mothers as political actors mobilized against the state’s criminality.

Situated Debates: Feminist Photography and Resistance to State Terror On the Wall thus bares the memory of political violence that refuses to vacate the visual frame. By keeping her daughter’s portrait on the side table and her brother’s off the wall, ԭkbal Eren asserts hope for his survival over the possibility of death. When Saturday Mothers founder Maside Ocak and her relatives collage a family photo out of individual portraits, placing her brother, Hasan—a confirmed victim of political murder—at the center, they reject the notion that a spiritual reunion is impossible. In first-person testimony accompanying the photo of her home in On the Wall, Maside describes marching with “the picture of his [Hasan’s] hacked-out face,” a reminder that pain is not past but a living torment. According to her, carrying a photo of his corpse alongside his living portrait marks both images as “milestones of our lives” at sit-ins. Tekiner’s documentation of interventions like Maside’s challenges the state’s monopoly on representation by contradicting normative narratives predetermining womanhood and family. Indeed, state violence deranges women’s relationships to family. Hasan’s political murder interrupted the teleology that might have guided Maside’s life from girlhood to adulthood, sisterhood to, perhaps, motherhood. Murders replace births and weddings as “milestones” in a patriarchal nation-state that supposedly reveres traditional values like motherhood and marriage as building blocks for society. State violence disallowed Maside from being her brother’s keeper; the only way to bring him peace is, ironically, to brandish the unpeaceable visage of his “hackedout face” in public. Their pain cannot remain private if justice is to be SITING ABSENCE

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achieved. Thus, Maside’s mode of resistance is “feminist” in the sense that her actions denounce much wider-reaching structures of violence through personal loss. Tekiner’s photography expands tensions surrounding women’s visibility by focusing on the more feminine features of a family home, including privacy, interiority, and domesticity. Her practice publicizes the private space of the family home as a political action. Literally constructed to foster social life and express vitality, living rooms connote death once interrupted and emptied by state violence. The family is thus both a site of and target for state violence. Women’s historical relegation to the home is no more natural than the unnatural violence that has incited them into public protest. But simultaneously, on a symbolic level, the state’s brazenness in violating the home threatens to collapse the very society it was claiming to “protect,” since social and political order center on the family. Indeed, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and other women-led protest movements inspired by their work have criticized twentieth-century dictatorships in Latin America for the same hypocrisy.24 It is hypocritical to vaunt the family unit as a microcosm of the nation, and motherhood as a sacred occupation, while willfully abusing family bonds and ineluctably severing mothers from their children. Photography possesses a unique capacity both to index “the real” and function symbolically. As Susan Sontag states, “to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude”; Tekiner exploits this dual capacity by which presence and absence constitutively interplay in any photograph.25 Even though neither Tekiner nor her collaborator Pınar staged any props in photographed interiors, the final images are nevertheless strategically framed. As Hirsch explains in Family Frames: Because the photograph gives the illusion of being a simple transcription of the real, a trace touched directly by the event it records, it has the effect of naturalizing cultural practices and of disguising their stereotyped and coded characteristics.  .  .  . At the end of the twentieth century, the family photograph, widely available as a medium of familial self-presentation in many cultures and subcultures, can reduce the strains of family life by sustaining an imaginary cohesion, even as it exacerbates them by creating images that real families cannot uphold.26

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If family photographs traditionally maintain an idealized “imaginary cohesion,” then Saturday Mothers displaying family photos of the disappeared in both private homes and public streets radically exposes the fracturing of that cohesion after state violence. The photographs function as evidence of former presences and present absences, indices of loss and mourning. Bargu describes forced disappearance in Turkey as having an “erasing effect that renders individuals not only invisible but also anonymous.”27 The photographs in On the Wall play on absence to make present the bodies and energies of victims who, in a corporeal sense, might never be recovered. Forced disappearance aims to vanish victims from not only the realm of the living but also history itself. Noble’s insights into the role of “the photography of disappearance” in the protests of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo are instructive here: “With no body to bury, the photograph within the photograph in the human rights photo opportunity melancholically materializes the ontological uncertainty of the absent presence of the disappeared.”28

Figure 14.3 Kazım Alpsoy, photograph by Fatih Pınar from Aylin Tekiner’s On the Wall series (2014). Source: Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

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The resemblance between the image with which I opened this essay and another commemorating the disappearance of Kazım Alpsoy, a Kurdish leatherworker, is uncanny in its striking uniformity and, consequently, mundanity. Its caption states that Alpsoy was last seen in the large southern city of Adana in 1994. On the day before his disappearance, he was detained, interrogated, and tortured by undercover police; the next morning, he returned, as instructed, to collect his identification card and was never seen again. Although agents insisted no record of Alpsoy’s detention existed, an apprehensive witness informed his family that Alpsoy had been killed under torture. Still, the government denied the family’s request to retrieve his body from Akkapı mass cemetery. Alpsoy’s out-offocus portrait, the photograph within Tekiner’s photograph, emphasizes the grim irony of his fate: his obedience in retrieving his state-issued identification occasioned both the erasure of his identity and the disappearance of his remains. In direct opposition to these effacing effects, Tekiner’s interviewees consistently reject the finality of forced disappearance. Muzaffer Yedigöl, speaking about his brother, Nurettin Yedigöl, another absent subject in On the Wall, explains in his testimony, “At the house in our hometown, all his clothes with all of his other belongings are kept as they are. For he is still living there. How could we give away his clothes to others, since we are not entirely sure of his death? We live every moment hoping for his return, with his smell.” While his material effects keep his presence alive, his family nevertheless suffers through state-orchestrated humiliations, like voter registration papers continuing to arrive in his name each year. Tekiner shows that the families left behind in victims’ homes are struggling against the sensation of being psychologically stuck in the moment of their relative’s kidnapping. As Tekiner learned while interviewing eight families for On the Wall, smiles do not connote joy but instead often conceal guilt amongst elders, anxiety amongst children. Tekiner’s installations thus increase visibility not only for disappeared victims but also for survivors. Photography works against violent technologies of erasure and invisibility. Critics of the medium have accused it of encouraging exploitation, as if there exists “an uncorrupted, unblemished photographic gaze that will result in images flawlessly poised between hope and despair, resistance and defeat, intimacy and distance.”29 In fact, numerous photographers

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with global human rights interests have, like Tekiner, experimented with depopulated memory sites to represent collective trauma. In Spectral Evidence, Ulrich Baer analyzes the austere Holocaust landscapes in Mikael Levin’s War Story (1995) and Dirk Reinartz’s Deathly Still: Pictures of Former Concentration Camps (1995), exhibitions where former concentration camps compel the viewer’s imagination to repopulate scenes of trauma. American artists have photographed empty public spaces to decry state violence that perpetuates black pain; in Slave Coast (1993), Carrie Mae Weems captions abandoned sites from the transatlantic slave trade with ghostly first-person testimonies, and in an ongoing project, This Violent Land (2017), Diana Matar documents police brutality in the United States.30 To challenge indefinite detention, Edmund Clark’s 2010 exhibition Guantánamo: If the Light Goes Out brings audio testimonies from detainees to bear on evacuated rooms in the camp, where photographing inhabitants is illegal.31 On the deportation of undocumented immigrants, British photographer Melanie Friend overlaps audio and visual emptiness to interrogate institutional spaces in Border Country (2003–2007), a series about refugee crises in the UK, and Homes and Gardens: Documenting the Invisible (1994–1996), which portrays empty homes of Kosovar Albanians living under the Miloševiɣ regime.32 Friend, like Tekiner, describes her attention to vacant living spaces as a conscious endeavor “to avoid the objectification of ‘the Other’ and the photojournalistic convention that visualizes violence through the body of the ‘victim.’ ”33 The “framed emptiness,” to borrow Baer’s terminology, contrarily reverberates “evidence of the crime’s enormity”—that it could persist anywhere so ostensibly normal.34 Across these projects, the tendency to reinforce images through orality heightens the experience of embodied recognition. According to Friend, sound and image surface otherwise invisible tensions in their convergence, such as “the individual psychological trauma experienced and the repression of the political situation” in a family home.35 Private space thus becomes the site for exposing state violence. In kind, Tekiner creates images that are open to identification but introduce details that “preempt viewers’ attempts to identify with, and imaginarily project themselves into, the image as a way of gaining access”; to establish an ethical relationship with the gaze of the other, Tekiner’s images maintain their context and invite solidarity but nevertheless forestall viewers’ over-identification.36

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Empathetic Embodiment and Transnational Feminist Solidarity Tekiner’s aesthetics challenge viewers to perceive the insidiousness and the intimacy of political violence in Turkey and elsewhere. The reality is omnipresent yet so unremarkable it could go unnoticed without her jarring sleight of hand. Her multisensory aesthetics are as important as her visual framing. Juxtaposing empty spaces with survivors’ testimonials invites viewers’ embodied and affective witnessing into the living room where unrecognized state crimes have violated family life. I first listened to Tekiner’s unsubtitled audio recordings in September 2014 at the Women Mobilizing Memory exhibition in Istanbul. Understanding nothing in Turkish or Kurdish, I only conjectured the meanings of certain vocal inflections. A throat swallows hard. A benumbed mother speaks in monotone. A sudden sibilance perhaps threatens tears, or fury, or frustration. As I admitted to Tekiner in an interview, in some ways, I simply “can’t understand” her work because of my own blinders: “I don’t know what’s being said in Turkish. I don’t know what it’s like to come from a political family like yours. I’m an American and therefore I’m already so many more steps removed.”37 But according to Tekiner, the distance itself—with the victims remembered in On the Wall being, as she put it, “three times removed,” from the house, to the photographic frame, to the wall of the gallery space—is intrinsic to the project’s efficacy.38 Her mediations merge with the decontextualized familiarity of these domestic spaces, and the combination creates a paradoxical sensation of intimate distance that actually invites identification. The artist’s objective is therefore counterintuitive, to “depict space as the framing of an absence that engulfs and absorbs viewers without creating illusions of belonging or destination,” withholding gratification to interpellate viewers more deeply into a void of recognition.39 Tekiner visually, orally, and aurally plays with dominant narratives to explore how “trauma and violence often throw truth-telling genres into crisis”; thus, she generates what Wendy Hesford has called a “crisis of reference,” abandoning the witness’s gaze without a framework for understanding.40 Another listener’s experience mirrored my own:“[S]he said she extremely felt moved, as if the sound is more from Argentina. She said the same sounds, the same upsetting voice . . . even if you don’t understand, you feel their sadness very deeply.”41 In 2014, I removed the headphones after viewing [ 270 ]

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each image for only a few seconds. But in 2016, I rejected the inevitability of detachment. When I closed my eyes and listened to ԭkbal Eren recount her relationship to her missing brother, I heard her authoritative voice playing the role of an expert. Without warning, her voice broke, and I opened my eyes to read the subtitles (a feature absent in the 2014 gallery exhibition), “I kiss [the picture frame] every time I take him in my hands, I kiss [it] every time before I put it down.” The consistency of On the Wall’s images, paired with the sensory affirmation of the familial bond and its primary meaning for constructing society, compels the viewer’s response on both corporeal and affective levels. As Noble says of the family photograph’s political power against forced disappearance in Latin America, “I/we may not be able to put myself/ourselves in the place of the relatives of the disappeared; but perhaps I/we can imagine that place relationally.”42 Empty settings amplify the sense of loss emanating from survivors’ voices as they recall the dead and missing. Facing a vacant living room as a mother tentatively recounts her son’s disappearance challenges a viewer to enter the precarious embodiment of a secondary witness. In Dominick LaCapra’s terms, the viewer may either adopt “vicarious victimhood” by possessing the mother’s loss as her own or experience what he terms “empathic unsettlement,” whereby one virtually places herself into the position of the other without losing sight of the unbridgeable distance between them.43 Hesford adds that this contradiction embeds viewers of human rights photography into a “crisis of witnessing” when negotiating “the risks of representing trauma and violence, ruptures in identification, and the impossibility of empathetic merging between witness and testifier, listener and speaker.” By recognizing that her witnessing is in crisis, the viewer acquiesces to “question[ing] the presuppositions of both legal and dramatic realism that urge [advocates] to stand in for the ‘other’ on the grounds that such identifications risk incorporation of the ‘other’ within the self.”44 Tekiner thus enjoins secondary witnesses to identify with grief despite desiring to look away. As an outsider, I am forced to grapple with my own implicated subjectivity as someone wakeful to the privilege of my distance but also eager to engage in co-resistance. In being asked to grieve without appropriating the grief of the other, viewers come to recognize our interdependence as a global community that is both mutually enabling and mutually violating. As Judith Butler has argued, “[t]he primary others who are past for me not only live on in the fiber of the boundary that contains me . . . but they also haunt the way I am, as it were, periodically undone and open to SITING ABSENCE

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becoming unbounded.”45 By becoming unbounded ourselves—voluntarily exposing ourselves to the risk facing strangers around the world—we become personally involved with grievous injustice. As secondary witnesses, we can enter the frame and its crisis of reference surrounding forced disappearance in Turkey.46 However, feeling vulnerable to another’s grief also puts us on edge; it tempts us to initiate revenge and self-preservation, even though more violence (or more alienation) would exploit the very social bond that renders us human, familiar, and legible to each other. This interdependency confers upon us the rights to legitimacy and recognition that we, as bystanders, transnational activists, and feminist artists like Tekiner, would like to restore to the disappeared people in her photographs. A matrix of identities and differences mediates my relationship to Tekiner. Both self-identified feminist scholars of cultural memory and human rights, we aspire to alter discourse in the name of dismantling authoritarianism. Given the inseparability of narrative and photography, poetics and representation, perhaps one way to achieve our shared aspiration is to adopt one another’s modes for articulating resistance and to build an “ethics of cultural translation.”47 In an essay titled “Globalizing Home,” Myriam J. A. Chancy posits that interrogating the self for evidence of otherness might be the only way out of the globalization of political apathy, which reduces abductions in broad daylight to nonevents: “By looking deeply into our own natures, our own selves, we may begin to apprehend how self-change might ripple out from the local to the global and participate in the worldwide movements for social change that day by day counteract the march toward the desecration of the human spirit so well-engaged by our governments on our behalf.”48 Trauma, collective or individual, is a structure, like a family home. Those who have suffered continue mapping the space every day, raking the dark for a flashbulb only to find more walls. Representations like On the Wall expose barriers to fully knowing or adequately siting another’s grief over state terror. But Tekiner’s art also reminds us that the implications of these crimes are not so far from home, whether we protest in Diyarbakır or New York. Her art derives power from the self-consciousness it provokes in even the “safest” or “farthest removed” viewers.When photography sites political violence in every homophonic sense—to site, to cite, to situate a horrible sight no one wants to see—it apprehends the absent subject’s violation in multiple dimensions. The need to work towards empathetic unsettlement by opening ourselves to collective grief and political responsibility becomes clear. [ 272 ]

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Context affirms its importance for situating political repression and its perpetrators. Being wakeful to privilege provokes self-reflexivity. To present political violence, On the Wall ironically reinvents discursive mechanisms integral to the state, such as uniformity and suppression, by juxtaposing spaces of everyday life with survivors’ asynchronous testimonies. In doing so, photography’s status as an evidentiary medium renews its force for apprehending authoritarianism. Tekiner’s photography aspires not just to mobilize against government repression in a feminist push to expose injustice across wide-ranging institutional scales, from the private home to the public square. Her aim is also to draw viewers into identifying with a loss wrought through political violence that they can (or hopefully, will) never know.

Notes 1. Fatih Pınar took the photographs and helped choose images and audio clips for On the Wall. While he handled recording equipment, Tekiner conducted interviews. In the larger 2014 public exhibition titled Mobilizing Memory: Women Witnessing, On the Wall was recognized as Tekiner’s project while Pınar received photo credits. Aylin Tekiner, with Fatih Pınar, On the Wall in Mobilizing Memory: Women Witnessing, DEPO, Istanbul, September 5–October 15, 2014. 2. Andrea Noble, “Family Photography and the Global Drama of Human Rights,” in Photography: Theoretical Snapshots, ed. J. J. Long, Andrea Noble, and Edward Welch (New York: Routledge, 2009), 71. 3. When referring to victims of disappearance throughout this article, I align my use of the past or present tense with the tense favored by their loved ones in Tekiner’s exhibition. As a result, switches between past and present tense may be jarring, but I believe the need to honor the survivors’ desires supersedes academic conventions. 4. Aylin Tekiner, in discussion with the author, November 2016. 5. Any factual information pertaining to victims in On the Wall comes directly from biographies and captions also included in the exhibition. The military coup took place in response to escalating violence between political extremists on both the right and the left. For more context on the historical and political events discussed in Tekiner’s exhibition, see Gülsüm Baydar and Berfin ԭvegen, “Territories, Identities, and Thresholds: The Saturday Mothers Phenomenon in Istanbul,” Signs 31, no. 3 (2006): 690. 6. Banu Bargu, “Sovereignty as Erasure: Rethinking Enforced Disappearances,” Qui Parle 23, no. 1 (2014): 38. SITING ABSENCE

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7. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “site, (n.),” accessed January 11, 2019, http:// www.oed.com/view/Entry/180471. 8. I owe this insight to Ayߞe Gül Altınay in her opening remarks at the “Women Creating Change: Mobilizing Memory for Action” conference in Istanbul, Turkey, September 15–21, 2014. 9. Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 12. 10. After 200 consecutive Saturdays, the protest was suspended in 1999 when the mothers were repeatedly attacked and taken into custody by the police, whose ingrained respect for motherhood gave way before the rationale that these women were “not proper mothers”—unfit caretakers who could not keep track of their children, if not terrorists themselves. A second iteration of the protest movement mobilized in 2009 in response to the publicity of several high-profile trials that, though ultimately inconclusive, attempted to prosecute senior military officials for human rights violations, including forced disappearance, for the first time. Instead of resisting the institutionalized and disabling silence of the Turkish state with the patient silence of civil disobedience, this new iteration spotlights one disappeared person’s story every week. See Ahıska’s “Memory as Encounter: The Saturday Mothers in Turkey” in this volume, as well as Baydar and ԭvegen’s “Territories, Identities, and Thresholds” and Bargu’s “Sovereignty as Erasure.” 11. See Taylor’s “Traumatic Memes” in this volume; also Noble’s “Family Photography and the Global Drama of Human Rights.” 12. Tekiner, discussion. 13. U.N. General Assembly. Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, 1993, accessed January 11, 2019, http://www.un.org/documents /ga/res/47/a47r133.htm. 14. Baydar and ԭvegen, “Territories, Identities, and Thresholds,” 690. 15. Umut Arifcan, “The Saturday Mothers of Turkey,” Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice 9, no. 2 (1997): 269. 16. Arifcan, “The Saturday Mothers of Turkey,” 265. 17. Bargu, “Sovereignty as Erasure,” 38. For the most up-to-date report, see Özlem Kaya and Hatice Bozkurt,“Fotogઅrafı Kaldırmak”: Eߞi Zorla Kaybedilen Kadınların Deneyimleri (“Holding Up the Photograph”: Experiences of the Women Whose Husbands were Forcibly Disappeared ), Report for the Truth Justice Memory Center 2014, Hafiza Merkezi, accessed December 9, 2018, http://hakikatadalethafiza.org /en/kaynak/holding-up-the-photograph-experiences-of-the-women-whose -husbands-were-forcibly-disappeared/. 18. Tekiner, discussion. 19. “Artist Statement,” Aylin Tekiner (website), 2014, accessed August 10, 2015, http://www.aylintekiner.com/aylin.asp?l=tr&kid=3&alt_kid=0&alt_kid1=0. [ 274 ]

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20. Hrant Dink was a Turkish-Armenian journalist and editor who publicly criticized the state’s denial of the Armenian genocide; a young Turkish nationalist named Ogün Samast assassinated Dink in 2007. The aforementioned award, named in his honor, recognizes exceptional individuals and collectives for defending human rights on the anniversary of his birthday each year. For more information, see the Hrant Dink Foundation’s website, http://www.hrantdinkodulu.org. 21. Tekiner, Fehmi Tosun in On the Wall. 22. Quoted in Tekiner, Fehmi Tosun in On the Wall. 23. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 13. 24. For more on critiques of gender and nationalism from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, see Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). Melissa W. Wright takes the same stance in discussing mothers’ methods for protesting femicide in Mexico in “Witnessing, Femicide, and a Politics of the Familiar,” in The Global and the Intimate (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 267–288. 25. Susan Sontag, “War and Photography,” in Human Rights, Human Wrongs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 260. 26. Hirsch, Family Frames, 7. 27. Bargu, “Sovereignty as Erasure,” 38. 28. Noble, “Family Photography and the Global Drama of Human Rights,” 67, 75. 29. Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 45. 30. Slave Coast Series, Carrie Mae Weems (website), accessed December 9, 2018, http://carriemaeweems.net/galleries/slave-coast.html; see also Deborah Willis’s contribution in this volume, “Carrie Mae Weems: Rehistoricizing Visual Memory”; and This Violent Land, Diana Matar (website), accessed July 24, 2017, http://www.dianamatar.com/3425694-this-violent-land#0. 31. Edmund Clark, Guantánamo: If the Light Goes Out, 2012, photography exhibition, New York, Flowers Gallery. 32. Border Country, Melanie Friend (website), accessed July 24, 2017, http://www .melaniefriend.com/bordercountry/. 33. Melanie Friend, “Homes and Gardens: Documenting the Invisible,” Home Cultures 4, no. 1 (2007): 97. 34. Baer, Spectral Evidence, 81. 35. Melanie Friend, “Representing Immigration Detainees: The Juxtaposition of Image and Sound in Border Country,” Forum: Qualitative Social Research 11, no. 2 (2010): par. 69. 36. Baer, Spectral Evidence, 13. 37. Tekiner, discussion. 38. Tekiner, discussion. SITING ABSENCE

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39. Baer, Spectral Evidence, 18. 40. Wendy Hesford, “Documenting Violations: Rhetorical Witnessing and the Spectacle of Distant Suffering,” Biography 27, no. 1 (2004): 107. 41. Tekiner, discussion. 42. Noble, “Family Photography and the Global Drama of Human Rights,” 78. 43. Dominick LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 4 (Summer 1999): 722, 699. 44. Hesford, “Documenting Violations,” 107. 45. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 27–28. 46. Butler, Precarious Life, 27–28. 47. Noble, “Family Photography and the Global Drama of Human Rights,” 75. 48. Myriam J. A. Chancy, “Globalizing Home: Editor’s Introduction,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 4, no. 2 (2004): v.

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CH A P T E R X V

Carrie Mae Weems Rehistoricizing Visual Memory DEBORAH WILLIS

The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them. I DA B. WE LLS

[Carrie Mae] Weems understands that political art is about asking questions, not delivering answers. HO LLAND COTTE R

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nspired by African American history and folk culture, by literature and new media, Carrie Mae Weems is a New York-based conceptual artist who is well known globally for her photographs that reframe and reimagine events of the past and today. Weems has received critical attention for her performance art and art installations focusing on black life in the low country of South Carolina, in the sea islands off the coast of Georgia and southern Louisiana, in New Orleans, as well as in other sites in the United States and cities in the United Kingdom, Germany, Cuba, Senegal, Ghana, and Italy. Weems’s 2006 Roaming series consists of large-scale photographs created in major locales in Europe as they reference imperial and colonial power. She explores the problems of representation and the interplay between the historical text and contemporary art practices that inform and translate views on gender and race today. By creating a visual memoir that looks at freedom and migration, Weems’s Roaming series is a search for countermemories haunting classic European imperial sites. Noting and contesting inequities or absences, Weems thus establishes a presence and place for black women throughout the world and throughout history. In these images of her erect body dressed in a black gown, she leads us through her landscapes with confidence and pleasure—we are assured that we will be guided on a [ 277 ]

difficult yet necessary journey. Weems focuses her lens on her own ability to roam freely and to see the building of empires. She considers and reflects on the past and the lack of free will of women who were forced to migrate and travel to work on foreign soil. Roaming is about seeing and being seen. It forces the viewer to see race often obscured or erased in museum exhibitions; beauty denied or accepted when considering the black female body; and potential of the black robed figure that guides us through rugged landscapes, pristine city views, and forbidden class structures. In conceiving Roaming, Weems says, Architecture, in its essence . . . is very much about power. If we think about a place like Rome . . . what one is made to feel is the power of the state in relationship to . . . the general populace.You are always aware that you are sort of a minion in relationship to this enormous edifice—the edifice of power. . . . I thought, then, perhaps . . . I could use my own skin in a sort of series of performances. That I could use my own body as a way of leading the viewer into those spaces—highly aware—and challenging those spaces.1 For example, in the photograph, When and Where I Enter—Mussolini’s Rome, Weems stands in a large room with an opened window in front of three steps, the draped curtains wide open as the clouds of the morning sun peak through the darkened room. Weems appears hesitant, yet assured, as she steps into the light. Her photographers’ tools ever present, camera and tripod are visible. She appears as if she is contemplating Rome and its storied histories—Ethiopia, Fascism, and Benito Mussolini’s invasion. The title of the photograph is her homage to the early black American feminist and educator Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964). The full phrase reads: “Only the black woman can say when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.”2 Poet and scholar Elizabeth Alexander writes that “in the spaces we designate and create, the self is made visible in the spaces we occupy. Literal ‘black interiors  .  .  .’”3 In this photograph, Weems is creating such a black interior, placing her body in a landscape from which it has been historically omitted, calling attention to the absences in the historical record. An artist concerned about iconography, she problematizes the icon by standing and facing historical sites. Weems’s project begs the question, “What did early [ 278 ]

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travel photographers see?” She challenges us to see what travelers in the past saw and photographed, even as she revises their images for the traveler of today, by inserting herself into the pictures. In The Edge of Time—Ancient Rome and Pyramids of Rome—Ancient Rome, the expansive mountainside and the imposing pyramid frame Weems’s black mysterious figure. The photographs bear witness to conquest and the preservation of civic life, but through her body, they point to the absence in what is present. Repeatedly, we see her imposing figure looking at historical sites and monuments, Sabatini Gate—Ancient Rome and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. As art historian, Franklin Sirmans aptly argues, with “Roaming and the related Museum Series, Weems combined her interest in the structures of history (its monuments, museums, and other institutions) with herself in the landscape. Now she is no longer acting but is functioning as an omniscient observer, suggesting either a dominance of the landscape by humans or the puny insignificance of humanity in nature. In both the photographs taken in front of classical structures in Rome and in the Museum Series, Weems stands like a monumental sculpture to be reckoned and dealt with in the confines of those structures she stares down.”4 The power of her images is informed with nostalgia and romanticism, both surprising aspects of the otherwise critical Roaming project. It is a complex project, locating history, culture, race, and gender through historical references that still engage us today. Roaming introduces both lush views and harsh landscapes, reminding us of the intersection of race and xenophobia. Weems explores the mysteries and challenges of historical narratives that privilege some stories while hiding others. She is her own muse as she poses questions within the frame of history and as she restages and projects a new visual order through the camera’s ground glass. Throughout her explorations in Roaming, Weems’s figure is both witness and interpreter. As she poses with her back to the camera, Weems channels the past as she reflects on the contemporary narrative of migration, alluding to historical references from the Middle Passage and to forced and voluntary trafficking and migration today. By using her own body to recall and locate the social imaginary found in history and in the current news, her images gain in intensity and she becomes an eyewitness to past and contemporary violence. Roaming for Weems is meditative, yet provocative. Her journey considers the collective passage of women, men, and children CARRIE MAE WEEMS

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across time and possibly that of her own descendants who left Mississippi to move to Portland, Oregon for a new life. Current debates on migration oftentimes invoke the violence suffered by women and men who have lost children in the wake of war and displacement. Weems offers us a contemplative moment to consider the inequities experienced by mothers and women who moved to places where they were not welcomed and survived under the threat of beatings, intimidation, and death. Weems’s black robed gown evokes mourning cloth, hinting at her compassion for these women. The richness found in these striking photographs and the memories invoked convey a political consciousness of the tragedies at sea, on the shores, and in cities around the world. By embodying the memories of these women and men and re-enacting their imagined journeys, Weems becomes a messenger who not only helps the viewer visualize the experiences and heightens our senses but also provokes us to intervene in how history has been transmitted and to imagine alternate, more inclusive, histories and art histories. Weems stands in front and behind medium and large format cameras, to critique photography, even as she uses the photograph to visualize and inform. The black female body occupies a prominent place in Weems’s art. As an artist concerned with iconicity, she has constructed a series of works examining black women’s visibility and invisibility in the history of art. Through Roaming and its contribution to this different art history that Weems is both making and commenting on, she teaches us to see what is not there and to intervene in what we are now, through her, able to see. During the past thirty years, Weems has added to the visual representation of the current politicized environment on migrating black bodies with critical photographs that explore new ways of expressing memory. As she heightens everyday experiences, she also opens the way to transformation.

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Figure 15.1 When and Where I Enter—Ancient Rome from Roaming. 2006. Source: © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Figure 15.2 The Edge of Time—Ancient Rome from Roaming. 2006. Source: © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Figure 15.3 A Broad and Expansive Sky—Ancient Rome from Roaming. 2006. Source: © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Figure 15.4 British Museum—London, 2006 from Museums, 2006—ongoing. Source: © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Notes 1. Carrie Mae Weems, “Roaming,” Art 21, September 10, 2010, https://art21.org /watch/extended-play/carrie-mae-weems-roaming-short/. 2. Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South, Pt. 1 (Xenia, OH: The Aldine Printing House, 1892). 3. Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior: Essays (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004), 9. 4. Franklin Sirmans, “A World of her Own: Carrie Mae Weems and Performance,” in Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video (Nashville, TN: Frist Center for the Visual Arts in association with Yale University Press, 2013), 53. [ 284 ]

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CHA P T E R X V I

“When Everything Has Been Said Before . . .” Art, Dispossession, and the Economies of Forgetting in Turkey BA N U K A R AC A

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ike elsewhere, Turkey has experienced a “memory boom” over the past two decades.1 Along with questioning Turkey’s foundational myth of complete rupture from its Ottoman past, minority memory and heritage have been central to both scholarly and artistic reinterrogations of the past, especially as cultural pluralism, albeit in a tamed version, has emerged as a threshold for modernity. This development stands in stark contrast to earlier stages of nation-building during which ethnic heterogeneity was identified as one of the chief causes for the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Whereas ethnic heterogeneity was equated with loss of sovereignty, ethnic homogeneity2 indexed modernity. The focus on diversity has been further animated by the role accorded to “multiculturalism” in discourses of democratization and EU accession that have—until recently—significantly shaped the framing of cultural policy and cultural politics in Turkey. While many commentators have welcomed this recovery from the longstanding “organized amnesia,”3 the way in which this recovery happens is also vital to consider. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research on art and dispossession in Turkey, this essay examines a series of works by Istanbul-based contemporary artist Dilek Winchester that center on past experiences of pluralism and how their loss through state violence reverberates in the present. Winchester’s works deal with the silences that pervade Turkey’s official memory regime; silences that are also mirrored in the blind spots of national (art) history. I argue that she breaks these silences [ 285 ]

by addressing (art) historical episodes deemed unspeakable within the civilizing narrative of the state. Before turning to Winchester’s works, however, I first want to elaborate on the historical background against which contemporary recoveries of minority memory take place and the official discourses that accompany them.

Unwieldy Pasts The Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) that has governed Turkey since 2002 has frequently relied on discourses of a “cosmopolitan Ottoman past” and its exemplary function for peaceful co-existence in the present. Indeed, as a party rooted in Turkey’s post-1980 Islamic movement, the AKP has long tried to mitigate fears regarding the role of religion in their policies through a rhetoric that called for the recognition of non-Muslim and other minorities alike. Still, the question of how to equitably address contemporary diversity—in the form of ethnic, religious, gender, sexual, and social difference—has proven difficult within the frame of the nation-state and official Turkish history. These difficulties have been compounded by a public sphere that has increasingly turned its attention to the atrocities and traumas produced by the extensive social and demographic engineering measures, the violence and dispossession that brought modern Turkey into being, beginning with the Armenian Genocide (1915–1917). The rise of artistic, cultural, and scholarly works thematizing mass violence and state terror has been accompanied by demands for official recognition and varying calls of making amends, not “solely” as a matter of the past but a way for striving toward a more just future. While the AKP has taken up now globalized discourses about facing the past4 and proclaimed to break with state tradition in the name of democratization, it has nonetheless shied away from taking concrete steps to hold the Turkish state structure accountable, even though most of these episodes of state violence lie outside of the party’s time in government. Instead, the government has managed to have it both ways: partially acknowledging and simultaneously rejecting political responsibility by oscillating between, on the one hand, proclaiming Turkey’s multicultural make-up and, on the other, espousing antiminority rhetoric on a daily basis, including debates on and state policies regarding cultural heritage and patrimony. The government has highlighted its purported efforts to restore and give back formerly [ 286 ]

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confiscated non-Muslim community properties, among them the restoration of the Armenian Cathedral of the Holy Cross, located on Ahtamar Island in Lake Van and the return of Mor Gabriel monastery to the Assyrian community. Yet is important to note that the Ahtamar church was not reinstated as a place of worship but as a museum under the stewardship of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Problematic in form and scope, these kinds of restoration projects, even if billed otherwise, co-opt minority memory rather than framing restitution and memory as questions of justice.5 To address this issue from a perspective of historical justice would entail publicly interrogating—and renouncing—the state violence that facilitated the expropriation of these cultural and religious sites and acknowledging the far-ranging dispossession that non-Muslim minorities have experienced in the late Ottoman Empire and throughout the history of the Turkish republic. Systematic dispossession not only deprived these communities of their economic foundation but severed them from resources of cultural production and reproduction. Dispossession and state violence have also uniquely shaped the structural make-up of the art world in Turkey, enabled a particular practice of writing art history, and established frames of perception that continue to reverberate in the present. To give a sense of the extent to which the art world is entrenched in processes of state violence and dispossession, I sketch some—and by no means all—of these episodes of nation-building and consolidation in the next section.

Topographies of Dispossession The massacres and deportations of Ottoman-Armenians and other Christian minorities, Greeks, and Assyrians, between 1915 and 1917 were accompanied by a coordinated effort to confiscate their “abandoned” properties. Veiling genocidal violence through the euphemism of “relocation,” the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) went to great lengths to give the process a legal allure. According to historian Bedross Der Matossian these “highly bureaucratized procedures”6 were accompanied by the swift enactment of laws that established the Abandoned Property Commission (Emvâl-i Metruke Komisyonu) and the Liquidation Commission (Tasfiye Komisyonu) that kept “detailed registers of the items, properties and capital that were confiscated from the Armenian deportees, with the claim that they would be returned to them in their ‘relocated’ destinations.”7 Property “ W H E N E V E RY T H I N G H A S B E E N S A I D B E F O R E   .   .   .”

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and capital thus dispossessed would become the very foundation of the Turkish republic a few years later. The wealth tax instated in 1942 further aided the “Turkification of the economy.” Officially billed as a measure to raise money to close the deficit in the state treasury during World War II, curtail black market activity, and inhibit war profiteering, the actual application this one-time tax targeted minorities, i.e. non-Muslims, and those categorized as “crypto-Jews” (a derogatory term used for Jewish converts to Islam) and “foreigners,” long imagined as “enemies within.”8 Historian Rıfat Bali describes how in the process of collecting this tax, not only monetary assets, but entire households, including goods such as antiquities and artworks, were confiscated by government officials or auctioned off by the owners under duress to meet the levied tax; their whereabouts are not subject to public knowledge today.9 We can, however, find traces of these objects in the daily newspapers of the time that featured pages upon pages advertising these auctions. As historian Ayhan Aktar notes, these ads were fashioned as service announcements to the exclusionary category of “the Turkish people” and often accompanied by triumphalist headlines on the front pages of the very same papers that reported on these auctions in a tone of conquest.10 In the aftermath of the wealth tax, many of the remaining non-Muslim minorities, especially the Jewish and Rum (Greek) populations, left the country. Another exodus followed after what is generally known as the “events of September 6–7, 1955,” a covertly organized pogrom during which non-Muslim-owned businesses, along with places of worship and private homes were ransacked and demolished by “spontaneous mobs” in order to “avenge” the purported bombing of Mustafa Kemal’s birthhouse in Thessaloniki.11 In the oral history interviews I conducted on the event, witnesses and victims of these lootings recounted how in the days and weeks following the pogrom they encountered at times their own belongings and at other times those of neighbors and friends spread out on the street in impromptu yard sales—often only a few blocks from their homes, and often with exuberant buyers, glad to be able to find such “bargains.” Another episode in the Turkification of the economy followed in 1964, when the government forcefully expelled around 13,000 Greek Orthodox residents, mainly of Istanbul. They were only allowed to take twenty kilos of luggage and twenty dollars with them. What happened to the rest of their belongings is mostly unknown today. Along with the destruction of life, art sold under duress, expropriated and “lost” in different episodes of states violence, amounts to a cultural annihilation that is paralleled by the absence of [ 288 ]

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non-Muslim artists in official versions of Turkish art history. Together with minority farmlands, workshops and businesses, art and antiques, minority collectors, artists and audiences have been written out of (art) history.12 Processes of dispossession, both material and symbolic, at times facilitated by genocidal and at others by structural violence, form only part of the equation. The other part consists of the redistribution processes that have forged networks and allegiances that signal more than economic selfinterest and individual enrichment. Rather, the complicity in violence, by exertion of force or by benefiting from dispossession, embodies an investment in “Turkishness,” in terms of belonging and citizenship, that simultaneously signals an investment in systematic forgetting. The scope of this investment transcends the narrower circle of perpetrators of violence and dispossession, stretching to those who benefited directly or indirectly from the legacy of mass violence.13 This is true for a large part of Turkey’s art economy, including those art patrons, often heads of family-owned corporations, who were able to establish their companies or significantly advance their economic standing in the course of the “Turkification of capital” that ranged from discriminatory policies to large-scale dispossession and outright violence.14 This investment in Turkishness is constantly modulated and reproduced in the form of the “myth of the nation-state”15 and rewarded with citizenship not as a right that is distributed equally but as a privilege predicated on the imperative to forget. The point I want to make here is not simply that these corporations aim to whitewash the questionable provenance of their capital by investing in art. Nor do I aim merely to point out that many of the artworks that are today in big collections are of problematic provenance. Rather I want to illustrate the ways in which the Turkish art world is entrenched in processes of dispossession. It is against this backdrop that I will discuss selected works from Dilek Winchester’s series as if nothing has ever been said before us (2007–2015) as artistic interventions that trouble official narratives and mobilize social memory by way of re-inscribing and connecting obscured pasts to the present.

On Reading and Writing As part of the exhibition A Century of Centuries (SALT, Istanbul, 2015),16 Dilek Winchester’s as if nothing has ever been said before us (2007–2015), greets us with a writing on the wall, consisting of Greek, Armenian, Hebrew, “ W H E N E V E RY T H I N G H A S B E E N S A I D B E F O R E   .   .   .”

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Arabic, and Latin letters. The respective alphabets reference some of the languages spoken and written in the Ottoman Empire: Greek, Armenian, Ladino, and Ottoman Turkish,17 a composite of Arabic and Persian script. Although Latin script had a certain currency in the history of the Ottoman Empire, especially in the form of French-, English- and German-language publications, it was only introduced as the official alphabet in 1928 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Like other means of social engineering that focused on religious, cultural, and artistic expressions that were introduced following the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the language reform was explicitly designed to modernize Turkey and to expunge “the backwardness” associated with Ottoman language practices, written and oral traditions. Aiming at homogenization, standardization, and simplification, the language reform was one of the many measures that were to position the Republic as a new beginning. Yet, the harf devrimi, or “alphabet revolution,” also engendered a particular kind of rupture: citizens born into the Turkish republic found themselves disconnected from the written sources of the generations before them, whereas as those who had learned reading and writing in Ottoman times were deemed illiterate. It is this rupture that Winchester is especially interested in. A closer look reveals that the writing is a quote from OОuz Atay’s novel Tutunamayanlar (The Disconnected),18 in which Atay takes on the implications of the language reform that separated modern Turkey from its Ottoman past. Literary scholar Murat Cankara notes that the quote is taken from a passage in which Atay “asks God, through a protagonist, how one could memorize the Latin names of the bones of a man praying in Arabic, or why he did not teach all the languages to a dear friend who had committed suicide. His characters struggle to death to find their own voices without being ridiculous, despite the weight and devoid of the richness of what was said before them.”19 The expression kendinibegઅenmiߞçesinesankibizdenöncehiçbirߞeysöylenmemiߞçesinegillerden follows the agglutinative logic of Turkish and is part of the following sentence from Atay: “We are knocking on your doors with an emotion and arrogance unparalleled in world history and without fear of seeming like those who are conceited and behave as if nothing has ever been said before them.”20 The next piece, Three First Turkish Novels (2009, Figure 16.1), displays three novels from the nineteenth century, Vartan Pasha’s Akabi Hikayesi (Akabi’s Story, 1851), Evangelinos Misailidis’s Seyreyle Dünyayı (Behold the World, 1871) and ߸emsettin Sami’s Taaߞߞuk-ı Talat ve Fitnat (The Love between Talat and Fitnat, 1875),21 along with copies of the first three chapters of each book.While [ 290 ]

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Figure 16.1 Dilek Winchester, as if nothing has ever been said before us (2007–2014), and part of Three First Turkish Novels (2009), installation view from A Century of Centries, SALT BeyoОlu, Istanbul, 2015. Photograph: Mustafa Hazneci, Courtesy of SALT.

all are phonetically written in Turkish, the first uses Armenian, the second Greek, and the third Ottoman script. Armeno-Turkish, Karamanli, and Ottoman represent three practices of literacy that were not merely forgotten but delegitimized and erased with the foundation of the Turkish republic. In the Turkish literary canon, it is notably ߸emsettin Sami’s work that is assumed to be “the first Turkish novel”; the other two barely have a place in the country’s literary history. Yet, when viewed together, the installation leaves the viewer wondering which one is “the first Turkish novel” indeed? And what does it mean that the same language that we can only recognize in Latin script today was able to traverse these different alphabets? In preparation for this work,Winchester transcribed the novels into Latin script, painstakingly, letter by letter, so as to be able to read them. In the display, it is through the tracing paper, placed at specific conjunctures in the reproductions of the books and featuring partial phonetic transliterations of the text, that the viewer is able to grasp that all of them are written in Turkish. In an interview that I conducted with Winchester, she described the process of breaking down the texts into individual letters, and then “ W H E N E V E RY T H I N G H A S B E E N S A I D B E F O R E   .   .   .”

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reassembling them back into words as an experience of learning writing and reading anew. She sees her own artistic practice of becoming literate (again) as a reflection of Atay’s as if nothing has ever been said before us: “When I started [to phonetically transcribe the texts], there was a certain audacity in my approach, a certain kind of braveness that comes from not knowing. The more you learn the alphabets, and the more you begin to grasp the texts, and the history connected to them, the more you feel the weight of that part of history [. . .], the vastness of the memory—from a time that is not even far away and yet has been erased.”22 At the same time, Winchester describes the process of transcription as a way of “tweezing” out difference and differentiation from the patriarchal structure of standardized modern Turkish and its state-sanctioned usage. Identifying as a “feminist and artist in equal measure,”23 Winchester frequently makes transparent her own process and aesthetic practices to the viewer. In the case of Three First Turkish Novels, she does so by screening the interviews she conducted with literary scholars and historians, who talk in detail about the usage of different literary traditions and alphabets in the Ottoman Empire as well as about the novels themselves. Like the tracing paper, these videos allow the viewer to accompany Winchester in her learning process. Next, we encounter three anecdotes written on blackboards in Arabic, Greek, and Armenian script (Figure 16.2). Again, most visitors have to read the ledgers or listen to the recordings of the texts from the headphones that line up next to each blackboard in order to understand what the writings say. Each text describes the moment of a child’s surprise, confusion, and disappointment when s/he notices that her/his own language is not shared by others. Each is based on an encounter in daily life, selected from the many stories that Winchester says she has collected from her own experience and those of friends and acquaintances. These encounters are mundane and yet extraordinary: the first day at school where nobody else has a “secret language” that they only speak at home, a neighborhood friend who learns a different language—and different alphabet—at school, a discovered correspondence between the parents that is undecipherable to the child because it is not written in Latin script. Pronounced by a computer program, the voice that transliterates the writings on the blackboards defies any inkling of a specific region of Turkey; it has no recognizable accent. Winchester explains that she chose a text-to-speech software to express that these anecdotes and the linguistic practices they represent have been severed from the community of human voices, the daily life and social contexts to which they [ 292 ]

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Figure 16.2 Dilek Winchester, Blackboards (2013); installation view from A Century of Centuries, SALT BeyoОlu, Istanbul, 2015. Photograph: Mustafa Hazneci, Courtesy of SALT.

once belonged. The alienation that the computerized voice produces in the audience parallels that of the protagonists of the anecdotes. This moment of (re)cognition, or of comprehension, establishes a thread not only between Winchester’s works but also between the artist, the works, and the viewer. In this moment, Winchester once again raises the question of why Turkish speakers cannot read the texts without assistance—given that the spoken language is intelligible to them. What does it mean to have to speak and read as if nothing had ever been said before us? For this is how Winchester, much like Atay, sees the practice of reading, writing, and speaking modern Turkish. In his review of the exhibition, art critic Cem Erciyes writes that Winchester’s work recalls “erased lives and literary texts”: “Winchester [. . .] looks at the people who once used these different alphabets yet were able to be one society, and how they have been erased. She is more interested in individual tragedies. She lays out a striking picture of how nationalization and constructing a homogenous culture can be annihilating.”24 It is notable that  Erciyes finds, first and foremost, individual experiences expressed in Winchester’s work. After all, the protagonists of Blackboards remain “ W H E N E V E RY T H I N G H A S B E E N S A I D B E F O R E   .   .   .”

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anonymous, and they are introduced to us only through a single paragraph. They are not furnished with names or biographical backgrounds. Erciyes’s attribution, it seems to me, arises from the intimacy of the anecdotes that despite—or because—their specificity create a shared moment of recognition. They produce a recognition of alterity that reverberates in and can be transposed to other places and instances that reveal the totalizing thrust of the nation state. The texture of this connection that Winchester fosters corresponds to the notion of connectivity that Marianne Hirsch describes in her take on feminist readings of postmemory and the past. Such a reading “moves between intimate and global concerns by attending precisely to the intimate details that animate each case [. . .] even while enabling the discovery of shared motivations and shared tropes.”25 Moving between intimate and global concerns, between time and space, Winchester’s work transcends the national boundaries and the particularities of the post-Ottoman landscape as her feminist practice “disrupt[s] traditional organizations of space, [..] forge[s] productive dislocations, [and] reconfigure[s] conventions of scale.26 Contemplating the role of intimacy in feminist investigations,

Figure 16.3 Dilek Winchester, Negative Epiphany (2015); installation view from A Century of Centuries, SALT BeyoОlu, Istanbul, 2015. Photograph: Mustafa Hazneci, Courtesy of SALT. [ 294 ]

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literary scholar Victoria Rosner and geographer Geraldine Pratt argue that “intimacy is thus potentially and productively disruptive of the geographical binaries and hierarchies that often structure our thinking.”27 Winchester is interested precisely in how practices of reading and writing are not just linked to the project of nationalism in Turkey but to the political form of the nation-state across the globe. She takes issue with the myth that modernity engenders a rupture from other ways of being in the world and relating to others in it, shifting the focus instead, as she formulates it, to the “continuity that we are part of, and instances where this continuity expresses itself.”28 Winchester’s latest piece in the exhibition, Negative Epiphany (2015), consists of a range of black prints made by overexposing photo paper to sunlight. The accompanying text marks the way the prints have been produced and notes that they stand in for, or represent, “photographs that could not be shown.” This piece takes its title from the following passage of Susan Sontag’s On Photography: Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel. Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised—partly through the very proliferation of such images of horror. One’s first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany. For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau which I came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July 1945. Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life—ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously.29 It is no coincidence that Winchester draws on this particular text in which Sontag forcefully lays out the intertwined development of photography as a visual technology and of modern ways of waging war, including genocide as a form of modern mass violence. While in this passage Sontag is concerned with a moment of comprehension and recognition—a concern that is central to Winchester’s series—it also forms the building block of Sontag’s thinking about the moral efficacy of images of atrocity, of violence, and of genocide that she developed further in Regarding the Pain of Others.30 Sontag saw a risk in the proliferation of images of suffering, war, and political violence, proposing that overfamiliarity with such images had the potential to anesthetize or demoralize viewers rather than mobilizing them for action against war and other forms of violence. At the same time, “ W H E N E V E RY T H I N G H A S B E E N S A I D B E F O R E   .   .   .”

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Sontag’s notion of negative epiphany as a moment that engenders uncomfortable questions as to the unrepresentability of experiences of atrocity also speaks to wider concerns that have animated both critical theory and feminist theory in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Winchester confronts the unrepresentability of what she calls “moments of terror” in all their unsettledness and discomfort. Instead of depictions of violence, the insistence on the unrecoverability of loss and the unrepresentability of atrocity stand at the center of Winchester’s works.31 While working through erasures and things unseen within official history, Winchester mobilizes another register of memory by exhibiting the prints along with cameras dating from 1900 to 1915, i.e., from the beginning of the century to the beginning of the Armenian genocide: the specter of Ottoman photography, most prominently pursued by Armenian photographers, among them the Abdullah Frères (Viçen Abdullahyan, 1820–1902; Hovsep Abdullahyan, 1830–1908; and Kevork Abdullahyan, 1839–1918) in Ottoman and Maryam ߸ahinyan (1911–1996) and Osep MinasoОlu (1929– 2013) in republican times. Their works and archives have received increasing attention over the past few years.32 But she also points to the limits of transposing or exposing such memory. In her review of Winchester’s works, Alexandra MacGilp proposes that “[t]he prints were a stand-in for photographs that could not be shown in the gallery, and reflected the unrepresentable nature of memory.”33 I would argue, however, that the artist’s emphasis on limitation does not merely comment on the nature of memory but on the capacities of art. According to Jacques Rancière, it is exactly this recognition of possibilities and limitations that harbors art’s critical potential. For Rancière, “Critical art is not so much a type of art that reveals the forms and contradictions of domination as it is an art that questions its own limits and powers, that refuses to anticipate its own effects.”34 I will return to how this refusal to anticipate its own effects plays out in Winchester’s work at the end of the essay.

The Intimacy of Complicity The selection of Winchester’s work I have discussed here does not folklorize cultural difference, or minority lives, for that matter. Her approach stands in stark contrast to the preferred mode of the Turkish state (and, at times, contemporary art)35 that ultimately aims to tame difference through [ 296 ]

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discourses on past—and present—“multiculturalism.” She thus breaks out of the frame of purported liberal tolerance that depoliticizes difference and divorces it from rights claims by transposing it onto a romanticized version of Ottoman regimes of pluralism. Winchester’s work does not express “imperialist nostalgia,” not a longing for what one has destroyed, to use anthropologist Renato Rosaldo’s term.36 Both folklorization and nostalgia in the imperialist register are modes of representation that keep historical asymmetries and power relations intact. At the same time, Winchester’s work goes beyond “mere” documentation. The instances of recovery she presents do not simply fill gaps in knowledge or make the invisible visible. Rather her work makes what is imperceptible perceptible by tending to the daily practices of reading and writing. The way in which she connects the past to the present troubles official history and, connectedly, the dominant memory regime of Turkey. It counteracts forgetting not just of national narratives but of artistic legacies and histories by revealing the organized intolerance of internal difference that marked the language reforms of the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish republic.37 What is today identified as “national language” emerges not only as a policy that turned people illiterate but one that cut them off from their past and, hence, (their) history. As such, Winchester’s works unhinge the “success”-story of nationalism that has normalized monolingualism by showing that it does not correspond to the experience of people living in the geography of today’s Turkey a mere 100 years ago. But they also unhinge the conditions of making art in contemporary Turkey; conditions that, too, work in the mode of as if nothing has been said before us. As a result of the politics of dispossession sketched earlier in this chapter, art history in Turkey continues to be taught as the “history of Western art,” with the more recent addition of Islamic art at some art academies. Ottoman art and its diverse landscape and actors, however, remain absent. What I mean to stress here goes beyond the so often diagnosed process of “Turkification” as dependent on and facilitated by national forgetting. By reconfiguring frames of remembrance along with frames of perception, art from Turkey tends to be trapped within articulations—and even more so perceptions—that tend to reiterate “that nothing has ever been said before here.” Standardized narratives on “Turkish” art history as the story of a striving for modernism under the patronage of the state (characterized by the attempt to empty modernism of the critique of modernity that has marked its very emergence) begin in 1923 and have long regarded artistic production of the Ottoman period as decadent, imitative, or simply nonexistent.38 “ W H E N E V E RY T H I N G H A S B E E N S A I D B E F O R E   .   .   .”

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Winchester notes that while her works seem to tend to the past, “they are actually concerned with today.” They recover “fragments,” as she calls them, from the vast memory that has been lost, but that nonetheless “can be transformative.”39 This recovery of fragments in Winchester’s works goes beyond acknowledging the mere existence of Armenians, Greeks, Jews, and other minorities in the Ottoman Empire. Countering notions of repair— which would suggest the possibility to reverse past injuries—Winchester begins to offer a transformative gesture that creates pauses to account for experiences of past violence and the way in which this violence continues to reverberate in the form of state denial. Winchester’s works trace how the daily practice of reading and writing today are implicated—even outright complicit—in these histories of violence and dispossession; histories that are in constant need of disavowal in officially sanctioned literacy and official writings of art history. I argue that in revealing this complicity, Winchester wages a disinvestment from “Turkishness” as privilege entrenched into systematic forgetting against the “national prism” that ultimately continues to frame the production and perception of art. Literary scholar Debarati Sanyal notes that apart from collusion or collaboration, complicity can refer to “understanding or intimacy,” particularly in the French usage of complicité.40 As I have already touched upon the kind of intimacy that Winchester produces—an intimacy to something that is both ostensibly unknown and yet resonating—I want to draw on another facet of complicity that Sanyal raises. Complicare, the Latin root of the term, also means “to fold together.” Reading complicity through the lens of the fold allows for “gathering subject positions, histories, and memories,” and for examining one’s often contradictory place in the “historical fold” of the nation-state.41 Viewed in this vein, Winchester’s works tease out the intricate mechanisms of the nationstate’s economy of forgetting in which official language as well as everyday practices of reading and writing fold us into—and in doing so keep us invested in—histories of violence. In the end, Winchester leaves us with the harrowing insight that, perhaps, “everything has been said before us,” in a language called Ottoman, or Ottoman Turkish, a language very much like “our own.” There is a lingering discomfort that arises from the recognition that not “only” many of its writers and readers were killed and expelled but that their loss—and with it “our” past, too—have been made unintelligible by another register of loss, that of script and literacy. By removing her works from the official frame in which the nation-state arrests difference, past and present—and [ 298 ]

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without anticipating the effects of this removal—Winchester presents us with the possibility, the chance, to find “what has been said before us” in the complex web of intelligibility and unintelligibility with all its uncertainties.

Notes 1. Jay Winter, “The Memory Boom in Contemporary Historical Studies,” Raritan 21, no. 1 (2001): 52–66; Esra Özyürek, ed., The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007); Catherine Duft, ed., Turkish Literature and Cultural Memory: “Multiculturalism” as a Literary Theme after 1980 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2009); Leyla Neyzi, Nasıl Hatırlıyoruz? Türkiye’de Bellek Çalıߞmaları (Istanbul: ԭߞ Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2011). 2. It is important to note that while Turkish citizenship was initially projected to be civic in nature, it became predicated on religion (by conceptualizing Turkishness as based in Islam, and codifying Jewish, Greek-Orthodox, and Armenian citizens as official minorities) and was increasingly understood as an ethnic demarcation in the course of republican history. 3. Esra Özyürek, “The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey,” in The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey, ed. Esra Özyürek (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007) 3. 4. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories. Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995). 5. Ahtamar and Mor Gabriel are but two out of thousands of expropriated community sites (see Mehmet Polatel et al., 2012 Declaration: The Seized Properties of Armenian Foundations in Istanbul (Istanbul: Hrant Dink Foundation, 2012). Their restitution will be decided on a case-by-case basis. This process might take decades given the fickleness of the political establishment, especially under the current conditions of political violence and the fall-out from the failed coup d’état attempt of July 2016. 6. Bedross Der Matossian, “The Taboo within the Taboo: The Fate of the ‘Armenian Capital’ at the end of the Ottoman Empire,” European Journal of Turkish Studies, 2011, accessed December 9, 2018, https://ejts.revues.org/4411, 3. 7. Der Matossian, “The Taboo within the Taboo,” 3. 8. Ayhan Aktar, “‘Turkification’ Policies in the Early Republican Era,” in Turkish Literature and Cultural Memory: “Multiculturalism” as a Literary Theme after 1980, ed. Catherine Duft (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2009), 29–62. 9. Rıfat Bali, Varlık Vergisi: Hatıralar-Tanıklıkla. (Istanbul: Libra, 2012). 10. Ayhan Aktar, Varlık Vergisi ve ‘Türkleߞtirme’ Politikaları (Istanbul: ԭletiߞim Yayınları, 2000), 232 and 235. “ W H E N E V E RY T H I N G H A S B E E N S A I D B E F O R E   .   .   .”

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11. A nonlethal bombing had indeed taken place, but it was in the yard of the Turkish Consulate. This attack, like the ensuing riots, was planned and executed by Turkish security forces to galvanize public sentiment around the Cyprus issue. For details on the planning of the pogrom, its human toll, and its highly problematic legal prosecution, see Dilek Güven, Cumhuriyet Dönemi Azınlık Politikaları ve Stratejileri Bagઅlamında 6–7 Eylül Olayları (Istanbul: ԭletiߞim Yayınları, 2005). 12. As art historian Vazken Davidian notes, Ottoman Armenian painters, for instance, have been doubly obscured, as they have been written out of Ottoman as well as Armenian art history. Their work remains in a limbo of silence and largely unacknowledged. Vazken Davidian, “Portrait of an Ottoman Armenian Artist of Constantinople: Rereading Teotig’s Biography of Simon Hagopian,” Études Arméniennes Contemporaines 4 (2014): 49. 13. In his work on post-apartheid South Africa, Mahmood Mamdani (2015) has forcefully argued that apart from considering victims and perpetrators, the category the beneficiaries of state violence and discriminatory practices is vital to consider in pursuits of social justice. Mahmood Mamdani, “Beyond Nuremberg: The Historical Significance of the Post-Apartheid Transition in South Africa,” Politics & Society 1 (2015): 61–88. See also Bruce Robbins, The Beneficiary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). 14. To name but two examples of business empires that have turned into prominent art patrons and collectors: Vehbi Koç (1901–1996), founder of the Koç Corporation, had taken over businesses and properties sold under duress during the wealth tax period. Hacı Ömer Sabancı (1906–1966) was able to take over cotton farming businesses in Adana in the early 1920s, despite his modest background, exactly because of “the voids” left by the Turkification of economy, i.e. the killing and expulsion of their minority owners. For details, see Ayߞe BuОra, State and Business in Modern Turkey: A Comparative Study (Binghamton: State University of New York Press, 1994), 82–86; Laure Marchand and Guillaume Perrier, Türkiye ve Ermeni Hayaleti. Soykırımın ԭzinde Adımlar (Istanbul: ԭletiߜim, 2014), 202–206. 15. Étienne Balibar, “The Nation Form. History and Ideology,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1991), 86–106. 16. Running from March 10 to May 24, 2015—and not coincidentally during the centennial of the Armenian genocide—A Century of Centuries, according to the press release, presented a look at the past 100 years through a “sequence of solo artistic positions shown in dialogue, formed in response to transformative moments, traumatic experiences and social transitions of the past that continue to resonate in and shape the present.” SALT was established in 2011 under the directorship of curator and art historian Vasıf Kortun, under the patronage of Garanti Bank. Since then, the arts institution has served as an umbrella for the [ 300 ]

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previous activities of the Garanti Gallery (focusing on architecture), the Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, and the Ottoman Bank Archives and Research Center (which became part of the DoОuߞ Group, i.e. the mother company of Garanti Bank in 1996). The Ottoman Bank archives themselves present a testament to the plurality of Ottoman society. While the archive is publicly accessible, the years 1915–1917 are yet to be made so. It stands to reason that these years hold much information on property and monies expropriated during the Armenian genocide. 17. Ottoman Turkish drew extensively on Persian and Arabic vocabulary. After the language reform, the Turkish Language Association was established in 1932 as a measure of nation-state consolidation. The association was explicitly charged with Turkifying the language, i.e. eliminating Arabic and Persian words, and replacing them with “originally Turkish” expressions—with varying success— throughout republican history. Part of the problem that the language reform, just like the construction of “Turkish identity” overall, encountered from the beginning was that it was conceived as both the making of a “new man” (and hence a new people) and the return to the “unspoiled” roots of an ostensibly already existing Turkishness “out there” that had been corrupted by the Ottoman elites. 18. OОuz Atay, Tutunamayanlar (Istanbul: ԭletiߜim, 2000[1971]). 19. Murat Cankara, “As if ” in Dilek Winchester (Athens: National Museum of Contemporary Art, 2013), 67. 20. OОuz Atay, Tutunamayanlar, 542. 21. The novel was first printed as a serial from 1872–1873 in Hadîka Gazetesi. 22. Dilek Winchester, personal interview with author, 15 January 2016, Istanbul. 23. Winchester, interview. 24. Cem Erciyes,“Yüzyıllık alfabe meselesi,” Radikal, November 3, 2015, accessed December 9, 2018, http://www.radikal.com.tr/yazarlar/cem-erciyes/yuzyillikalfabemeselesi -1310625/. 25. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 206. 26. Victoria Rosner, and Geraldine Pratt,“Introduction:The Global and the Intimate,” in The Global and the Intimate Feminism in Our Time, ed. Victoria Rosner and Geraldine Pratt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 1. 27. Rosner and Pratt, “Introduction,” 2. 28. Winchester, interview. 29. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 19. 30. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). 31. Although Hirsch’s contemplation on “objects of return” centers on the material quality of things and physical objects from which subjects have been severed, “ W H E N E V E RY T H I N G H A S B E E N S A I D B E F O R E   .   .   .”

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Winchester’s return to certain linguistic practices of the Ottoman Empire from the time of or immediately preceding genocidal violence, similarly grapple with what Hirsch calls the “structure of irresolution” (Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 225). 32. See, for example,Tayfun Serttaߞ, Stüdyo Osep (Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2009), and Foto Galatasaray: Studio Practice by Maryam ߸ahinyan (Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2011). 33. Alexandra MacGilp, “A Century of Centuries,” ArtAsiaPacific, March 2015, accessed December 9, 2018, http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/WebExclusives /ACenturyOfCenturies. 34. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2001), 149. 35. Banu Karaca, The National Frame—State Violence and Aesthetic Practice in Turkey and Germany (forthcoming). 36. Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” Representations 26 (Spring, 1989): 107–122. 37. See Nergis Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 38. Although the concept of Islamic art has been complicit in the obscuration of non-Muslim (Armenian, Greek, Assyrian, and Jewish) art world actors and others who do not fit the nationalist frame of “Turkish” art history in its postOttoman configuration, it has not easily lent itself to nationalist ideology— especially since until quite recently Turkey has fashioned itself as a decidedly secular state. Even the surging “Neo-Ottoman” discourses have trouble reducing Ottoman visual culture to the category of Islamic art, which covers vast parts of the world from North Africa to Southeast Asia and, likewise, vast time periods (see Avinoam Shalem,“What do we mean when we say ‘Islamic Art’? An Urgent Plea for a Critical Re-Writing of the History of the Arts of the Islamic Lands.” Journal of Art Historiography 6 (2012), accessed December 9, 2018, https://arthistoriography .files.wordpress.com/2012/05/shalem.pdf), not least because of the highly diverse backgrounds of its producers. 39. “Bir yıla kaç yüzyıl sıОar?” Agos, March 14, 2015, http://www.agos.com.tr/tr /yazi/10877/bir-yila-kac-yuzyil-sigar. 40. Debarati Sanyal, Memory and Complicity—Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (New York: Fordham Press, 2015), 10. 41. Sanyal, Memory and Complicity, 10.

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CH A P T E R X V II

Treasures S I LV I N A D E R - M E G U E R D I T C H I A N A N D M A R I A N N E H I R S C H

T

he multidimensional artistic projects of Silvina Der-Meguerditchian use hybrid archival media to recall a catastrophe that occurred long before she was born in a diasporic community in Argentina and to reconstruct the lives that were destroyed. Currently living and working in Berlin, Der-Meguerditchian is the granddaughter of refugeesurvivors of the Armenian genocide.Third-generation memory of destruction is multiply mediated and attenuated by inherited stories and objects, whether personal, familial, and intimate or public and collective. It is composed of shadows and traces. After three generations of denial, Armenian memory is often mobilized in the interest of reconstruction and restitution, mobility tethered by longing. It is no wonder that diasporic Armenian artists exhibit what the cultural critic Marie-Aude Baronian describes as “archival desire” that would be able to make a phantom past “newly visible” and palpable.1

Der-Meguerditchian, however, rejects identitarian politics and aesthetics, ethno-nationalism and its monumentality. Her recent project, prepared for the prize-winning Armenity pavilion at the fifty-sixth Venice Biennale in 2015, and partially recreated here, aims to mobilize family archives in the interests of connectivity and of healing. Armenity itself is an antinationalist project. As the curator has said:

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The curatorial concept of Armenity** implies the notion of displacement and territory, justice and reconciliation, ethos and resilience. Regardless of their place of birth, the selected artists carry within their identity the memory of their origins . . . these grandchildren of survivors of the Armenian Genocide . . . rebuilt a “transnational assembly” from the remnants of a shattered identity. Their ingrained concern for memory, justice and reconciliation skillfully transcends notions of territory, borders and geography.2

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Armenity, moreover, is installed in an extraterritorial site of particular meaning in Armenian diasporic history, and Silvina Der-Merguerditchian’s project uses the site’s elements to great effect. The island of San Lazzaro houses a monastery established in 1717 by an Armenian monk to archive a cultural heritage and offer a haven for Armenian culture in Europe. In the beautiful cases filled with an astounding assemblage of treasures collected by or given to the monks—glass bottles, Etruscan figures, Chinese teacups—Silvina Der-Meguerditchian installed her own “treasures.” The installation builds on an astounding object she inherited from her maternal great-grandmother Hripsime, a handwritten notebook of 350 folk health remedies, written in Armenian script in Turkish language. Hripsime, a genocide survivor who immigrated to Argentina with her son, Silvina’s grandfather, wrote the book in Córdoba in 1943. The installation consists of the 130 pages archival notebook itself and of objects that are building on the archive—the ingredients of these recipes, Anatolian plants, small sacks full of seeds and other healing substances, as well as the chemical formulas by which they might be assembled and do the work of healing. Photographs of Hripsime and her family are there amidst images of well-known Armenian doctors and healers. The artist relates her great-grandmother’s recipes to medical manuscripts and encyclopedias dating back as far as the Middle Ages, pharmacology textbooks, and other manuscripts from San Lazzaro’s impressive archives “putting her . . . back into the line of History, into the tradition of healers from Cilicia.” It’s not coincidental that, among the recipes, Silvina Der-Merguerditchian chose several remedies for maladies of the eye. “The first 60 are for maladies of the eye,” she writes “for example, for eyes that look but don’t see, or for teary eyes.”3 When Hripsime wrote her recipe book in Córdoba, she was doing so with a future in mind. She was no doubt eager to pass on the wealth of traditional knowledge she had acquired and brought with her into exile, to transmit healing practices that had been passed down to her, to transmit them viscerally and bodily. Including sixty recipes for eye ailments, she might also have wanted her descendants to see something they were not seeing, as they looked back to the past and forward into the future. What might that have been?

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eye refreshing recipe: sugar cubes for tea, ulex, potassium bitartrate, long pepper. eye refreshing recipe: citric acid, starch, clove, rock sugar polad. recipe to cure watery eyes: cypress, black cumin, alum, nigella sativa. recipe for eye herpes: sugar cubes for tea, black chickpeas, galga nux, clove. recipe for black eye irritated by smoke: galga nux, long pepper, clove, sugar cubes for tea, copper sulphate, ammoniac. special recipe for acute eye pain: cotton, rose water, syrian rue, white chickpeas. recipe to cure stye: sugar cubes for tea, alum, clove. recipe for sore in the eye: anzarot, clove, auraga, sea foam, alum.

herbal ointment for black eye: recipe for eyes irritated

honey ointment pearl powder, yolk

long pepper, goldenrod, galga nux, rock sugar polad, almonds, olives and

by dust and smoke

: shellac, ivory powder,

Building the installation around the notebook, the great-granddaughter artist does more than to pay tribute to her great-grandmother’s learning. She responds to the call to see better, receiving the fantasy of healing sent to her across time and space, transporting it across the seas to encounter other stories and other histories in an expanded extraterritorial archive. We might not be able to make remedies from these recipes, but the artist has given us a blueprint, a set of ingredients and bodily practices not only for healing and repair, but also for a critical engagement with memory practices that mobilize the past for the benefit of a more progressive political present and future.

Notes 1. Marie-Aude Baronian, “Mémoire, Tissage et Estéthique du Déplacement,” Témoigner: Entre Histoire et Mémoire 120, no. 1 (2015), 97–108. 2. Adelina Cüberyan von Fürstenberg, “Introduction,” Armenity/ Hayoutioun, ed. Adelina Cüberyan von Fürstenberg (Milan: SKIRA), 23. 3. von Fürstenberg, “Introduction”; Artist note.

Silvina Der-Meguerditchian, Treasures, 2015; Installation views, Mekhitarist Monastery of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, Venice, Courtesy Piero Demo.

CHA P T E R X V III

Blank An Attempt at a Conversation

SUSAN MEISELAS & I߸IN ÖNOL I N C O L L A B O R AT I O N W I T H BԭLAL E L ԭ F K AYA LEYLA DEMԭR Z E Y N E P Ö Z TA P ZARԭFE BԭTԭM N E J B ԭ R E R KO L

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Figure 18.1 Bilal’s cell phone, with images from his destroyed hometown on the border between Syria and Turkey, March 5th 2016 Courtesy, Susan Meiselas.

An Attempt at a Conversation

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n the summer of 2015, a few months after the officially announced Peace Process by the Turkish government had effectively come to a halt, the Turkish Army announced renewed military operations against the PKK. The upsurge in violence centered on Kurdish cities exposing civilians to military force and curfews with devastating human rights violations and loss of life. The information we could gain from the media was neither sufficient nor reliable. Many blank spaces remained between the lines. Cities were demolished, people vanished: a dreadful emptiness. We wanted to hear from them: their testimonies as opposed to official information. We invited five art students from the Fine Arts program at Mardin Artuklu University to contribute to this text in an attempt to include their experiences in the region during the onslaught of violence. What follows is their response. But can we read between the lines, when there are no lines? Susan Meiselas & Iߞın Önol

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∗

We’re sending you a blank page as our testimony. We were invited to send visual and written material instead. As we were debating how to contribute without becoming objectified, you asked us to send a scanned page ASAP. You are in a hurry but we have an emergency. Our testimony is five blank A4 pages. p1 Elif Kaya p2 Leyla Demir p3 Zeynep Öztap p4 Zarife Bitim p5 Nejbir Erkol

Figure 18.2 7 Scanned blank pages and a short statement sent by Mardin Artuklu University Students Elif Kaya, Leyla Demir, Zeynep Öztap, Zarife Bitim, and Nejbir Erkol, October 6, 2016

Courtesy, the artists.

CHA P T E R X IX

Interventionist Theater Challenging Regimes of Slow Violence J E A N E . H OWA R D

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n Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon argues that certain kinds of violence are difficult to represent: violence, in particular, that occurs over long stretches of time where change from day to day is barely perceptible.1 His prime example of slow violence is prolonged environmental degradation, the impact of which is as lasting and as devastating as more punctual, easier-to-capture events. Nixon focuses much of his attention on postcolonial countries where deforestation, mining, refinery fires, and oil leaks are normalized and go unaddressed: part of the extraction process by which wealth is transferred from the global South to the North with no regard for long-lasting trauma to the earth and to the poor who inhabit it. How, he asks, can one represent the temporality and the long-term material effects of such slow-motion catastrophe? I argue here that theater is one of the media in which long-term violence, violence that occurs over generations and that is important precisely because it is unremarkable, can be registered, exposed, and its causes critiqued. This may seem counterintuitive since theater is often described as a medium of immediacy that excels at registering and creating responses to the shared now of performance. But I will argue that this immediacy can be a way of vividly evoking long histories of violence that actors/ characters can embody—and challenge—in performance. I will focus on the contemporary British experimental dramatist, Caryl Churchill, who has a particular concern for the lives of women and the violence they experience. [ 329 ]

In various plays she has looked at what the English Civil War meant for women caught up in its conflicts and its millennial hopes (Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, 1976); at witchcraft persecutions in Essex in the 1640s (Vinegar Tom, 1976); and at the psychological and material price historical (and fictional) women pay for being unusual (Top Girls, 1982). In what follows, I will examine two other Churchill plays, Fen (1983) and The Skriker (1994), which experiment with ways to depict and to intervene in histories of slow environmental and gendered violence. The former does so by connecting the now of the represented action to the longue durée of history through the repetition of recurring gestures of agricultural and household labor, the later by intermixing contemporary women with fantastic and damaged figures from the ancient world of British folklore and fairytale. In both instances, the slow violence of environmental and gender damage is given a history through innovative performance techniques, and then that violence is interrupted, its inevitability questioned, by another repertoire of bodily acts and movements. Throughout this essay I draw on Diana Taylor’s idea of the repertoire, that is, forms of “embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing—in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge.”2 Churchill’s feminist theater practice uses a repertoire of gestures and movements both to carry the memory of historically-inflicted suffering and pain and also to advance the struggle for different social arrangements intimated by an alternative mode of embodied being.

The Embodied History of Gendered Labor Churchill’s 1983 play, Fen, is unique for the quotidian nature of the violence it records and for its place specificity. It shows a community of women, and a few men, trying to survive as day laborers in the fens of East Anglia.3 This patch of land has a history. For eons it was marshland subject to flooding. The people who lived on it made accommodation with its peculiarities and developed a particularly symbiotic relationship with their watery landscape. As a contemptuous Japanese businessman says at the start of the play: “Long time ago, under water. Not true people had webbed feet but did walk on stilts. Wild people, fen tigers. In 1630 rich lords planned to drain fen, change swamp into grazing land, far thinking men, brave investors. Fen people wanted to keep fishes and eels to live on, no vision. Refuse work [ 330 ]

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on drainage, smash dykes, broke sluices. Many problems. But in the end we have this beautiful earth.”4 The play shows, however, that in the end what really remains is land wrenched from its traditional uses and turned over to capitalist farmers who have drained and enclosed it, making its inhabitants into wage laborers on the land they had once considered common property. Eventually that land comes into the hands of an overseas investor, the Japanese business man referenced above, and its products enter a global economy. The only constant in the four centuries since the original fen draining, Fen suggests, is the unremitting labor of those who work the land for what are barely subsistence wages. The play is a tragedy of an unusual sort: a tragedy of emiseration: that is, it does not just depict misery; it both exposes its causes and its experiential dimensions. Lacking a singular protagonist, the play focuses on a collective one, the community that over time is turned into waste material and condemned to a life of startling deprivation. Churchill employs a contrapuntal dramatic technique that gradually unfolds the longue durée of this centuries-long process of emiseration. On the one hand, the play thematizes the ills and pathologies that wrack the present: marital violence, child abuse, depression, suicide. Even young girls have interiorized the low expectations and limited compass of lives straitened by poverty and isolation. As three little girls sing about their future, all they can imagine is staying put and doing feminized jobs: nurse, hairdresser, teacher, housewife, and even some of those seem incompatible with life in the small rural community they take as their chosen situation. I want to be a nurse when I grow up And I want to have children and get married. But I don’t think I’ll leave the village when I grow up. I’m never going to leave the village when I grow up even when I get married. I think I’ll stay in the village and be a nurse.5 (157) Adult characters talk about breaking free and going to London or starting a new life, but they don’t. They stay, leave their children, kill their lovers, or just carry on, as one characters says, being busy to keep from thinking. But the play is more than a realist slice-of-life. It punctuates its scenes of present misery with devices that create temporal depth by forcing the past into the present, thrusting the dead among the living and uniting both I N T E RV E N T I O N I S T T H E AT E R

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Figure 19.1 This image suggests the repetitive, backbreaking labor involved in harvesting potatoes. Actors (L-R) David Strathairn, Concetta Tomei (rear), Ellen Parker, Pamela Reed, and Linda Griffiths in a publicity shot from the New York Shakespeare’s Festival’s 1983 production of Fen. Source: Photo by Martha Swope. Copyright Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

through a shared habitus of bodily labor. It is through the gestures of the female laboring body that the longue durée of daily, quotidian exploitation registers as theatrical event. Two striking scenes of this short play involve women picking crops, moving down a field in unison, and contending with a Nazi-like foreperson who urges them to work faster and praises them for keeping going when there are icicles hanging from their clothing and faces. These are horrific scenes, especially for anyone who has ever picked crops, in this case potatoes. Bending, lifting baskets, working in rain and mud, the women become nothing but their labor. To hold on, they sing, but their songs are children’s melodies, nursery rhymes with simple repetitious words that let the woman find a work rhythm but that also infantilize them.This grinding bodily labor has a history that began when fens became fields and ownership replaced the commons. The bodies of these women, in their gestures of conscripted labor, carry this history of backbreaking agricultural labor with them.6 Likewise, they carry the gendered history of household labor in their “private” moments which center on ironing, holding babies, feeding children. The history of agriculture labor by the vulnerable is intimated in the opening stage direction: “As the audience comes in, a BOY from the last century, barefoot and in rags, is alone in a field in a fog, scaring crows. He shouts and waves a rattle. As the day goes on his voice gets weaker till he is hoarse and shouting in a whisper. It gets dark” (148). Children and women are linked by labor and bodily vulnerability.7 The realistic scenes of present labor and present suffering are thus counterpointed by scenes involving ghosts or uncanny revenants from a prior time. The BOY is one: a wanderer from another time who haunts the stage before the Japanese business man appears. He is echoed, halfway through the play, by another figure from the past described in the stage directions in this way: “a Woman working in the fields. She is as real as the other women workers but barefoot and wearing nineteenth century rags. She is a GHOST” (162–63). Unlike the BOY, who presumably is also a ghost, this figure speaks, and what she speaks is a blistering denunciation of the landowner’s cruelty: “We are starving . . . You bloody farmers could not live if it was not for the poor . . . My baby died starving” (163). These ghostly figures tear a hole from the past into the present of stage enactment. That the woman in her movements and gestures of work is indistinguishable from contemporary women, and is seen as different only by her clothing, suggests the continuity across the decades and centuries of particular kinds of rural exploitation. These women have I N T E RV E N T I O N I S T T H E AT E R

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all been interpolated by the foreperson’s voice; they bend their backs in unison. And they all share an anger that longs to turn outward but mostly is turned against themselves. The ghost laborer threatens “that there will be a slaughter amongst you very soon,” and a rebellious woman named Nell repeatedly stands up to the foreperson, making demands (163). But threats have not toppled the landowners, and while one old woman speaks nostalgically of the days of union organizing, there is no union organizing in the present. The ghost suggests the continuity of suffering and of labor across widely separated periods of time but also of a recurring impulse to resist, though to date such resistance has not fundamentally changed these women’s conditions of work. Field labor and household labor, crystallized in the actions of bodies picking up the row and ironing shirts, come together in a concluding sequence in which a woman who has been murdered by her lover comes back as a ghost and tells about the dead she has seen and the continuing suffering of the living characters we have seen and of the suffering of their grandmothers and those women’s grandmothers. Three striking theater images then follow one another. (1) S.D. “Nell crosses on stilts.” She says: “I was walking out on the fen. The sun spoke to me. It said, ‘Turn back, turn back.’ I said, ‘I won’t turn back for you or anyone’ ” (189). Nell, the boldest of the women, defiantly assumes an old technology for navigating the fens before they were drained. She strides; she embodies free movement across a marsh—the antithesis of bending and struggling across a potato field. (2) S.D. Shirley “is ironing the field,” a gesture that only makes sense as an emblem of the intertwined scenes of her subjection: to the soil and to her iron, stove, and kitchen table (189). When she irons the field, what is she doing?8 Bending the land to her will? Refusing the divorce of the private and public, the world of domestic and of public labor, forcing the viewer to see the interconnections? In production, the action of the play typically takes place on a field which also serves as the floor of village houses, thus physically intermingling the worlds of domestic and agricultural labor. (3) S.D. “May is there. She sings” (189). May, a grandmother caring for the children of her unhappy daughter, has throughout the play refused to sing, even when the grandchildren ask her. As her daughter says: “My mother wanted to be a singer. That’s why she’d never sing” (190). But as the play closes, Mae bursts into song, the aural equivalent of Nell’s striding across the stage on stilts. Throat open, head back, May channels freedom. [ 334 ]

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Figure 19.2 Shirley irons while holding a baby as her husband and Val sit at a table. The house is superimposed on a field. Actors (L-R) Linda Bassett, Bernard Strother, and Jennie Stoller in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of Fen, 1983. Source: Photo by Martha Swope. Copyright Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library.

This concatenation of embodied images, one crystallizing the oppression whose longue durée the play has detailed, the other two suggesting by an altered bodily repertoire, what freedom feels like, end the play with gestures of optimism.The work does not suggest a program for social transformation. But it exposes the consequences and causes of a particular kind of prolonged violence that damages bodies and souls and makes the audience long for other forms of embodiment: for the freedom of those who stride on stilts or who sing as if there no tomorrow, or better, as if a utopian tomorrow could be now and forever. Churchill’s best instrument for setting up the contrast between regimes of slow violence and the possibility of a freer existence is the actor’s body. Performance allows what reading cannot—namely, the kinetic sense of bodies constricted, weighed down, and locked into postures of deadening labor and bodies that are free to soar. Theater thus becomes a means both of embodied critique and, conversely, of embodied freedom as walking on stilts and full-throated singing interrupt the bodily regimes that have heretofore dominated the play. I N T E RV E N T I O N I S T T H E AT E R

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The Embodied Anger of the Violated Earth A decade later in The Skriker (1994), Churchill returned with renewed anger to the violence of environmental catastrophe and to the theatrical problem posed by its longue durée. This time, however, Churchill did not focus on a microclimate of the sort the fens represent, but on a more abstract planetary setting. The plays are linked, however, by their striking juxtaposition of widely disparate timeframes and the counterpoint between the present scene of representation and past moments, which in The Skriker encompass a primeval time before the dominance of man. As many critics have noted, The Skriker has just three speaking characters but a cast of twenty-six. In the foreground are two young women, Lily and Josie, the latter of whom, as the play opens, is in a mental institution for having killed her baby. Lily is herself pregnant, eventually has the baby, but abandons it to go with the third figure, the Skriker, to the underworld. In The Skriker, both Josie and Lily are wellmeaning young women, but they are without husbands, lovers, or support. As in many of Churchill’s plays, mothers who can’t mother because of the social circumstances in which they find themselves, and violence against children are signs not only of cruelty but also of a world poisoned at the root, incapable of generation.9 The only figure seemingly solicitous of either of them is the play’s titular character, the Skriker, who emerges from English and Irish myth and in traditional folktales wails loudly to announce human death. Stage directions describe her as “a shapeshifter and death portent, ancient and damaged.”10 In the original production she was played by Kathryn Hunter, a powerful but diminutive actor with a body twisted and damaged from an accident.11 In Churchill’s play her character throbs with malevolence. Taking the shape, in turn, of an old woman, a schoolgirl, and even a sofa, she insinuates herself into the lives of the two girls by promising to grant their wishes and then, when they succumb to her endearments, holding them completely in her power. She whisks Josie to a deadly underworld from which she returns seemingly only by chance, and when Lily leaves her daughter to go with the Skriker, she returns to earth to find her grandchild an old woman with a deformed child of her own who bellows at the sight of Lily. If the Skriker’s behavior evokes the Persephone myth, it does so only to fracture it. In Lily’s case there is no happy reunion of mother and child as winter gives way to spring. Instead, as the Skriker says to Josie: [ 336 ]

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Have you noticed the large number of meteorological phenomena lately? Earthquakes. Volcanoes. Drought. Apocalyptic meteorological phenomena. The increase of sickness. It was always possible to think whatever your personal problem, there’s always nature. Spring will return even if it’s without me. Nobody loves me but at least it’s a sunny day. This has been a comfort to people as long as they’ve existed. But it’s not available anymore. Sorry. Nobody loves me and the sun’s going to kill me. Spring will return and nothing will grow. Some people might feel concerned about that. But it makes me feel important. I’m going to be around when the world as we know it ends. I’m going to witness unprecedented catastrophe. (282) In short, the Skriker will be present at the end of the world as we know it when, in Rachel Carson’s memorable phrase, we will face a silent spring where nothing grows.12 The significance of the Skriker in this scenario is illuminated by the nonspeaking characters who repeatedly flood the stage at the same time that Lily, Josie, and the Skriker are interacting. A few of these figures are ordinary humans: a girl with a telescope who increasingly succumbs to despair and slits her wrists, a family on a picnic, businessmen. But the overwhelming majority of the nonspeaking characters spring directly from the world of folklore, like the Skriker herself. They have names like Johnny Squarefoot, The Kelpie, Yallerybrown, Bogle, Spiggan, Brownie, Fair Fairy, Dark Fairy, Rawheadandbloodybones, Nellie Longarms, Jennie Greenteeth, Black Annis, Thrumpins.13 These are the figures who produce the play’s deeply sedimented temporality, since they derive from “the olden days,” released now by the disastrous course of human action to seek their revenges on the humans who have wrecked their habitats. Johnny Squarefoot, for example, in some stories came from the race of giants that built Stonehenge and other stone circles throughout England and Ireland. The Skriker herself is ancient. She says: “I am an ancient fairy, I am hundreds of years old as you people would work it out” (257). But she also says, “You people are killing me, do you know that? I am sick, I am a sick old woman,” and in the wonderful fractured Joycean language she sometimes employs she intimates what has become of the damaged earth: “Dry as dustpans, foul as shitpandemonium. Poison in the food chain saw massacre” (256, 271). The Skriker and the other folklore figures who infiltrate the present scene are temporally present when Josie and Lily are speaking, hinting at A Time I N T E RV E N T I O N I S T T H E AT E R

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Before, even as the Skriker evokes an apocalyptic Time to Come. The Now of performance encompasses all three. The history of the play’s folklore figures, probably better known to British than to American audiences, suggests the cataclysmic disruption of an ancient balance and symbiosis between man and nature, now completely destroyed.14 Some of these creatures, like the brownies, were believed once to have inhabited houses and at night helped with chores and household tasks in exchange for a small bit of honey, porridge, or milk. Some families left seats for them by the fire. Other characters, like Jennie Greenteeth, with green skin, long teeth and hair, were more malign. Living in rivers, they pulled children or the elderly to their deaths. Most of the folklore figures are part of stories that suggest their potential to harm humans who cross them or trespass on their territory: rivers, caves, dark cupboards. Spriggans, for example, guard buried treasure, but they can steal children and leave changelings in their places.Yallerybrown can grant wishes but turns vicious if the conditions set on the wishing process are violated. In short, these figures always hint at the danger they can pose to humans at the same time that many of them also do chores for humans, grant wishes, and cohabit without consequence. Churchill’s great theatrical innovation is to have these figures share a stage with the two human characters from the temporal present. The folklore creatures bring with them the mystery and ancient terror of a race of half-forgotten creatures now bent solely on malice. Wounded, they will wound, the Skriker being only the most obvious case in point. How these creatures are to be embodied challenges actors. For the initial production Churchill worked closely with a dance company Second Stride and the choreographer Ian Spink, with whom she had done several other shows.15 In her introduction to the volume of plays in which The Skriker is contained, however, Churchill says that “the movement will be developed differently in each production,” leaving it up to the director and performers to imagine a choreography, a gestural template, a musical accompaniment, and a series of costume and make-up choices that will capture the dark subtext that the fairies represent.16 This can be done in a number of ways: by having the folklore characters wear masks that underscore their difference from the two human characters (the kelpie, for example, is a horse spirit); by having the folktale figures move slowly but looking always at the human characters in their midst, circling them, menacing them, while the humans remain oblivious; by [ 338 ]

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having the nonhuman characters maimed or wounded themselves, limping from the effects of blows, dragging a limb, or wearing a mask to filter toxic air. Churchill, believing always that actors and performance troupes should have a major say in realizing her texts theatrically, does not specify exactly how her creatures should look and move the many times they are on stage. This feminist practice of inclusion allows the actors to draw on their own repertories of embodied gesture and movement to create a mutually-agreed upon choreography for the performance. The one exception is the scene in the underworld where Josie is taken by the Skriker. Churchill describes in some detail how the scene should look: Light, music, long table with feast, lavishly dressed people and creatures, such as YALLERY BROWN, NELLIE LONGARMS, JENNY GREENTEETH,THE KEPLIE, BLACK DOG, RAWHEADANDBLOODYBONES, THE RADIANT BOY, JIMMY SQUAREFOOT, BLACK ANNIS (with a blue face and one eye). It looks wonderful except that it is all Glamour and here and there it is not working—some of the food is twigs, leaves, beetles. Some of the clothes are rags, some of the beautiful people have a claw hand or hideous face. (268–69) Taking a clue from this stage direction, I suggest that an effective way to present the folklore characters would be have them embody, in their motions and their persons, a mixture of beauty and damage. For example, the kelpie, who appears on stage at numerous points, enacts a wordless drama of its own. He appears, part man and part horse, in the hospital where Josie is first confined, saying nothing but departing when the scene is over. Later he appears in a bar scene where he drinks with a woman. Still later, “The WOMAN gets on the KELPIE’S back and rides off” (259). Eventually, the kelpie appears in the underworld scene. Back on earth “The KELPIE and the WOMAN who rode off on his back stroll as lovers” (273). Later they dance with other couples before we see “KELPIE with the body of WOMAN who went away with him” (285). Finally we see “The KELPIE cuts up the woman’s body” (285). The last thing we hear of the kelpie is that it rushes wildly across the stage in the company of Johnny Squarefoot and Rawheadandbloodybones. In this sequence, performance mobilizes the bodily repertoire of courtship and amatory passion until it gives way to gestures of extreme violence. The kelpie, perhaps with an axe in his horse’s head or a maimed leg, can I N T E RV E N T I O N I S T T H E AT E R

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be nonetheless seductive, a spectacle of strangeness that has the glamour of which Churchill speaks. Yet, like the Striker herself, he is damaged, and finally malevolent. His wordless presence conjures up the ancient world from which he emanates but which has been poisoned at its root. The eeriness of the play’s dramaturgy depends on the gap between the ordinaryseeming contemporary world that the girls inhabit and the ancient fairy world that surrounds them, bringing about a clash of temporalities that reveals the precariousness of the human situation. The Skriker is a known enemy, but broader forces have been unleashed of which the Skriker is but the symptom and outward sign. Poison in the food chain has unleashed retribution and violence without end, making The Skriker one of Churchill’s grimmest plays.17 Though often attractive, the two human figures, Josie and Lily, end up without their children and without each other, abused by a cruel spirit they cannot control. The future belongs only to a deformed girl and to the wild rushing of the folklore creatures. One looks for an alternative within the performance text, and only the dance affords a glimmer of a possibility. There are several scenes of dancing in the play, including the one in which the kelpie dances with the woman along with other figures like Nellie Longarms and Johnny Squarefoot.There is no textual indication if this dancing is beautiful or disordered, but in the case of the kelpie, it precedes his murder of his dance partner. In keeping with the stage direction accompanying the underworld banquet, I imagine the group dance that included the kelpie shows signs both of beauty and disorder or deformity, harmony threatened by menace. One character, however, simply called The Passerby, stands out as somewhat different. At least ten stage directions indicate that “The PASSERBY is still dancing.” He or she dances while Josie and Lily struggle with the Skriker, while the kelpie murders his partner, while the underworld figures feast and fight, and through nearly every scene of the play. There is no indication that the Passerby ever interacts with any other figures. He or she does not join the group dance with the kelpie. In performance this figure might embody an impulse toward harmony and beauty that has not yet been extinguished but that persists only through a radical severance from the other human characters or from entanglements with the folklore figures. In the Public Theater production of 1996, directed by Mark Wing Davey, in which the choreographer Ian Spink was replaced by Sara Rudner, the role of the Passerby was played by Jodi Melnick. In a recent email exchange, Rudner and Melnick explained that in that production the Passerby was an isolated [ 340 ]

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Figure 19.3 Dancer Jodi Melnick as The Passerby dances by herself in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of The Skriker, 1996. Source: Photographer Unknown. From the private Archives of Marina Draghici.

and therefore vulnerable figure, always on the edge of the central action. Their vision was of a Passerby in constant motion, “as if her stoppage of movement meant death.”18 They describe her movement as a “sign of hope” showing “how magical it was to be enchanted, to be given the gift of movement” and employed a mixture of dance forms to express this embodied freedom.19 In performance, then, there existed the constant possibility of a counterpoint between the damaged movement of wounded creatures and the fragile beauty of the free-floating Passerby. The audience, its attention divided, is not entirely focused on the unfolding script of catastrophe but is invited to imagine another script, another future. The end of the play, however, shatters the utopian possibility that I am suggesting could be expressed in the Passerby’s dancing. Lily, released from the underworld after decades have passed, comes upon the Skriker in the person of the old and unsightly woman she was in the play’s opening monologue, but she is now accompanied by the deformed child that may be Lily’s granddaughter. Lily is aghast, demoralized, and hungry. The Old Woman holds out food, the taking of which will put Lily once more in I N T E RV E N T I O N I S T T H E AT E R

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the Skriker’s power, and Lily reaches for it. At that moment “The PASSERBY stops dancing,” and the play ends (291). It is as if the malevolent power of the Skriker has extinguished the possibility of reversing the damage that humans have wrought and the vengeance that the fairy world is exacting for that history of slow and inexorable violence. While Fen ends with Mae singing and Nell striding on stilts, The Skriker ends with the cessation of the persistent movement of the Passerby.20 This is a grim ending, but the totality of this multitemporal play with its juxtaposition of damage and beauty also allows for the possibility of remembering/creating a different mode of embodiment in a radically different world from that evoked by the Skriker herself. Churchill does not seem optimistic here about humanity’s capacity to right the ship, but by creating The Passerby she keeps the possibility of beauty alive for all but the final moment of the performance. In Fen and The Skriker Churchill, an unremittingly experimental dramatist, uses the immediacy of theatrical performance to suggest the long history of slow violence that leads to present emiseration and environmental catastrophe. In both, she punctures the realistic foreground of the action with figures from another temporality, either that of the many generations of workers who have faced exploitation on the East Anglia fens or, in The Skriker, that of the spirit creatures from the Old Times whom modernity has reduced to myth and legend but whose persistence in the present of the play’s world hints at the revenge of disregarded gods. The Skriker is an especially challenging play, written partly in a fractured language that bodies forth the damage done to humanity in the loss of grammatical coherence and linguistic intelligibility.21 Like so much else in the play, language teeters on the edge of breakdown. In performance, however, the most striking effects may arise from the movement of bodies as creatures of menace and strangeness encircle the beleaguered and oblivious human duo, foretelling their destruction and the coming of a world of silence and sterility, the beauty of the dance utterly stilled. Churchill’s performance practice mobilizes bodies to evoke the suffering and the damage that humans over the longue durée of history have inflicted on one another and on the earth, and sometimes to hint at other, more utopian life forms and ways of being. Churchill’s is primarily, however, a feminist dramaturgy of alarm, using forms of degraded and damaged embodiment—especially of women, children, mothers—to intervene in the audience’s blindness to the histories of harm in which it is inescapably entangled. [ 342 ]

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Notes 1. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 2. Taylor opposes these to written forms of knowledge contained in the archive. See Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 20. 3. The play is rooted in the history of the fens and attempts to capture the texture of lived experience in the region. An account of the original East Anglia tour of the play indicates just how extensively Churchill and her actors conducted research on fen life. Churchill first called the play Rural Women and drew material from Mary Chamberlain’s book Fenwomen, from the Essex Oral History Sound Archive, and from a two-week workshop conducted in Upwell in 1982 that involved local people who talked with the cast about their work and personal lives. See “A Report on the Workshop and Tour of East Anglia of Caryl Churchill’s play, Fen,” University of California at Davis, Special Collections, Shields Library, D-035. 4. All references to Fen are taken from Caryl Churchill, Caryl Churchill: Plays 2 (London: Methuen Drama, 1990), here at page 147. 5. This list of possible female occupations, which goes on for quite a bit longer in the script, is drawn directly from Mary Chamberlain’s book, Fenwomen, excerpts from which were published in the program at the play’s 1983 premiere at the Essex University Theatre. Joint Stock Theatre Group Archives, 1973–91, Special Collections, Shields Library, University of California, Davis (Collection Number D-035). I am grateful to my research assistant, Seth Williams, for visiting the Davis archives and finding the material referenced here. 6. For a discussion of women’s labor in this play and in Top Girls, see Sian Adiseshiah, Churchill’s Socialism: Political Resistance in the Plays of Caryl Churchill (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 133–63. 7. In Precarious Life:The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London:Verso, 2004), Judith Butler calls attention to lives that, whether because they represent ideological otherness or simply because they are too humble for the violence directed against them to matter, go unnoticed and unmourned. Churchill focuses on the latter in Fen. 8. For a suggestive discussion of Churchill’s sustained attention to ecological crisis that also discusses possible ways to interpret this striking gesture of ironing the field, see Sheila Rabillard, “On Caryl Churchill’s Ecological Drama: Right To Poison the Wasps?” in The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill, ed. Elaine Aston and Elin Diamond (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 88–104, at 92. I N T E RV E N T I O N I S T T H E AT E R

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9. See Katherine Perrault, “Beyond the Patriarchy: Feminism and the Chaos of Creativity,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 17, no. 1 (2002): 45–67, esp. 49. 10. All references to The Skriker come from Caryl Churchill Plays 3 (London: Nick Hern, 1998), here at page 243. 11. For a good discussion of the concept of damage in the play see Elaine Aston, Caryl Churchill, 2nd ed. (Plymouth: Northcote House, 2001), 96–102. 12. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962; repr., New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002). 13. The program for the 1996 production of The Skriker at the Public Theater in New York City contains a partial glossary of the fairies mentioned in the play. The list is drawn from Katherine Briggs’s Encyclopedia of Fairies and her Folktales of England. The program is found at the Billy Rose Theatre Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (T-PRG [The Skriker (Churchill)]). In her “translator’s notes” also found in the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the NYPL (T-MSS 1993–028), Churchill provides extensive annotations about the fairies, their damaged condition, and their vengeful intentions toward the human world. 14. For a general discussion of the play’s mythic landscape see Amelia Howe Kritzer, “Damaged Myth in Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker,” in Verna Foster, Dramatic Revisions of Myths, Fairy Tales and Legends: Essays on Recent Plays (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), 112–23. 15. Libby Worth discusses Churchill’s interest in working with dancers and choreographers as a way of realizing the fully embodied possibilities of drama. See “On Text and Dance: New Questions and New Forms,” in The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill, ed. Elaine Aston and Elin Diamond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 71–87. 16. Churchill, The Skriker, viii. 17. For the implicit link between global capitalism and the destruction of the environment that is implied in this play see my essay, Jean E. Howard, “On Owning and Owing: Caryl Churchill and the Nightmare of Capital,” in The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill, ed. Elaine Aston and Elin Diamond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 36–51. See also Candace Amich, “Bringing the Global Home: The Commitment of Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker,” Modern Drama 50, no. 3 (2007): 394–413. 18. I am grateful to my research assistant, Seth Williams, for putting me in contact with Sara Rudner and Jodi Melnick who shared with me in an email of June 25, 2012, their recollections of the Public Theater production and their realization of the Passerby’s part. 19. Rudner and Melnick, email message. Rudner and Melnick’s recount that the plan was for the Passerby to be in constant motion for the entire two hours of the performance, and this was achieved in the dress rehearsal. However, George C. Wolfe, the then head of the Public Theater, found the Passerby too distracting [ 344 ]

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and subsequent performances cut the figure’s time on stage by more than half, a sign of the challenge of merging the demanding text of the play with the sustained dance sequences that were meant to be integral to it. 20. In “The Dramatization of Futureless Worlds: Caryl Churchill’s Ecological Dystopias” in Dystopia(n) Matters: On the Page, On Screen, On Stage, ed. Fatima Vierira (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 294–305, Sian Adiseshiah argues that the shutting down of the Passerby’s dancing signals the play’s dystopian view of the future (296). 21. In an interview with Nicholas Wright given in 1994 on the occasion of the world premiere of The Skriker at the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain, Churchill said that she wanted the Skriker to have a distinctive stage presence, particularly “a damaged way of speaking, so that it couldn’t entirely hold its train of thought.” New York Shakespeare Festival records, Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library (T-Mss 1993-028). Ironically, the linguistic creativity that results from the Skriker’s almost Joycean mode of speech suggests not only the breakdown of “normal” speech but the possibility of forging new kinds of sense and new kinds of knowledge outside the deadly norms of official interactions. “Damaged speech” is thus a further means of wrenching the audience away from its complacency and plunging it into a confusion from which might spring a new sense of the interconnections between actions and their unforeseen consequences.

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CH A P T E R X X

Making Memory Patricia Ariza’s and Teresa Ralli’s Antígonas L E T I C I A RO B L E S - M O R E N O

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n Peruvian and Colombian sociopolitical contexts of conflict, theater and performance have been especially prominent forms of political critique. In Peru, Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani has performed since 1971, questioning the sociopolitical inequalities rooted in Peruvian history. In Colombia,Teatro La Candelaria has fostered experimental theater that combines aesthetic research and an awareness of the social and political conflicts the country has suffered since 1966. Both theater groups have staged versions of Antigone, highlighting Antigone’s mourning and her rebellious act against a dictator in ways that connect the theatrical stage and the social arena. In addition to participating in these groups in their countries, theater artists Teresa Ralli in Peru and Patricia Ariza in Colombia are founding members of grupos de creación colectiva, which develop theater through collaborative work, both within the group and in dialogue with civil society groups.Their respective Antígonas mobilize memory by providing shared spaces where the intimate and the public come together to transform mourning into acts of resistance to tyranny. Their performances make memories of loss less individual and more likely to lead to public action: they are an invitation to overcome vulnerability through collective action. By analyzing different interpretations of Antigone by Grupo Yuyachkani and Teatro La Candelaria, this essay will explore how theater and performance use embodied memory and the effects of mourning to politically intervene in the public sphere.1 Antigone’s political force reemerges [ 346 ]

in every reinvention of this piece and its staging of protest and resistance. The story of a woman who at great cost to herself defies a tyrant to bury her brother’s body has been appropriated by performers, philosophers, and activists across the globe as a resource for thinking about resistance, mourning, and the duties owed to the dead in conditions of extreme duress. The Latin American Antígonas that I am examining take their place in this transnational network of discourse and performance that uses the  figure of Antigone to define the limits of state power and to demonstrate the potential of individual and collective resistance. In both cases, a feminist theater practice provides occasions for people to come together to remember very specific crimes and to energize resistance both within and outside the theater.2 Theater and performance gather people together to establish relational connections. They work from and through the body to share, activate, and transmit cultural memory. These performances of Antigone engender shared memories through the connection among bodies on and off stage, actively cooperating in the production of a unique shared experience that bridges the individual and the collective. At the same time, the relationships forged through performance help us to understand how summoning people out of suffering in isolation and silence can weave a social world of networks that resists and defies authoritarian regimes.

Antígona in Peru Between 1980 and 2000, Peru suffered a bloody internal war that left more than 60,000 civilians dead or disappeared. Almost twenty years after the supposed ending of this war, thousands of people continue to be missing. Their relatives maintain hope that their right to mourn their loved ones may still be exercised and that the perpetrators will face trial. In 2001, the transitional government of President Valentín Paniagua established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to examine abuses committed between 1980 and 2000. The TRC presented its Final Report in 2003, identifying Sendero Luminoso, “Shining Path,” as a subversive and terrorist group, and the major perpetrator of human rights violations. However, the TRC also reported that the Peruvian Armed Forces—and therefore, the Peruvian state—were responsible for the torture, murder, and disappearance of thousands of civilians. M A K I N G M E M O RY

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In the midst of this internal armed conflict, Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, working as a collective, were staging their socially engaged plays throughout the country and internationally. Given that the state was responsible for the disappearance of corpses that never had a proper burial, it was only a matter of time before Teresa Ralli, founding member of Yuyachkani, saw the necessity to retell Antigone’s story. After a long and difficult collaborative process, Ralli delivered a solo performance in 2000, lending her own body to all the characters. Yuyachkani’s Antígona is circular: the first image on the empty stage is a chair that lies on the floor, waiting to be brought to life. A female character comes to the stage holding a box that will remain on a corner of the stage. The woman caresses the chair, and sits down, starting to tell the story of a war and its aftermath, speaking from the present, from the first day of peace. The narrator then opens the stage to the different characters that are part of Antigone (Creon, Hemon, Tiresias, Antigone herself)—all of them embodied by the same actress. The chair becomes Creon’s throne, Antigone’s tomb, Polynices’s corpse—all entities animated by the actions taking place on stage. When the story has been told and its deaths enacted, the narrator reveals her identity: she is Ismene, the sister who was paralyzed by fear. The box that she brought to the stage contains the mortuary mask for her brother Polynices, and it is this mask that she reveals to the audience to perform a belated funerary ritual. Teresa Ralli,Yuyachkani’s director Miguel Rubio, and José Watanabe, the Peruvian poet who was brought in to write the text, decided to make Ismene the one who narrates her family’s story because traditionally Ismene is the bystander to the action. Ralli recalls that they felt that the atrocities of state terror were so evident and the victims so numerous, that civil society had to confront its own silence and ask “where was I when my brothers and sisters were being tortured and murdered?” They recognized that it was urgent for citizens to acknowledge that those who don’t act are also affecting society with their inaction. At the end of the piece, Ismene recognizes herself, honors her sister’s action, and admits what she should have done. Her final words are: From your exalted kingdom ask Polynices to forgive me for not performing this task at the proper time. I was frightened by the scowling face of the king. And tell him how great my punishment is: to remember your act every day—a torture and shame for me.3 [ 348 ]

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Antigone offers a model of resistance that inspires Ismene to action.Though belated and rooted in shame, what Ismene does is still meaningful. Antigone’s defiant burial of her brother is relived in the body of her sister; moreover, through a potentially expansive network of shared memory, that defiant gesture of resistance can be relived in the body of anyone who reenacts it. When Ismene finally performs the funerary ritual for Polynices, she is also addressing the ones who survived the war and did nothing to stop it. In 2001, this performance was staged in the Andean town of Huanta, Ayacucho, to accompany the TRC’s quest for testimonios of survivors after twenty years of armed internal conflict. By invoking characters from a story (and a history) of authoritarianism and familial loss, Ralli reclaimed the cultural memory of Peru’s immediate past and acts of both resistance and complicity therein. In “Fragments of Memory,” Ralli recounts that Antígona emerged from three sources of inspiration.4 The first was Sophocles’s classic, a play that had become an obsession for Ralli. She brought the proposal to stage this piece to the director Miguel Rubio and the group. Rubio then asked Ralli to prepare a lecture on the Greek classic text and the Labdacides lineage.

Figure 20.1 Teresa Ralli performs Antígona in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas (2013). Source: Lorie Novak. M A K I N G M E M O RY

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Ralli sat on a chair to tell this story to her fellow members in Yuyachkani and thus developed the iconic image referred to earlier of a woman sitting alone on stage telling a story. She had started the journey that would end with her innovative embodiment of the Narrator-Ismene. This same chair would later be used by different women who had a close relationship with Yuyachkani and who had participated in theater and self-esteem workshops organized by the group. In Disassembling Antigone, a staged work demonstration, Ralli recollects the stories and feelings that these women shared with her: as relatives of the citizens disappeared during the Peruvian armed internal conflict—these women were the play’s second source of inspiration. They had struggled and continue to struggle for justice, wanting to know where their sons, brothers, and husbands are, or at least where their corpses are, seeking the closure they expect from having the right to perform funeral rites for their loved ones. Having suffered insults, humiliation, and even accusations of being terrorists, these courageous and determined women were also aware of their vulnerability and fragility. They often felt alone. At the same time, in sharing mourning and rebellion, they emerged as a collective capable of transforming individual pain into an interpersonal and social force. Recognizing their vulnerability, they found that affective connections with other women strengthened their demands for justice. As Ralli narrates in Disassembling Antigone, towards the end of the creative process, Ralli, Rubio, and Watanabe decided that the image of that woman alone on stage, narrating her story sitting in a chair, was the image that connected each of those women and that stage to Peru’s chaotic and potentially isolating reality. That chaotic reality is related to the third and final source of inspiration for the piece: the internal armed conflict. Even now the Peruvian desaparecidos remain missing, and their relatives are still waiting for justice. Each woman is still waiting for the opportunity to perform the mourning ritual for her relatives—to repeat Antigone’s gesture. In every performance, Teresa Ralli summons each of those women through her body, repeating, or, as I will argue below, quoting their gestures. Antigone’s defining action is to perform the funeral ritual for her brother that is her duty as a sister; moreover, the reiteration of these funeral gestures constructs her role as a sister. In this sense, one can argue that such reiterated performative gestures reappearing again and again since ancient times make the social. If we ask what performance does, then, the answer will take us beyond the stage and beyond the walls of a theatrical space. Performance [ 350 ]

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constructs worlds: in the case of Antigone, from Sophocles to Yuyachkani, the funerary ritual honors Polynices but, just as importantly, it defines Antigone. And beyond her, the familial gestures that we perform define us as brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers. Every time we reiterate a gesture we install ourselves within the social, while operating from our own contingency. In contrast, if Antigone is (or, better said, becomes) the sister who honored her brother, Ismene denies herself the role of sister when she does not join the ritual. Ismene only recovers herself within the belated gesture that honors both Polynices and Antigone. Although this belatedness tortures and shames her, it also rescues her and reinstates her within the social. As Diana Taylor has suggested: “. . . we can re-contextualize, re-signify, react, defy, parody, perform, and re-perform with difference. That is the promise of performance—as an aesthetic act and as a political intervention.”5 The piece Antígona invites us, above all, to recognize ourselves in Ismene as subjects who have the opportunity to perform actions that reinstate us within a society as brothers and sisters of those who are still waiting for justice. The familiarity of the familial relations functions as a space from which an open call—that can be either received or rejected—emerges. It is an invitation not to forget, and not to forget ourselves. Yuyachkani’s work engages with Peruvian society as the voices and bodies that stubbornly repeat gestures that make the world we inhabit. The social is built upon a series of acts of belonging, caring, and sharing that are reiterated again and again—a series of repetitions that happen on and off stage. Antigone chooses death because not performing the funeral ritual for Polynices would erase her sister-being. She dies yet she remains; or, better said, in dying she becomes what she is: “Remember my name—/ one day I’ll be known as the sister who never forsook / her brother: / My name is Antigone.”6 The figure of Antigone has inspired projects that intertwine art and activism, and it has been a nodal point for theoretical analyses that unpack the philosophical and political potential of mourning. However, unlinking Antigone’s words from her acts, as some readers have done, may minimize the transformative force of her actions. Performance and “artivism,” in contrast, bring the body to the forefront, forcing audiences to recognize the nuances that arise from the interplay between acts and words.7 Accordingly, Yuyachkani’s performance foregrounds Antigone’s rebellious act—and thus her significance in the spheres of the political and the social—beyond the realm of language. M A K I N G M E M O RY

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Although understanding the centrality of Antigone’s acts, Judith Butler’s reading, for example, instates her claim as a reassertion of the law of kinship, which challenges the symbolic order represented by Creon.8 In Lacanian terms, the Law of the Father that prohibits incest is at the base of the symbolic, and thus it is the condition of possibility of the social. For Lacan, Antigone’s desire goes beyond the limits of the human and approaches the atrocious, which cannot be subsumed under the structures of the symbolic: it is an excess (Atè) that is rendered incomprehensible. However, if we center our analysis on her actions and on the fact that she is being embodied by a performer, we can read the Lacanian excess as a return to the body. Antigone denies and reaffirms herself by playing the game of language with Creon: by challenging his Law with her claim. But this challenge is not only verbal but also—and most importantly—an action. Performing the mourning ritual for Polynices establishes the moment when Antigone inhabits excess: her body fully embraces her lineage. In this sense, even though she can still be read within the terms of the Lacanian symbolic, it is her body that confers political force upon her, which makes her meaningful in the 2000s in Peru. As Lacan states, “Antigone perpetuates, eternalizes, immortalizes that Atè,” that excess which places her in the realm of the in-between, where the symbolic and the Real become blurred.9 Accordingly, performance brings together the realms of the symbolic and the Real: performing a mourning ritual is neither a representation nor a not-representation. By blurring these spheres, performance gives the body the central place it has in politics. Antigone’s ultimate rebellious act is to shatter the order of things: her embodied action is a glitch in the sociosymbolic fabric. From the very moment she approaches Polynices’s corpse and covers it with dust, Antigone is neither dead nor alive. By both affirming and sacrificing herself, she inhabits that excess from which something is always missing. And in so doing, she does what a rebel does: she unsettles the known world and allows for the imagining of other possibilities. This is why she is condemned, and this is why she remains—in Yuyachkani’s vision—in her sister Ismene’s persistent presence and future actions. Antigone’s ambiguous role unsettles power and offers visions of rebellion. In times of authoritarianism and social injustice, her contemporaneity is compelling. Jacques Rancière brings up her name in discussing what he calls the “ethical turn” that affects political and artistic practices today— a time when moral judgment bows to constraining law. From here, such categories as “axis of evil,” “infinite justice,” and “war on terror” put in [ 352 ]

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motion a cyclical narrative of infinite evil, justice, and redemption. For Rancière, Antigone “is not the heroine of human rights that was created by the modern democratic piety. She is rather the terrorist, the witness of the secret terror at the basis of the social order.”10 This statement, however resonant in our current moment that seems caught in an endless spiral of violence, does not recognize how heavily charged the term “terrorist” is in the context of the internal armed conflict in Peru—and also the varying implications that this word might have in other contemporary contexts. Although it is true that terror is now more than ever ingrained at the basis of the social order, there is a gap between being the terrorist—defined by performing acts of terror—and being the witness of terror. In the period spanning 1980–2000 in Peru, being marked as a “terruco” or “terruca”—a terrorist—would mean the difference between life and death. As Jo-Marie Burt explains in her research on the use of fear in Peru during the years of violence, especially during the government of Alberto Fujimori, thousands of Peruvian civilians were trapped in the crossfire between Shining Path and the federal armed forces. A minimal gesture of resistance would place a peasant on the side of the subversive forces; as Burt points out: “If you speak, you are a terrorist.”11 Following Rancière, we can see Antigone’s defiance as yet another act within the infinite cycle of terror that spins out of control. It is undeniable that when Antigone buries Polynices, she is doomed as another victim of the cycle of evil. However, she is not a “terrorist” like the ones who install and instigate terror—both from the side of the state and from the attacks on the foundations of the system. She is rather the sister of terror, the one tied to the criminal by links of kinship. She knows that burying Polynices will bring more violence—in this case, against herself—but she knows as well that her act makes her a sister, gives her an identity within that system of violence, and so this act gives her a place in the social fabric. Her beingsister seems to sum up both Lacan’s and Butler’s formulations since she is a sister by virtue of her family’s fate as daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, and she is also a sister through the acts she performs. Antigone’s ambiguous position, or excess, has been read by Lacan and Butler as desire, a sexual desire or death desire. However, by focusing on the force that drives her, one can argue that they fail to see her as a driving force. In Yuyachkani’s version, she does things and also makes things happen: her defiant act inspires Ismene. In response to Rancière, Ismene would be the possibility of breaking the cycle of evil: she is the one who remains, the one M A K I N G M E M O RY

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who will not be punished, the survivor who will perform the burial, and, finally, will bring redemption to herself and her family.

Antígona in Colombia Performance and theater stubbornly persist in enacting gestures of defiance in spite of being immersed in a cycle of evil. Violence reiterates gestures of terror, it is true, but against this, reiterated gestures of belonging, kinship, caring, and rebellion can be the response to that violence, and they can trouble authoritarianism. The figures of Antigone and Ismene represent the present and the future of resistance against terror and violence. They are also relational expressions of the role of gendered grief in Latin American society. If violence and terror crippled Peru in the 1980s and 1990s, violence and terror have defined the functioning of Colombia for decades. And in the labors of resisting violence and keeping memory alive as a response to corrupt governments, the work of Teatro La Candelaria is pivotal, particularly the work of one of its founders and its current leader, Patricia Ariza. Teatro La Candelaria was founded in 1966 by a group of independent artists and intellectuals who accompanied director Santiago García in his desire to create an independent political theater. Since its inception, La Candelaria’s project included experimentation and innovation on stage, searching for a national dramaturgy that would resonate with popular audiences.The group members were aware of their role as cultural agents and their commitment to Colombian society. By the beginning of the 1970s, La Candelaria started exploring collective work as a strategy for originating plays that addressed the acute social and political problems of their society. Among these theater creators, Patricia Ariza is one of the most committed to a cultura de paz (culture of peace) within Colombian society. Her tireless work as an artivist is crucial to understanding theater and performance as agents of social change. Patricia Ariza was the writer and director of La Candelaria’s Antígona (2006), a piece that multiplies Antigones and Ismenes on stage, in the same way that la violencia in Colombia unleashed countless variations of death and disappearance. When Patricia Ariza visited the region of Urabá, she talked to a group of women who had not been able to bury their husbands, killed or disappeared by the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) or the paramilitary AUC (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia). Departing from Sophocles’s text as a material support, Ariza maintains the [ 354 ]

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key elements of the story to ground a new version that speaks to these urgent local issues related to Colombia. As a playwright, she brings together elements of the classic Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus, adding more figures like the vengeful Erinyes to build a piece that is a call to resistance, a statement against oblivion, and a testimony to the power of sisterhood. The tyrant, Creon, appears on stage on a mobile throne, amplifying his voice and his decrees through a microphone. He is a decrepit old man, and while theatrical prosthetics enlarge his bodily presence on stage, they also dehumanize his power. In contrast, the chorus, which expresses the people’s voice, appears masked behind a curtain. Their ghostly presence, paradoxically, overcomes Creon’s power by channeling the chants of the women who might have been condemned to death but were never silenced. Antigone and Ismene perform as a female collective force. Ariza presents three Antigones and two Ismenes in constant struggle between doing and not doing. Nohora Ayala, Fanny Baena, and Shirley Martínez embody a fierce and rebellious Antigone, whereas Nohora González’s and Alexandra Escobar’s Ismenes are shy and afraid but attentive to Antigone’s actions. While the Antigones’ clothing features leather and metal accents, the Ismenes’ dresses are silken and meant by convention to project the innocence of youth. However, as the piece advances, these five female bodies get closer to each other through their movements and their voices. All of them come together in chants of defiance against the tyrant who would simplistically categorize them as “women.” Each performer embodies a different claim. Fused together by either fear or bravery, they embody variations of the same figure: the active sister and the one paralyzed by fear. Ariza’s decision to multiply Antigone and Ismene on stage gives new power to the idea of Antigone as the figure who slips between theater and the social. When revealing her intention to defy Creon and to bury Polynices, the three Antigones’ voices shift grammatically from the use of the first person singular to the plural. Antigone(s) tells Ismene(s): “Creon has ordered our brother Polynices to remain unburied on the edge of the road, forbidding all of us from mourning his memory [. . .] we will not be able to cry for him nor bury him.”12 Antigone, in this piece, is a “we,” more specifically, a feminine “we”—todas. Echoing international demands for human rights, the Antigones constitute a community of mourners who risk their lives confronting an authoritative masculine power.13 The two Ismenes, in turn, voice the traditional role assigned to women by a patriarchal society: “We women are not made to fight against the Law.”14 M A K I N G M E M O RY

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Ismene’s fragility underlines the fear that has been imposed upon society by authoritarianism, where being a woman means to be vulnerable, even in the company of other women. Teresa Ralli had already evoked this vulnerability, embodied in the fragility of a woman sitting by herself on stage. However, in both La Candelaria and Yuyachkani’s renditions of Antigone, the character on stage is not alone because she either summons a community of mourning women—in Yuyachkani’s case—or she is part of a community of mourning women, as occurs in the multiplication of Antigones and Ismenes in Ariza’s version. In both cases, female vulnerability is exposed and challenged at the same time. Women’s presence on stage forces us to question how a collective force overcomes fragility. Teresa Ralli might be alone on stage, but she is quoting the gestures of the women who inspired her Antigone. Indeed, quotation is at the basis of any performance work, since it requires a sequence of actions reinstated time and again. What Richard Schechner has called “restored behavior” highlights the reiteration of a behavior that “can be stored, transmitted, manipulated, transformed. The performers get in touch with, recover, remember, or even invent these strips of behavior and then rebehave according to these strips. . . .”15 In both performances, Antigone chooses to quote the funerary ritual that honors her brother—a performance that condemns and immortalizes her at the same time. Ismene, in turn, reveals an affective component in the belated act of quoting her sister’s behavior: she has been driven by shame and guilt, which ultimately pushes her to perform as her sister before her. This happens either by finally completing Polynices’s funerary ritual, in Ralli’s work, or by joining Antigone’s voice of protest, as in Ariza’s version. Acting through contagion, placing Ismene in-between what she is afraid and unwilling to do and what she is compelled to do, Antigone spreads and generates new acts of defiance. This is Antigone’s gift: an act contagious enough to be quoted again and again, no matter where or when, in different struggles for justice from different positionalities. Either as an individual woman or as a collective of women, Antigone—and, by contagion and quotation, Ismene—embodies the unsubordinated and is a monstrous rebel who must be crushed by those who exercise power. The multiplication of Antigones and Ismenes opens relational ties to women’s struggles and, by extension, to common struggles fought by all those who have been forgotten and silenced, generating networks of resistance. Although Ralli and Ariza offer different stagings that seem to contrast bodily isolation versus multiplication, both performances [ 356 ]

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create a similar effect: to connect individual bodies with their communities, giving their actions a collective force. Accordingly, the confrontation between Creon and Antigone acquires another layer of meaning, since the image on stage clearly shows the dictator trying to subjugate an insubordinate community of women. This directly refers to what has occurred with great frequency in the past decades in different parts of the Americas: groups of women demanding justice from their governments. In Ariza’s play, Ismene finally joins Antigone and with arms raised they chant softly but firmly and look at Creon defiantly. Moreover, this version of Antígona brings the feminine deities of vengeance to the stage. These Erinyes voice anger towards Creon.16 In turn, the Chorus voices judgment in the play, talking to Ismene: “No good comes from obedience born of forgetfulness. Ismene, do not stop listening to Antigone’s voice; she is telling you what is just and right.”17 Again, Ismene appears as the one who is meant to carry Antigone’s legacy: the one who will survive to finish what her sister started. If Antigone is the rebel and the martyr who gets killed because of her rebellion, her act should resonate with the ones who remain—the ones who will quote her gesture. At the end of the play, Tiresias calls to action the witness of Antigone’s tragedy: “Silence and fear have been the greatest accomplices of this tragedy. Come! Come out and come to see once and for all the ruins of this war!”18 In 2006 Colombia, these words were not meant to be contained within the four walls of the theatrical stage. The country has been bleeding from political violence since the mid-twentieth century—enduring confrontations between the government and the FARC; massacres from either the side of state-sponsored terror or the drug cartels; and the displacement of entire communities of Colombians who had to abandon their lands so as not to be killed. The word “war” carried a present meaning. Colombia, it has been said, has been immersed in an interminable war. If the Narrator/ Ismene of Yuyachkani’s piece talks from a present that witnesses “the first day of peace,” La Candelaria’s Ismene survives to be part of a society that is still at war. Tiresias’s calls to “see” what is happening: to acknowledge that which is happening on stage mirrors what was happening in the streets of Colombia in 2006.19 Traditionally the character of Antigone is constrained neither by human laws nor by the walls of a theater. In one of the reinventions of La Candelaria’s Antígona, the three Antigones accompanied a public acción (una intervención en espacio público), and performed with the mothers, sisters, daughters, M A K I N G M E M O RY

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and relatives of the disappeared by la violencia in Colombia. As I noted above, Ariza directed the acción ¿Dónde están?: Memoria viva. Mujeres en la Plaza in the Plaza de Bolívar, in downtown Bogotá, within the frame of the 7th Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics in 2009. The question that the women gathered in the Plaza asked, “Where are they?” (¿Dónde están?), reverberated in every corner of the public square. In the original onstage piece, several actresses gave voice and presence to Antigone and Ismene, who were one and multiple at the same time. Mirroring this theatrical strategy, hundreds of Colombian women performed in the heart of the city of Bogotá and demanded justice as if they were one. Grief and memory concentrated and expanded; they traveled through bodies and became a shared experience. Tiresias’s call would take another meaning in this case: La Candelaria was inviting passers-by to see the ruins of a war that was denying sisters, mothers, daughters, and wives their right to mourn. Mujeres en la Plaza was a labor of quotation and contagion: the complicated choreographies to be staged in the Plaza de Bolívar couldn’t be rehearsed there without the police noticing it. For this reason, Ariza and other actresses from La Candelaria worked with a group of women who were leaders in different neighborhoods in Bogota’s outskirts. These women taught the choreographies to their compañeras back home. The day of the intervención every woman knew her role and her movements, and how to interact with hundreds of other bodies in the Plaza. This was an action shared, organized, and performed by hundreds of women becoming one. Interestingly, this acción conflated contagion and quotation in a monumental performance: the generous sharing of movements was undoubtedly affectively rooted, since a shared mourning linked these women. But at the same time, they had to rehearse a complicated choreography, reiterating what had been passed along to them. Moreover, contagion and quotation were intended to happen by performing in a public space: Ariza wanted to touch the audience and publicly acknowledge the pain of the women who were still looking for their loved ones. Her ultimate goal was to get this audience to quote the women who performed in the Plaza and to repeat the question that filled the Plaza: “Where are they?” The international audience stayed in the Plaza for hours, and passersby found themselves caught up in an action of co-construction of shared memories. The Hemispheric Institute’s participants—both from Colombia and elsewhere—engaged in an action of making memory throughout this public intervention. The Antigones who filled the Plaza invited everyone [ 358 ]

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to mourn and remember with them, to become part of the acción and so become part of their history and struggle. This collaborative effort exemplifies the power of transnational encounters. Like Yuyachkani’s Antígona, this acción invites us to become Ismenes: to witness the ruins of war and to take action within our society. Patricia Ariza and Teresa Ralli have prominent roles as performers and activists within their groups and in their respective societies. Their feminist struggles grow from their position as women and from their farreaching political commitments.20 Both of them have wide experience traveling throughout their countries, the rest of the Americas, and the entire world. They have learned from multiple political histories and have included issues of gender, class, race, and ethnicity, among other factors, in their memory work. As women, as performers, as activists, Ariza and Ralli invite their audiences, as Tiresias does, to listen to Antigone’s voice and to remember it, since, “no good comes from obedience born of forgetfulness.” As noted earlier, by surviving in contexts of cyclical violence, both theater groups have fought against oblivion in their societies. Their performances trace connections between the individual memories of the performers as well as those of the spectators. Their performances also address recent political history and the claims for a politics of memory that would include testimonies from the dispossessed. In this way, their performances also bring together ancient mythologies that put in dialogue objects, nature, and human bodies with claims for social justice discussed internationally in the public sphere. Yuyachkani’s and La Candelaria’s performances are sites of convergence that link diverse social actors. They are assemblages that help to produce a society, even as they acknowledge its fragmentariness and woundedness. While the performers’ bodies are the main vessels of memory transmission, the audience’s bodies become sites where vectors of connection cross, bounce, or collide. Later, these connections are reassembled in other configurations after the performance ends. This may have happened, for example, as the relatives of the disappeared engaged in memory transmission when they decided to give their testimonies to the Peruvian TRC’s hearings. This also can be related to Ariza’s sister project: Tramaluna’s Antígona, Tribunal de Mujeres, where the women who were relatives of the desaparecidos went to the stage to tell their stories. In these projects, by denouncing crimes against their fellow citizens, they perform gestures of mourning, protest, and defiance. M A K I N G M E M O RY

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Performing the dynamic between the individual and the collective, these Antígonas are not “recontextualizations” of a classic but sites that engender collective narratives through the connections among bodies on and off stage.21 The relations between performers, audiences, theater groups, and civil society build vessels of connection between individuals and commonalities and highlight the intersections and the networks among them as ways to remember the past, articulate the present, and imagine the future. Ariza and Ralli activate the solidarity engrained in the political potential of Antigone and invite us to (re)mobilize memory. Their work reveals that more than being a dormant entity that is there to be awakened, memory can be built together in moments of encounter and sharing. Performance, as an artistic expression where “action” is crucial, reveals the power of the “intervention” (la intervención): a piece is never finished, but always susceptible to being reinvented, reimagined, reperformed. Antigone welcomes different responses and interventions and in this sense, remains an invitation to become part of (intervenir en) acts of resistance, bringing people together to rebuild communities that have been shattered by violence. In Spanish, “remembering” may be translated into “the act of making memory.” May this intercultural dialogue inspire us to understand memory not as a recollection, but as an action: el acto de hacer memoria.

Notes 1. For a detailed account of these groups’ historical trajectories, as well as their connections with other collectives throughout the Americas, see Santiago García, Teoría y Práctica del Teatro (Bogotá: Ediciones Teatro La Candelaria, 1983, 2002, and 2006); Miguel Rubio Zapata, Raíces y Semillas: Maestros y Caminos del Teatro en América Latina (Lima: Yuyachkani, 2011); and Ileana Diéguez, Escenarios liminales (Buenos Aires: Atuel, 2007). 2. In “Tragedy Shakes Hands with Testimony: Uruguay’s Survivors Act in Antígona Oriental,” PMLA 129, no. 4 (2014): 761–72, Moira Fradinger notes that the character of Antigone has been reimagined by almost every Latin American country. These widespread reinterpretations of Antigone speak to global concerns about the effects of authoritarianism, as well as “the persistence of works that show human beings attempting to make sense of mortality, suffering, and other forces that challenge human comprehension and control,” as noted by Helene P. Foley and Jean Howard in “The Urgency of Tragedy Now,” PMLA 129, no. 4 (2014): 618. [ 360 ]

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3. José Watanabe, “Excerpts from Antígona,” in Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform, ed. Diana Taylor and Roselyn Constantino (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 370. Unless otherwise noted, all English translations of Watanabe’s Antígona refer to Margaret Carson’s version in Holy Terrors, 365–70. 4. Teresa Ralli, “Fragments of Memory,” trans. Carson, in Taylor and Constantino, Holy Terrors, 355–64. 5. Diana Taylor, Performance (Buenos Aires: Asunto Impreso, 2012), 108. 6. Watanabe, “Excerpts,” 368. 7. I follow Ricardo Dominguez and Stephen Duncombe’s thoughts on the utility of art in activism as they recently proposed in The Fear of Art, Social Research: An International Quarterly 83, no. 1 (2016). Imaginative tactics, embodied experiences, and expansive networks of collaboration are some of the elements that allow artists and activists to learn from each other and work towards social justice. 8. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 30–40. 9. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: 1959–1960. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan,Vol. 7, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), 283. 10. Jacques Rancière, “The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics,” Critical Horizons, 7, no. 11 (2006): 5. 11. Jo-Marie Burt, “ ‘Quien habla es terrorista’: The Political Use of Fear in Fujimori’s Peru,” Latin American Research Review 41, no. 3 (2006): 32–62. 12. Patricia Ariza, “Antígona,” in 4 Obras Teatro La Candelaria (Bogotá: Teatro La Candelaria, 2008), 219. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of La Candelaria’s Antígona are mine. 13. A theater group related to La Candelaria and Ariza, Tramaluna Teatro, has staged Antígona,Tribunal de Mujeres throughout the world.This piece’s Antigones are the Madres de Soacha, a group of mothers whose sons were killed by the Colombian Army and then dressed as guerrilleros to count them as enemies killed in battle so as to receive a monetary reward for their deaths. In spite of the mothers’ demands for justice, this case, known as the “Falsos Positivos,” remains under investigation. 14. Ariza, “Antígona,” 222. 15. Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 35–36. 16. It is worth noting that, although the Erinyes are feminine deities, in La Candelaria’s play one of them is embodied by a male actor, Libardo Florez. Ariza’s work as an activist for women’s rights always has been committed to promoting collaboration between men and women. It is for this reason that in her play Antigone’s claim is tied to a feminine “force.” 17. Ariza, “Antígona,” 223. M A K I N G M E M O RY

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18. Ariza, “Antígona,” 262. 19. On October 2, 2016, Colombia voted “NO” on its plebiscite for peace, closing the doors to a ceasefire between the government and the FARC. Setting aside the economic and political interests involved in this popular decision, it was disheartening to consider that violence could keep wounding the country. Later that year, President Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC’s leader Rodrigo Londoño signed a Peace Treat that is currently in its implementation process. 20. Patricia Ariza was cultural representative to the Unión Patriótica (UP), a leftist movement that started to gain power in the mid 1980s in Colombia. Paramilitary death squads started targeting UP’s members, kidnapping, disappearing, and killing hundreds of them—a state-sponsored crime that remains unpunished. Ariza received death threats but refused to leave Colombia and kept working in spite of the terror campaign against her comrades. Teresa Ralli, in turn, as well as her fellow partners of Yuyachkani, received death threats during the years of violence in Peru. It is hard to say where those threats came from, since Yuyachkani’s work denounces both terrorist acts and state crimes. In different interviews they have said that they had to live with their passports ready to flee the country at any time. In spite of fear, they also stayed in Peru making theater and making memory. 21. In a volume edited by Erin B. Mee and Foley, Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), Mee proposes that theater productions are potential places “where Ismenes can be transformed into Antigones” (126). The “universality” of the play, Mee and Foley point out, must be traced in what theatrical productions do instead of on what literature means. In this sense, Antigone’s rebellious gesture would set in motion a series of connections and associations every time it is staged. Antigone calls for theatrical productions, embodied actions, street interventions, public mourning: Antigone is an invitation to put the body in motion, especially in contexts of authoritarianism and political repression. This is the case, for example, for Antigone in Shatila, performed by a group of Syrian women who are refugees in the camp of the same name. “Before we were introduced to Antigone’s story, we felt alone,” says one of the performers. “Then we realized these tragedies keep happening throughout history and it gave us the courage to speak out. Together we feel stronger and more confident,” qtd. in Kirsty Lang, “The Tragedy Giving Hope to Syria’s Women,” BBC News, July 5, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine -33362642. Yet again, the strength of the collective resides in the encounter of multiple acts of resistance.

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CHA P T E R X X I

Theater of the Mothers Three Political Plays by Marie NDiaye N O É M I E N D I AY E

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hen, in 2003, Papa doit manger (Daddy Gotta Eat) was performed at the Comédie Française, Marie NDiaye became, at age thirty-five, the second female playwright and the first female playwright of color to enter the repertoire of the flagship national theater since Molière’s company founded it in 1680. With her, intersectional feminist dramaturgy entered the French canon. Undoubtedly, Marie NDiaye’s most popular plays to date are Hilda and Daddy Gotta Eat; yet she articulates her vision of theater as a political force most powerfully in a corpus of less well-known plays comprised of Providence (2001), Les Serpents (Snakes) (2005), and Les Grandes personnes (Grown-Ups) (2011). Marie NDiaye’s reflection on political theater hinges on a motif that has haunted her plays for almost two decades: the motif of sacrificial mothers who seek forgiveness for horrendous crimes committed against their children. The mothers participated or feel that they participated in those crimes, be it rape, abuse, or murder. They carry the memories of those crimes, and those memories compel them, long after the event, to seek reparative ritualistic resolutions. Only cathartic rituals will relieve them of their traumatic memories and of guilt. This quest, however, opposes them to a tight-knit civic community always recognizable as an instantiation of the French nation, although its scale varies from play to play. Indeed, the community always had a hand in the crimes for which each mother seeks atonement, but, unlike the mothers, it refuses to remember or acknowledge [ 363 ]

those crimes. Ultimately, the community destroys the mothers: the plays deny them reparative resolutions and turn them into sacrificial scapegoats who carry the communal burden of memory. This recurrent motif clearly critiques the patriarchal social forces that silence women and enforce oblivion in order to protect rapists, racists, pedophiles, domestic abusers, and murderers in today’s France. But in this essay, I argue that, within NDiaye’s critique of patriarchal forces, the motif of sacrificial mothers also interrogates the role of political theater itself. Indeed, the particularly theatrical nature of the rituals devised by the mothers turns them into mises-en-abîme of theater. What does it mean, then, that those rituals always abort? If theater does not give grieving mothers what they seek, then whose interests does it serve? Whose interest can it serve? Can theater be a reparative process for victims on stage and off? Yes, it can, Marie NDiaye tells us, but only if it starts by reckoning with its own potential harmfulness. Given Marie NDiaye’s reluctance to elucidate the intentions of her plays or to comment on their politics, it is up to spectators to identify the ethical positioning of her works.1 My own interpretive strategy consists in using the motif of sacrificial mothers as a key to unlock the ethical universe of NDiaye’s feminist theater. The fate of the sacrificial mothers who are denied the possibility of completing their theatrical ritual and are subsequently executed not only critiques gender-based violence; it also critiques the ways in which theater can fail women. Indeed, what I call Marie NDiaye’s Theater of the Mothers is a theater that reckons with the reality of systemic patriarchal oppression. By definition, a critique of systemic oppression exposes how all institutions participate in that oppression—and theater is an institution, especially, but not exclusively, when it is performed at the Comédie Française. Thus, part of the Theater of the Mothers’ work is to expose the ways in which theater, theatricality, and performance themselves often collude with patriarchal social forces on stage and off. In other words, the feminist ethics of Marie NDiaye’s theater bring with them a rare degree of self-scrutiny. Self-scrutiny and self-consciousness also define the esthetics of that theater. Indeed, rather than using “the conventions of a chosen theatrical form,” as most political plays do, NDiaye’s plays use the conventions common to all theatrical forms “to emphasize, reveal, and criticize the ideology serving as the social background of human actions or situations, to locate alternative discourses to the one preferred by the ruling ideology, and to liberate [ 364 ]

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human consciousness from its circular binding to mythical formations.”2 They use the very building blocks of the theater’s episteme—performance, spectatorship, substitution, repetition—as metaphors to make visible and indict oppressive patriarchal social scripts. In the most recent play of our corpus, Grown-Ups, Marie NDiaye even uses one of those building blocks, conjuration, to imagine alternative social scripts. In short, the Theater of the Mothers puts the core devices of theater to productive use. Following the chronological order of Providence, Snakes, and Grown-Up, I will bring to light Marie NDiaye’s feminist intervention in the tradition of political theater by using a critical lens rarely brought to bear on her work: the lens of theater and performance studies.

Providence (2001) Providence, a beautiful young woman described as a she-devil with cloven hooves, was gang-raped by the inhabitants of the generic French village where the play is set. All the other characters of the play are nameless, only identified by their profession. An additional character, “the Question-asker” (le questionneur), interviews them throughout the play, trying to piece out what happened to Providence and to extract the truth from reluctant or unreliable informants.3 Reading between the lines, the audience understands that everybody in the village either participated or watched the rape, including the women, whose enduring libidinal fixation on Providence is unnerving. A child was born from that rape, and Providence lost her. She claims that the villagers took her; the villagers claim that Providence fed her newborn to pigs. Whichever version is true, Providence was subsequently institutionalized. At the beginning of the play, a number of years later, Providence returns to the village, knocking on every door to get her child back. But in vain. She then devises a new plan: “seeking justice,” she demands that the man who fathered her child be delivered to her, hoping, in her state of psychological distress, that her child will be returned to her at the same time (43). That plan must follow a specific script: I want the father of my child to come forward. I want that man, who lives in the village, who is one of you, to stop masquerading as an honest citizen. I want him to walk up to Providence’s house, alone: let T H E AT E R O F T H E M O T H E R S

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him climb up the hill, alone, under everyone’s gaze. . . . I want him to walk up to me and admit that he is the father of the child I seek. . . . He must come forward and expose himself, so that the whole village might see him walk towards me, and understand what it means. . . . The father shall show himself: such amends might bring my child back. . . . Tell your parishioners I’ll be waiting. (46–50) An act that can bring back the dead is nothing short of a sacred ritual. A simple movement (stepping forward) engaging two protagonists will be performed on an elevated platform (up the hill) and will be observed by an audience (the whole village) that will interpret that action and “understand what it means.” If, as Richard Schechner puts it, theater and rituals differ only by virtue of the context in which they are performed and the function that they emphasize (efficacy versus entertainment), when Providence wishes to have this ritual performed on what Marie NDiaye’s spectators know is a theatrical stage, she imagines a perfect hybrid: a theatrical ritual.4 Yet when the time to perform this theatrical ritual comes, nothing unfolds as scripted: insurer: You expected someone important, but here comes a whole crowd of important people: the butcher, the innkeeper, the real estate agent, the gym teacher, the notary, the priest, the biology teacher, the middle school assistant principal, the baker, the antiquary. Ay! A whole army of shopkeepers and notables is climbing through the broom shrubs, silent and grave, to fight this war . . . providence: Help me, insurer! I cannot take them all. They come to kill me because they fear me . . .They come to kill me because they took my child. Oh God. No jokes, please. Here they come! (68–70) Those who were supposed to watch ignore the script and act instead.Theatrical rituals fail Providence: she never gets to know the identity of her child’s father, catharsis is thereby denied her, and the community murders her. For that community, however, Providence, originally a foreign element adopted by a childless local gentry couple, had remained a “monstrous error” (55) “infecting” (58) the village. From the community’s viewpoint, her murder is only a cleansing ritual.5 Providence’s theatrical ritual is thus aborted and replaced with a ritual murder that rids the village of foreigners and the obligation to remember past crimes. [ 366 ]

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The final scene of Providence further shows how rituals can be used to patriarchal ends. In that short scene, the character of the “waitress,” a young woman who has had “a hard life,” confesses her sins to the priest, presumably in a Catholic confessional (52). The waitress—who may or may not be Providence’s lost daughter—was abandoned by her father, and her mother was “mad” (59). She was then abused by her fostering relatives, taken advantage of by her landlord, and unfairly treated by the judicial system. Her speech patterns are full of nonsequiturs that cast doubt on her mental health. The priest, hardly listening to her pleas for help, responds: “Yes, yes, you’ve already said that.You must pray a little. Everything will get better . . .Young woman, aren’t things getting better already? No one ever loves troublesome people. Pray hard and save yourself, save yourself!” (71–72).The priest—who just participated in the collective murder of Providence—is here using the ritual of confession to keep the waitress in check, to stop her from following in the footsteps of “troublesome people” like Providence. In the collective execution scene and in the private confession scene, the play shows how efficiently rituals can function as oppressive patriarchal mechanisms while aborting the one scenario—Providence’s intended theatrical ritual— in which they might have been reparative tools for victims. If Providence stages instances in which rituals serve oppressive purposes, it also exposes how certain spectatorial behaviors can lead audience members to collude with the patriarchal social forces that they think they oppose both on and off stage. Indeed, Providence’s collective execution plays out as a repetition of the collective rape scene, placing the audience in the voyeuristic position that was the position of the villagers during the rape. This seems all the more true since the rape itself was turned into a commercial spectacle at the time: “You are telling me that the whole village paid to watch?” (66). At the end of the play, NDiaye’s audience finds itself in an ethically problematic position that aligns them with the rapists rather than the victim. That troubling alignment is one way the play critiques a passive and voyeuristic type of spectatorship. That critique is particularly palpable in the itinerary of the “Questionasker.”The Question-asker, I argue, is a stand-in for the play’s spectators who, like him, wish to piece out Providence’s story. Coming “from the capital,” the Question-asker is “a stranger” to the village (29). He is described as “elegant, well-read, sun-tanned, and, like us, deeply hostile to emotionality, tobacco, and old religions (but extremely sympathetic to new ones, whatever they be).” He is an “eloquent” man with “the forehead of an informatician” (31). T H E AT E R O F T H E M O T H E R S

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Although he is listed as present in four scenes, we never hear the Questionasker: he does not intervene. He only exists on stage through other characters’ acknowledgement of his presence. His interviewees answer in real time questions that are never voiced but merely reported with phrases such as: “Our visitor asks” (38), “Our host keeps repeating” (38), “Our host says that” (41), “He asks why” (57). Why do audience members never get to see or hear the Question-asker? Because they are the Question-asker, I would suggest. Although a conservative mise-en-scène will use an actor to embody the Question-asker (as Marc Liebens did when he created the play at the Théâtre Kléber-Méleau in Renens, Switzerland), an interesting directorial choice would be to cast the audience as the Question-asker, having characters turn to the auditorium when they must listen to him. A stand-in for spectators, then, the Question-asker starts out as Providence’s ally, seeking the truth to defend her.Yet his moral authority is gradually undermined, as his scopophilia, his obscene appetite for graphic details, becomes more and more palpable: Here is someone who wishes you well. This gentleman would like to ask you some questions. He wants to know everything, to find out everything about you. You have to tell and show us what is still hidden . . . Providence, he wants to split you open from head to toe, to gut you so as to know you, and to love you best. Yeah, that’s what it’s about: love! Pure love! He will open you up slowly, and . . . he will watch. (60) The violence of the metaphors used here and their affinities with sexual violence are striking. The Question-asker burns to engage in voyeuristic spectatorship despite his denial: They told him . . . they say there was blood dripping down your right leg. He hates having to picture that, but he has to, if he is to seek the truth. He says he feels like crying. But, he also says it is good to feel that kind of sting in your eyes, to be moved by the suffering of a brave girl who was sacrificed. (67) Marie NDiaye has no tolerance for voyeuristic spectatorship. Her protagonist, Providence, senses the kinship between the Question-asker and the rapists, and she rejects him altogether. When the villagers walk up the hill [ 368 ]

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and Providence begs the insurer for help, he advises her to turn to the Question-asker: insurer: You are mistaking me for the man who loves you and fears for you. Look, here he is. providence: I do not want him to save me from those below. I’d rather die. Nothing surrounds me; I sense no warmth from him. (69–70) The Question-asker and the audience he stands for are discarded as potential saviors for Providence, because their solidarity ends in complicity. With the figure of the Question-asker, the play uses a building block of the theater’s episteme—spectatorship—to make visible and indict the voyeuristic social script that turns bystanders into passive accomplices of patriarchy off stage. Providence was Marie NDiaye’s first play, adapted from a children’s tale she had published a year earlier, La Diablesse et son enfant (The She-Devil and Her Child).6 As she carried out this work of transmediation, Marie NDiaye engaged, I argue, not only with the literary genre of drama but also with the notions of theatricality and performance at large. Providence exposes how rituals can be co-opted for oppressive patriarchal purposes (purges, confession) outside the playhouse and how easily uncritical spectators can remain just that, passive bystanders complicit with violence, rather than agents of change, both inside and outside the playhouse. As Marie NDiaye’s Ur-sacrificial Mother, Providence tragically intervenes in the tradition of political theater to point out the Achilles heel of that tradition: passive spectators.

Snakes (2005) Marie NDiaye turned her attention from the dynamics of spectating to those of acting when she resumed her reflection on political theater four years later. In Snakes, Nancy reckons with her decision to leave her abusive husband and to abandon to him her little boy, Jacky. About ten years after the deed, she comes back to her ex-husband’s house, lost in the middle of cornfields. Little Jacky has long been dead. His father used to beat him regularly, hard enough to stunt the boy’s growth. “He made the boy pay for your absence, and he would tell him: let your mother come visit you and stop my arm. Nothing else would, and Jacky probably knew it too.”7 T H E AT E R O F T H E M O T H E R S

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But Nancy never visited the son she left behind: “How could I have come visit? I was terrified of him” (36).The father eventually purchased vipers and put little Jacky in charge: he had to feed them, clean their cage, and sleep in it. The plan worked: the boy died, and his grandmother, Madame Diss, comments that her son “sacrificed the boy to the goddess of vipers” (75). Nancy had learned about her son’s death but had remained too scared to visit his grave until the play begins. What appears at first to be an intimate family drama very quickly turns into a critique of French patriarchy at large. At the center of that critique stands the figure of a father-ogre who is never seen directly but is felt through his effects on the women of the play: his wives, past and present, and his mother. That the father-ogre is a synecdoche of the patriarchal social system at large is buttressed by various allusions to the French nation. The father-ogre’s new wife, for instance, is called France, a name that transparently conjures up the country, while Nancy is named after the regional capital of Lorraine. As for Madame Diss, her name evokes the acronym of the Direction des Interventions Sanitaires et Sociales, the administrative branch overseeing French Child Protection Services—the evocation is quite ironical, since she witnessed her grandson’s abuse without intervening. By virtue of their names, the women evoke the nation and its institutions. Moreover, the play takes place on July 14, the national holiday commemorating the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution, which gives its actions, as private as they may seem, larger political implications. “I have just stopped being afraid of his father,” Nancy informs Madame Diss, whom she finds on the threshold of the house when the play begins (37). Nancy is now able to come back and to perform a specific theatrical ritual: Today is fireworks day, and it is also the anniversary of the boy’s death. I have come so that his father and I might visit his grave—there’s a grave, right? So that, together, we might bow down very low to the boy’s little soul (since he is not here anymore) and apologize, so that he might forgive us.Then I’ll go, and I will never come back again.We will have done what we had to. The father simply must agree . . . We can still go to the graveyard before the fireworks—there’s a graveyard, right? There is still time. We will apologize to the poor boy . . . We may not know how to do it well, but we will kneel down, because we failed, we failed him, our son, our little Jacky. (39–41) [ 370 ]

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Imagining specific movements (“bowing down very low” and “kneeling”) for the performers of a ritual that shall procure forgiveness and closure, Nancy, like Providence, is imagining a theatrical ritual on a day of remembrance both at the private and at the national level. And just like Providence, she sees that theatrical ritual abort when one of the protagonists, the father, refuses to participate and remains inside his house (spectators never see him at any point in the play). Frustrated, Nancy starts another ritual with the one person who does come in and out of the father’s house: his new wife, France. Nancy grows delusional and increasingly desirous to reclaim her place in a reformed version of the hellish household: “I want to be there. With the authority I can command now, within the house, I want to dominate him softly with my arms, to make him fear me a little, and to love his children, to scold them, and raise them. I want to be there, and I want little Jacky to be there too” (58). In Nancy’s fantasies, past and present merge. Meanwhile, France grows ready to leave her husband, but she is concerned about leaving her two children with the husband. Nancy promises to raise them for her: “I will take care of them and love them as much as you do. They won’t see the difference” (68). The prospect becomes irresistible when Nancy learns that one of France’s children is called Jacky. The two women decide to substitute for each other, as if their lives were theatrical parts that can be infinitely exchanged between two actresses.They start by exchanging names: Nancy will be called France, and vice-versa. In her production of Snakes at the Théâtre des Quartiers d’Ivry in 2008, director Youlia Zimina insisted on the metatheatrical dimension of the life swap between the two women. Zimina reports that the costumes worn by the two “divas” throughout the performance were “very operatic,” gowns with angular geometrical shapes, long glistening trains, false eyelashes applied upside down, and buskins—a nod to the tragic tradition.8 The metamorphosis of France and Nancy into one another was staged as follows. The stage set used light bulbs to represent the start of the corn field in front of the house: the light bulbs were re-arranged to evoke a dressing-room where Nancy and France could put on one another’s operatic costumes.This metatheatrical role-swap launched a never-ending cycle of substitutions. After substituting for Nancy, France lets Madame Diss direct the course of her life: madame diss: You will re-marry. Find a nice man. france: As you wish. T H E AT E R O F T H E M O T H E R S

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madame diss: You will have a couple more children. france: Yes, I will. madame diss: I will introduce you to my third husband. I know he happens to be single at the moment . . . He still loves me, so you will have to share him with me, but you’ll have power over his decisions. (76) Obeying directions, France substitutes for Madame Diss in the bed of her former husband, Tony. After things collapse with Tony and France gets a new man, Madame Diss substitutes for France in the new man’s bed, and France comments: “What you did is not done! To seduce methodically each of your daughter-in-law’s lovers!” (88). In the last scene of the play, France complains that this series of substitutions has harmed her greatly. To make up for it, Madame Diss suggests a final substitution, encouraging France to seduce her son’s father: the ogre’s father. As spectators watch France walk away to execute Madame Diss’s final command, they realize that this brings France back to the beginning of the substitution cycle, and, most likely, back to a situation of domestic abuse. Indeed, when Madame Diss recalls that the abuser’s father had “a sharp wolfish face,” France responds, “Like his son” (91). Yet coming full circle is not the end: even that final substitution contains the promise of more substitutions. France’s last words before she exits are: “I will come back” (92). If indeed she comes back to the house after the play ends, France will, once again, turn into Nancy. The metatheatrical cycle of substitutions leads France to psychological disintegration and Nancy to physical destruction. Scene VI is set inside the house. Nancy’s voice guides us: contrary to what she anticipated, the house is dark, all openings are closed and sealed, children are nowhere to be seen: “there’s nothing here, no one any longer, and no child to make mine with my love” (83). Finally, fear overcomes her anew: “I thought I had become immune to fear, but I’m scared, I’m scared . . . What and how is it going to be? This house smells of death, and he will eat me last” (84). The father had repeatedly been described as an ogre: we understand now that the house is part of him—the room, dark, sealed, empty, smelling of death, is the ogre’s stomach.9 With its cycle of role-swaps, the play uses the theatrical devices of substitution and repetition to make visible and indict the social scripts that enable the relentless reproduction of domestic abuse in a patriarchal society, in this case in contemporary French society. Indeed, when France expresses [ 372 ]

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concerns about the children she is leaving behind with the father-ogre, Madame Diss comments that they will be sacrificed “to the mysterious god of the fireworks!” (75). But who is the “mysterious god of the fireworks” shot on Bastille Day, if not the French Republic itself? Zimina’s mise-enscène suggested that Nancy too was sacrificed to that national god by using sound effects: the audience heard the fireworks right after Nancy’s final words. As Nancy disappeared into the stomach-house, fireworks boomed and celebrated her death; the god manifested its contentment. The configuration of Nancy’s murder suggests that it is sanctioned by the French Republic, a community that protects and enables domestic and child abuse by means of various social scripts that demand interruption, but, in this work, grimly continue to be recycled.Turning her attention from spectating to acting, in Snakes, Marie NDiaye used the core theatrical devices of substitution and repetition as metaphors to make visible and indict the dynamics of domestic abuse.

Grown-Ups (2011) Marie NDiaye resumed her reflection on political theater with her next single-authored play, Grown-Ups, in 2011.While that play continues the grim critique of theater’s participation in systemic patriarchal oppression that is inherent in the motif of sacrificial Mothers, it also goes beyond critique and offers some alternative possibilities. In yet another generic French village, Madame B. disrupts the local parents’ association meeting with an important piece of news: the schoolteacher is a pedophile. “The school teacher raped my boy several times . . . He put a sex toy into his anus . . . I had to tell you because, most probably, our child was not the teacher’s only victim . . . It was my duty to tell you. There. Now you know what kind of man the teacher is. Now you know.”10 However, as the teacher himself confirms a couple of scenes later, on a more or less conscious level, the parents already knew, and simply did not want to hear the truth spoken out loud. Consequently, they resent Madame B.’s intervention: parent: Who told you we wanted to know anything like that? parent: Who cares? We don’t believe her! . . . parent: Even if there were some truth to it, how dare she reveal it? T H E AT E R O F T H E M O T H E R S

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parent: Ma’am, you could have solved your problem on your own without telling us. parent: It was our right to decide that the teacher could use our children if he wanted to. All we had to do was let it be without putting a name on it. parent: Absolutely! In exchange for his teaching and directing the school remarkably, we had silently authorized the teacher to play with our children the way he wanted . . . Isn’t it more important for a child to know how to read, to count, and to reason than to preserve her little body intact? . . . parent: You should leave. You’ve done enough harm already. parent: She is soiling our harmonious vision of the world! (V) To further undermine the credibility of Madame B., the parents deploy a xenophobic rhetoric. Indeed, Madame B., whose North African roots are evident in the name of her son, Karim, has only been a member of this village for six months: parent: Yet another one of those new families. parent: Can someone with old roots in the village vouch for your honesty? . . . parent: Nobody knows her, she has no friends, no name, and she wants us to take her word for it! parent: Whereas we’ve known the teacher for a long time. We were all born here, and we are all from the same generation . . . parent: Newcomers only bring problems! . . . parent: Go back where you came from, Ma’am. You are not wanted here, and you will never be one of us. (V) The racial overtones of the parents’ comments are unmistakable and are later echoed by the teacher, who, when confronted with Madame B.’s reproaches, answers:11 teacher: So your son is the only child who complained. No other child went whining to their parents. Don’t you find it disturbing that you foreigners should find unacceptable what everybody else here seems to accept? . . . You fucking foreigner! . . . Fucking stranger! I can’t understand a word you’re saying! madame B.: You are the only stranger here. And you know it. (VII) [ 374 ]

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By having Madame B. reject the pedophilia that has long been accepted within that French community, the scene counters the widespread xenophobic rhetoric that usually associates sex crimes with immigrants. Racked with guilt over what she considers her own failure to protect her son and anticipating that the memory of the crime will haunt the family forever, Madame B. proactively devises a solution: a cathartic ritual. She meets with the teacher and informs him: “You are going to come to our house. You won’t enter, you will stay at the threshold. I will bring Karim, you will kneel to him, acknowledge the harm you have done to him, and ask him for forgiveness” (VII). Anyone who has seen or read Snakes will find this ritual oddly familiar and anticipate its failure. Indeed, the teacher struggles with the stage directions of the ritual: he tries to renegotiate them, and Madame B.’s refusal to budge ultimately leads him to withdraw altogether: teacher: Could I do what you want me to do— madame B.: Confess your fault, and ask Karim to forgive you. teacher: Yes, that. Could I do it through a door, without seeing the child? madame B.: Of course not. That’s impossible.You have to look the one you are begging for forgiveness in the eyes. How can he decide whether he will forgive you if you avoid his gaze? teacher: He can see me. But I can’t stand the idea of seeing him . . . I’m afraid to look at him. Standing in front of me, he won’t be a child any more. He’ll be a tiny old man invested with the stupid right to judge me and to condemn me . . . I don’t regret anything I did. I couldn’t help it, so how could I regret it? I am very upset now! . . . I hate you, you grown-ups! (X) With these words, the teacher metamorphoses into “a big bird spreading its wings” and flies away, escaping responsibility (X). Parents see the metamorphosis and accuse Madame B., the “fucking foreigner,” of using “witchcraft” on the teacher. One of them raises a stick, and the stage direction reads: “Gives her a strong blow. The woman moans and collapses on the ground” (XI). In other words, the parents misunderstand the scene they see and act upon what they believe they saw—a belief naturally conditioned by their own prejudices against women of color. Here again, the theatrical ritual imagined by a grieving Mother is aborted and replaced with the ritual murder of a scapegoat—someone whose status is low on the axes of gender, race, and class, which interlock in a patriarchal T H E AT E R O F T H E M O T H E R S

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system.12 That the other parents stand for the French community in this scene of collective murder is all the more visible given their association with an icon of French republican mythology: the public school teacher, a supposedly nurturing point of contact between the individual and the State.13 As the parents declare, “We are decent and loyal folks: we will always defend the school teacher and our common motherland, rather than defend the truth!” (V). What Grown-Ups stages is not just the use of rituals as conservative mechanisms of social control but their enactment of the purging impulses of the extreme right wing that is currently resurgent in France. Grown-Ups, like Providence and Snakes, alerts spectators to the dangerous ideological uses to which rituals can be put. Yet, unlike Providence and Snakes, which only use some building blocks of the theater’s episteme—performance, spectatorship, substitution, repetition—to make visible and indict patriarchal social scripts, Grown-Ups also uses that episteme to imagine alternatives. Specifically, it uses conjuration to do so, as we see in the other narrative strand of the play, which runs parallel to Madame B.’s and focuses on Eva and Rudi, the oldest friends of the pedophile’s parents. Eva and Rudi lost their own children seventeen years before the play starts. Their teenage Daughter ran away, then started drinking, and became a drug addict. Despite all their efforts, they could never find her. Shortly after, their adopted son ran away too, in Rudi’s words, “as if we had been wardens, wicked spirits, or two ogres waiting for you two to be sufficiently fattened” (VI).Yet, the Daughter assures us: “I had wonderful parents, an adorable little brother, and an exquisite life” (XII). She ran away because “filled with love” as she was, she “felt empty and vain, insensible to pain and joy” (XII). As for the Son, he left home when he started hearing in his chest the voices of his dead biological parents demanding, out of jealousy, that he murder his adoptive parents. In other words, the Daughter suffered from depression and the Son from severe bipolar disorder. For seventeen years, Eva and Rudi lived without knowing whether their children were dead or alive. At the beginning of the play, the Son—now a grown-up—comes back home, and the ghost of the Daughter, who died long ago, returns to visit her parents, for “they have given me leave to come by as a ghost and to spend a few days with you” (XII). Her spectral return evokes another building block of the theater’s episteme: conjuration. Indeed, theater is always a form of conjuration. To quote Marvin Carlson, “one of the universals of performance, both East and West, is its ghostliness, its sense of return . . . this sense [ 376 ]

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of something coming back in the theater  .  .  . every play might be called Ghosts.”14 The theatrical ritual of conjuration brings emotional closure to Eva and Rudi. Indeed, they learn from their Daughter that she is dead, they learn why she left, and most importantly, they hear her say: “It feels good to be with one’s family. But my time is up. Think of me with softness and clemency, and don’t forget: all is forgiven” (XII). Theater’s ability to conjure up ghosts and let the living listen to the dead enables Eva and Rudi to understand their Son too. Indeed, when the Son first explains to them why he left, he faces incomprehension. Understanding only comes in the final scene of the play, when the parents can hear for themselves the imperious voices in their Son’s chest: rudi: Are they here? Can we talk to them? . . . the son(beating his chest): Hey you two! My parents have questions for you. . . . those who live inside the son’s chest: What do you want to know? the son (to eva and rudi): Can you hear them? rudi: I heard them perfectly. eva: So did I. the son (very moved): So you believe me now! They are real, they are here, and you don’t doubt it any more. You can hear them! . . . those who live inside the son’s chest: This boy we brought into the world, did he give you satisfaction? . . . Was he a good boy? rudi: Yes, a good boy, an excellent boy! . . . those who live inside the son’s chest: When he was born, he already had two little teeth. He did not cry, he was happy to see daylight. Before we died, we asked him: who is going to take care of you? We wept a lot, then death came, and we did not get our answer. rudi: He is an excellent boy. Thank you. those who live inside the son’s chest: He was so happy to be born. eva: Thank you. Thank you. (XV) Overflowing with joy and gratitude, Eva, the Mother of all Mothers, speaks the last words of the play in a final scene that shifts the mood from tragedy to romance. Only through a theatrical ritual of conjuration could Eva and Rudi converse with their Daughter and their Son’s dead parents and be reunited with their children. Yet conjuration also seems to model positive dynamics of communication among family members that can be T H E AT E R O F T H E M O T H E R S

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emulated offstage: a mode of communication in which participants are eager to listen, open to being destabilized by what they hear, and aware of the infinite preciousness of communication itself. Such communication dynamics strongly differ from the dysfunctional communication patterns observed in Providence, Snakes, and in the plot of Grown-Ups focusing on Madame B. The final conjuration scene is what an antipatriarchal model of communication might look like, and this alternative script is incorporated into Grown-Ups’ own theatrical language.

Conclusion Theater is not inherently an instrument of social justice, and Marie NDiaye knows it. As Bella reminds us in Rien d’humain (Nothing Human) (2004), ogres, rapists, and abusers too love going to the theater: “My family gave a lot to Djamila. They used and abused her. Yes, we would take her with us to the theater, to the countryside, we shaped her, we gave her some culture. And we fucked her, fucked her, fucked her!”15 Theater is not intrinsically progressive or feminist, but it can be made so by exploring the social scripts fuelling systemic patriarchal oppression both on stage and off. That is the bold bet that Marie NDiaye is making: her work aims at nothing short of reclaiming political theater for feminist purposes. This commitment to feminism is bound by double ethical imperative in NDiaye’s drama: first, to explore the multiple yet connected spheres in which the political simultaneously operates in our lives, from the intimate to the national, via the collective. The close readings of dramatic architectures offered in this essay have, I hope, illustrated that multilevel conception of the political. Second, feminist political theater must practice constant and mindful self-scrutiny: Marie NDiaye’s Theater of the Mothers has so far fulfilled this imperative by using core theatrical devices to define the conditions in which it can operate (in Providence) and to indict patriarchal social scripts (in Providence and Snakes). With Grown-Ups, it has moved forward and proposed alternative feminist social scripts. But Marie NDiaye’s Theater of the Mothers is still young and very much alive: it can grow, it can change, and it might surprise us in the years to come. Indeed, if we are to take a cue from her latest play, Our Honorable Elected Official (Honneur à notre élue)—a yet unpublished satire on democratic elections created at the Théâtre du Rond-Point in March 2017—Marie NDiaye is not done with political theater just yet.16 [ 378 ]

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Notes 1. For instance, when asked during an interview about the message of her latest play, Our Honorable Elected Official, Marie NDiaye answered: “I never try to convey any message. There are different interpretations, and many are valid. There is not one truth, there are several.” Judith Tuil, “Marie NDiaye,” Arte.tv, http:// sites.arte.tv/culture-touch/fr/marie-ndiaye-culture-touch. 2. Avraham Oz, “Introduction,” in Political Performances: Theory and Practice, ed. Susan C. Haedicke et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 17–31, here at 30. 3. Quotations from Providence are excerpted from Marie NDiaye and Jean-Yves Cendrey, Puzzle (Trois pièces) (Paris: Gallimard, 2007). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from French into English are my own. 4. Richard Schechner, “Ritual and Performance,” in Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. Tim Ingold (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 613–47, here at 613. 5. This ritual act of cleansing the body politic has many historical precedents. For instance, it can be compared to the pharmakos of ancient Greece, a ritual that consisted in expelling (and sometimes physically assaulting or executing) designated individuals of lower social status—often criminals or slaves—in order to purify the city. 6. Dominique Rabaté, Marie NDiaye (Paris: INA/CulturesFrance/Textuel, 2008), 11. 7. All quotations from Snakes are excerpted from Marie NDiaye, Les Serpents (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 2004). Here at 31. 8. Thanks go to Youlia Zimina, who, in the absence of recordings, was gracious enough to answer my questions about her mise-en-scène. 9. On the motif of the ogre and the dynamics of devoration that permeates NDiaye’s plays, see Andrew Asibong, Marie NDiaye: Blankness and Recognition (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 111–33. 10. All quotations from Grown-Ups are excerpted from the ebook version of Marie NDiaye, Les Grandes personnes (Paris: Gallimard, 2011). That ebook has no pagination, so quotations are referenced with scene numbers in this essay. Here at V. 11. The teacher’s father transparently deploys white-supremacist rhetoric: “My sperm had no smell and was all white, that’s why our son was born with such fair skin—but none of this mattered to us. Not at all. That’s the reason why your hair has no smell and your eyes are so pale: the milky whiteness of your daddy’s sperm” (Grown-Ups IV). The parenthetical moment of denial (“But none of this mattered to us. Not at all”) ironically captures the denial vis-à-vis racial issues that permeates contemporary French culture, and about which Marie NDiaye’s brother, sociologist Pap NDiaye, has eloquently written in La Condition Noire, Essai sur une minorité française (Paris: Gallimard, 2008). T H E AT E R O F T H E M O T H E R S

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12. We learn about Madame B.’s class status when she brings the teacher home, and he asks: “Don’t you have a car? Madame B.: We are saving money to buy one,” (X). 13. On the figure of the teacher in Marie NDiaye’s oeuvre at large, see Michael Sheringham, “La Figure de l’enseignant chez Marie NDiaye,” L’Esprit Créateur, 53, no. 2 (2013): 97–111. 14. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 1–2. 15. Marie NDiaye, Rien d’humain (Besançon: Les Solitaires intempestifs, 2004), 18. Emphasis mine. 16. My deepest gratitude goes to two editors of this volume, Jean E. Howard and Marianne Hirsch: this essay could not have come to fruition without their incredibly generous, perceptive, and helpful comments along the way.

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CHA P T E R X X II

Who Knows Where or When? AIDS and Theatrical Memory in Queer Time ALISA SOLOMON

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ate Valk hitched up her pants with a cock of a hip and clutched her inner thigh for a moment, right by her crotch. Playing the role of Detective Tom Persky, a cop on the trail of the serial killer Conrad Gehrhardt, she was coiled macho bluster, a guy hyped up on the hunt, adjusting his junk. It’s a campy old theater trick, as old as Aristophanes, for performers to draw glancing attention to the most glaring signifier of the gap between actor and role, particularly when primary or secondary sex characteristics—or lack thereof—are involved. And it’s an especially good trick when the gesture is in keeping with the part—the actor simultaneously builds and breaks character. Of course, in this sex-addled drama by the queer theater pioneer Jeff Weiss, Persky would give himself a squeeze while plotting how to trap the evasive murderer, Gerhardt’s doppelganger, Bjorn, a hot Finnish gymnast who picks up unsuspecting victims; pursuit of any kind is always hard-core lust in Weiss’s work, and Persky wants to bed Gehrhardt as well as bag him. And, of course, Valk has nothing there to squeeze. The gesture serves as an apt metonym for how theater always works: drawing from our wells of memory to make something absent present—giving spatial and temporal extension to a world that doesn’t really exist or that exists only here and now in performance.

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In this case, it was the twisted yet tender world of And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid (and its successor, Hot Keys), the occasionally presented offoff-Broadway debauched serial dramas concocted by Weiss beginning halfa-century ago, under the directorship and all-around guidance of Weiss’s partner, Carlos Ricardo Martinez. And in this case, Valk and the rest of the company were calling forth not only the show’s own slippery universe but also the departed souls who once helped bring it to life, a number of whom died of AIDS in the early and mid-1990s. For three consecutive nights in July 2015 at the Manhattan performance space The Kitchen, some fifty actors—and a “glee club” of some two dozen singers—staged anew excerpts from Weiss’s sprawling opus, with a different set of scenes and songs presented each evening. None of this material had been seen for at least two decades and the brief run sold out its 155 nightly seats within a day of the tickets going on public sale. I secured mine early for all three evenings with the fervor of a groupie chasing a Rolling Stones tour. In the early 1990s, for many months on end, I had turned up for weekly late-night episodes of Hot Keys, but my ardor for revisiting this work nearly twenty-five years later did not feel nostalgic. I hardly could yearn fondly for those wretched times before protease inhibitors slowed the unremitting death toll that had measured our days. Back then, when the AIDS memorial service had come to seem like downtown’s primary performance genre, Hot Keys provided an alternative space, separate from the bedsides, funerals, and streets where we poured out our love, grief, and rage, and separate, too, from the more conventional dramas that addressed the epidemic.1 Anticipating the 2015 performances, I knew I’d be revisiting some of the most compelling theater I’d ever experienced, but I was surprised by how powerfully the three evenings offered a productively provocative alternative to memorialization practices around AIDS that had begun to emerge in the United States around that time. These included a series of play revivals, documentary films, major art exhibits, memoirs, and by 2016, an official AIDS memorial unveiled in New York City, plans underway for an elaborate memorial in West Hollywood, CA, and talk of an AIDS museum in San Francisco. Just as Weiss’s work had queerly intervened twenty-five years earlier into a field of AIDS drama that was often sentimentally didactic (and before that, in the late 1960s, into a rising field of gay theater), in 2015 Weiss stood fruitfully askew once more. The work now staked out a memorial emotional territory where queer failure and vulnerability were valued. Precarity is ontologically built into the theater—a performance vanishes [ 382 ]

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forever in the very process of its coming into being—and Weiss’s work has always included the parlous, the shaky, and the risky among its themes. In 2015, they were also a palpable aspect of his presence on stage. Noting the ephemeral nature of theater and performance as well as their “special relation to art as memorial,” Peggy Phelan has suggested that these art forms may well “respond to a psychic need to rehearse for loss, and especially for death.”2 Seeing Weiss’s work again, after such a long period, also suggested that theater can be a place for calling the lost and the dead— recalling them—into the peculiar liveness of performance.3 Through its queer strategies, Weiss’s work invited us not just to remember AIDS but to think about how to remember, and, most of all, how to remember queerly.

2 “Remembering” AIDS at all is a fraught proposition. First of all, anyone touched by its agonies hardly forgets them. What’s more, AIDS is not over. So it may seem inappropriate, at best, to subsume it into memory discourses. The pandemic still rages globally and, in the United States, devastates communities of color even as the current U.S. government is reverting to the deadly indifference that characterized the Reagan administration when the syndrome was first recognized.4 In June 2017, six members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS resigned in protest, charging that the Trump administration “has no strategy to address the on-going HIV/AIDS epidemic, seeks zero input from experts to formulate HIV policy, and— most concerning—pushes legislation that will harm people living with HIV and halt or reverse important gains made in the fight against this disease.”5 To talk about AIDS in the past tense, then, assumes a particular national and temporal framing, one that encompasses an all-consuming experience for a population whose survivors still feel its ravages. It means focusing on the U.S. “plague years,” the hellish period between 1981, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first recorded cases of a rare strain of pneumonia among five white gay men, and 1996, when the advent of antiretroviral drug cocktails retarded the death rate. After that, HIV often became a manageable condition for those who could afford the medications.6 In the midst of the plague years, during which 350,000 people died of AIDS in the United States, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick noted, “It’s been one of the great ideological triumphs of AIDS activism that, for a whole series W H O K N OW S W H E R E O R W H E N ?

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of overlapping communities, any person living with AIDS is now visible, not only as someone dealing with a particular, difficult cluster of pathogens, but equally as someone who is by that very fact defined as a victim of state violence.”7 But if such visibility ever extended much beyond those overlapping communities, it seems quickly to have receded. Twenty-five years later, the United States has yet to reckon with the effects and aftereffects of the lethal neglect of its governmental, religious, media, and other institutions during the early plague years. How the theater might productively evoke the traumatic memory of state violence around AIDS is a question for individual productions, and the impact they might have on spectators is, of course, both collective and personal, the one shaped by the other. Plays like Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985) would seem to make the likeliest choice for commemorative projects, and indeed, a Broadway production in 2011 was an early instance of the recent spate of efforts to remember AIDS. A film version for HBO soon followed, first airing in 2014. Set from 1981 to 1984, the play tells a thinly fictionalized account of the founding of the advocacy and service organization, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, as a frightened and fractious group of gay white men in New York (led by protagonist, Ned Weeks, a stand-in for Kramer), confront the outbreak of a mysterious fatal disease in their community. When the play premiered at the Public Theater in 1985, it sounded a rousing call to arms (both against societal unresponsiveness and, controversially within the community, against promiscuity). Many of us seeing the first production downtown in 1985 were living some slice of the terror and torment it portrayed; we knew people who were dead and dying and the play showed us our fury and helped sharpen it into a political weapon. (Kramer cofounded ACT UP two years after the play’s debut.) The same can’t be said of Broadway spectators a quartercentury later who weren’t demographically likely to be close to people who are sick and dying of AIDS today. Besides, they could project onto the action the knowledge that for the population depicted in the play, at least, the horrors had mostly abated. Despite Kramer himself admirably leafleting outside the theater most nights of the twelve-week Broadway run, handing out flyers about current unacceptably high infection and death rates, the 2011 production felt like a remote history play. The night I saw the show, at least, the audience cheered after one character, the protagonist’s doctor, delivered a feisty speech decrying negligent authorities. How heartening for these grey heads in hetero [ 384 ]

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pairs to take our side, I thought, and then, instantly, revised: I wanted to stand up and shout at them, Kramer-style, “Where were you when it counted?” Weiss’s audience—from the 1960s to today—may overlap somewhat with the Broadway crowd (myself, for instance), but generally it looks scruffier, less wealthy, younger, and not as white. Weiss’s work never made agit-prop appeals; it did not tug at heartstrings unless Weiss kept yanking until they frayed and nearly snapped. He tackled AIDS in a far more oblique way, never directly representing realistic characters coping with the crisis. Yet for me, the Rent/Hot Keys extravaganza produced more galvanizing power, especially as a memory work. It did so by affective rather than didactic or narrative means, and, especially, by dint of its queerness. The queerness of Weiss’s work far outstrips gay content: it is powered by an aesthetic of excess, refusal to resolve plotlines, twisting temporalities, foregrounding of actors’ diverse bodies, veering shifts from the abject disgust of violence or sexual impropriety to the wholesome ebullience of sing-along show-tunes, and the conjoining of the salacious, the scatological, and the sublime. Structurally, Weiss’s work has steadfastly refused to play by the commodifying rules of a neoliberal economy. One result has been that Weiss remains largely unknown beyond a local and loyal New York following, despite his fistful of Obie awards and a fifty-year stream of reviews declaring him a deranged sort of genius. Weiss is seldom discussed or even mentioned in histories of America’s LGTBQ theater or by queer theorists, yet his marathon performances were always among the queerest specimens in the theater, itself the queerest art.8 He requires an introduction.

3 By the time I saw Jeff Weiss for the first time, in 1984, he was already a downtown luminary, “the most legendary performer in the history of offoff Broadway,” as Ross Wetzsteon declared in the Village Voice in 1976.9 As an actor—with his lean, sinewy build and a voice resonant in any octave or volume—he was lauded for “a vocal and physical skill rarely matched in any theater.”10 “He doesn’t so much portray characters,” Elinor Fuchs once wrote, “as characters overtake him, suffuse him like a sudden mist at dusk.”11 More than that, and especially in his own plays, critics noted his astounding intensity (a word that appears five times in a 1967 review of an early play) and a level of commitment to the theatrical as-if that was so extreme, W H O K N OW S W H E R E O R W H E N ?

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people speculated that there might not be any make-believe involved at all.12 They had reason to wonder. First, what Weiss told people—including journalists—about his own life sometimes seemed too farfetched for reality, though it might have been true: having grown up in a white working-class area of Pennsylvania, he became a hustler in New York, turning gay tricks until Martinez took him in and encouraged him to write plays; he once accompanied a team of German doctors across Africa, playing a clown to mollify children getting inoculations; he’d been married to three different women. Weiss’s plays blurred the lines between his own experience and the personae he thoroughly dissolved into on stage. His first drama, presented at La MaMa in 1966, and the first to bear the title And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid, was a one-man tour de force in which he unraveled before the audience’s eyes, regaling them with “a cascade of fantasies, reminiscences, meditations, poetry-readings and miscellaneous schtick,” as Julius Novick described it in a review that also chided it for “soul baring” and “self indulgence” insufficiently filtered and shaped into art.13 Novick’s colleague, Wetzsteon, did not see the same defect: in Weiss’s performances, according to Wetzsteon, “the blazing psychic energy of madness and the serenely disciplining forms of art melt into and nourish one another, creating a mutation of imagination, something new and nameless, something we have no criterion for evaluating.”14 Critics didn’t yet have the language for the queer interventions of Weiss’s confounding yet compelling work, which addressed subjects like racism, liberal hypocrisy, sadistic parenting, and sexual violence. Weiss’s caustic creations—which produced what Wetzsteon designated “one of the most moving and harrowing experiences I’ve ever had—and I don’t mean just in the theatre”15—didn’t fit into the category of ebullient queer theater emerging in the same period, with the cross-dressing canon-contorting of Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous Theater, the glitter drag of Hot Peaches and the Cockettes, and the zany vulgarity of John Vaccaro’s Playhouse of the Ridiculous. In contrast, Weiss’s work was doubly queer: destabilizing sexual and gender categories as Weiss inhabited an infinite variety of them, each more shocking than the last, and blasting apart the performance conventions through which other artists deconstructed them. Weiss didn’t bother much with costumes—his sudden transformations “without a visible moment of transition, no gears”—required no hats, garments, or props.16 Darting in a direction opposite from the gender-queering frou-frou of feather boas, wigs, and elaborate raiment that flowered forth at the same theaters where [ 386 ]

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he worked, Weiss banked on his queer body, often near-naked, pumped and glistening with the sweat of his labor. With And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid, Part II (La MaMa, 1973, curtain time: 1:00 a.m.) the cruising Finnish gymnast made his first appearance,Weiss playing both Bjorn and his pickup in the scene of seduction, sex, and murder; so did a shtick involving a manic medley of show tunes. Queerly,Weiss defied categories and the boundaries that delineate them in his confusion of the real and the imagined (figured by the repeated appearance of a Pinocchio image or character in his plays) and in the mix of moods he evoked—what the reviewer Michael Smith called a “disturbing blend of decadence and sheer horror with frivolity and innocent exuberance.”17 And it was not only the late hour of the curtain that placed Weiss’s work in queer time—an alternative to an ever-onward sense of chronology, marked out by normative work schedules, life-cycle events, and biological reproduction. It was also the foundering, meandering plot lines that sought no denouement and that felt like they could go on forever. Weiss upped the ante as Rent became a serial project—a form that arguably depends on the teleological linearity that queer temporality, and Weiss’s work, pointedly refuses. In ongoing episodes, Weiss developed Rent further, thickening (or, as he liked to say, “sickening”) the plot-lines, for example, setting Persky on Gehrhardt’s trail—an unending chase that only opened new avenues of mayhem and mirth. Space, too, was queer for Weiss and Martinez: They ran their own tiny theater, The Good Medicine and Company on East 10th Street, cramming about fifteen red-velvet chairs salvaged from a movie theater into two tight rows. It operated underground, deliberately outside the commercial sphere that was increasingly closing in on even the downtown theater scene. Weiss and Martinez had no phone. (When Kevin Kline, who’d admired Weiss’s work, wanted to invite him to play the Ghost, Osric, and the Player King in his 1986 Hamlet at the Public Theater, Kline had to slide a note under Weiss’s door to reach him). They didn’t have electricity, either. They lit the space with kerosene lamps and spectators quickly learned to bring flashlights to wield as follow-spots. Weiss called “blackout!” at the end of each scene and the audience heeded the cue. Beyond intimate, the space put Weiss within inches of spectators, and often, closer, as he climbed astride their seats or lay across their laps—always in service of a scene. Good Medicine ran off the grid in other important ways: it didn’t advertise, offer press seats to critics, run shows on a regular schedule, or apply for grants. If only two people showed up and paid their couple of bucks, Weiss W H O K N OW S W H E R E O R W H E N ?

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Figure 22.1 Jeff Weiss in Pushover: An Old-Fashioned Homosexual Mystery Play, La MaMa, 1973. Source: Amnon Ben Nomis, Courtesy of the La MaMa Archives, Ellen Stewart Private Collection.

performed; Martinez ran round to the corner bodega for snacks, which were shared at the end of the show. Which—straight time be damned— could run for three hours. Or four. Or even five.18 Eventually, Martinez recommended that Weiss bring additional actors into the work. Weiss kept a few of his show-stopping multicharacter turns to himself—a ballroom dancing teacher and all the old Jewish ladies he tutors and then murders, for instance—and he continued, logically enough, to play both Connie Gehrhardt and his doppelganger, Bjorn. In 1984, he collaborated with the now forty-year-old postmodern experimenters, the Wooster Group, staging And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid, Part IV (or, The Confessions of Conrad Gehrhardt) at their Soho home, the Performing Garage, and casting members of that company along with other actors. One of those performers, portraying various crazed, horny, and disappointed characters, was Kate Valk, the Wooster Group’s supremely versatile actor, whom the performance-art curator Mark Russell once dubbed “the Meryl Streep of downtown.”19 Her colleague Ron Vawter played Detective Persky, bringing his renowned laid-back sexiness with its hint of cool menace to the part. He died of AIDS in 1994. The August night I first attended, the overflow audience was stuffed tight into the Garage’s steep bleacher seating. There was no air conditioning and the show lasted four hours. Everyone stayed to the end. What I most keenly remember from that long sticky night is a scene when Connie/Bjorn finds an unsuspecting guy to go home with. He was played by Nicky Paraiso, the musician and actor (and nowadays, a programmer at La MaMa), who also filled in other roles, accompanied all the show’s songs on the piano, and sang a few himself. Connie/Bjorn stalks his slightly built prey around the stage, like a bobcat circling before the ambush, all the while exchanging suggestive banter with him. Soon he has Paraiso in his arms, embracing him from behind, gently at first, then squeezing his forearm against the young man’s torso with an urgency that pressed the air out of my own chest. paraiso: You’re very scary, Connie. weiss: You’re very frank, very sexy. paraiso: I’m glad you like me. weiss: Turn around, I’ll rub your neck. paraiso: You know right where I’m tense. weiss: Yeah. Tense and tight-assed. Before this evening’s over, honor bright, I’ll loosen you up, I promise. W H O K N OW S W H E R E O R W H E N ?

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paraiso: Gonna clean me out? weiss: Like the barrel of a gun. paraiso: Don’t break my neck. weiss: You do have a very small neck. paraiso: And you have very big hands. Easy!20 I was truly frightened—not in the way that one fears for actors beyond diegetic bounds because, say, they stray unawares too close to the edge of the stage or a piece of scenery looks like it might fall down—but concerned that the dramatic fiction itself would collapse, that Connie/Bjorn might really hurt his thin young quarry. Had Weiss pulled me so fully into the fiction that I believed a murder was imminent? Or had he pushed me so far out of it that I worried that Weiss was unintentionally going to do Paraiso real harm? I couldn’t quite tell, but also understood that was part of the point, insinuated by the meta-theatricality of Connie’s impersonation (if that’s what it was) of Bjorn. “You’re scaring me, Connie,” Paraiso said, and then shouted. “STOP ACTING!” Weiss called “blackout”—a Brechtian scene-ending technique he sustained even when performing in a house with a real lighting system—and that was that. A cheery musical number followed hard upon.

4 When Weiss and Martinez started a new serial in 1991, their ironic upending of what Jeff Nunokawa once called “a deep cultural idea about the lethal character of male homosexuality” became more pointed as AIDS, in Paul Morrison’s words, came to “stabilize, through a specifically narrative or novelistic logic, the ‘truth’ of gay identity as death or death wish.”21 Without ever explicitly mentioning AIDS, Hot Keys responded keenly to the epidemic; its central plot, after all, featured a mass murderer of gay men and a shaggy-dog chase after a purloined test-tube containing a cure for a mysterious deadly ailment that the show called “the Taint.” A gaggle of additional plot lines ran amok, some intersecting the main story and persisting for months, some dropped after a single episode. Among the recurring strands, often continuing from earlier instantiations of And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid: Sex-crazed Vicki Scheisskopf murders her way across

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the country, driving from New Jersey to California accompanied by her boyfriend Link, a failed lounge singer, her daughter, and her daughter’s hunky boyfriend.Yet another plot traces Billy Bunghole Battersall, a young hustler who picks up older men and bites them to death, having been fully trained—in wrestling, rough sex, and homicide—by his father.22 Yet one more follows the travails of Pinocchio in his quest to become a real boy; in one scene he appears stumbling and bloody, covered with purple lesions, ruing his wooden essence. “If I could know what it’s like to fuck for real, I’d die happy,” he says, “or at least fulfilled.”23 Weiss’s serial made no apology for—indeed, revelled in—its gleefully taboo-smashing polymorphous perversity, violent rampaging (never graphic—a banana typically stood in as a revolver). It made no plea for liberal tolerance, offered no chance to cheer an ally. Every week, scores of us attended this highly ritualized event—our secular shul, where we lustily sang along when Weiss invited us to join in the “traditional opening number” (Rodgers and Hart’s “Who Knows Where or When”) and with the closing tune (Herman and the Hermits’ “There’s a Kind of Hush [All Over the World]”). The downtown venues where Hot Keys played—usually beginning at 11p.m. or midnight and running three hours or more—were arranged informally.24 We sat at rickety cabaret tables or reclined on ratty old sofas or cushions on the floor—cheek by jowl with people we might never before have met, our sweaty bodies touching amid the press of the crowd. Cheap beer was for sale inside the theater and Weiss, who roamed through the audience to welcome us before the performance began, encouraged us to get up and purchase drinks at any point during the show. There were no intermissions. One had to arrive early to snag a good seat—or even to get in at all (admission: $6)—so preshow chitchat among the crowd was part of the event. We caught newcomers up on the serial’s plots, and, referring to the relentless tragedy unfolding outside the theater, learned who had been diagnosed in the last week (with what hardly needed specifying). With its late curtain-time, the show was also about releasing audiences into Manhattan’s streets in the wee hours of the morning, where one could both imagine Connie/Bjorn prowling around any corner and not help but notice the muting pall of gentrification that suffocated street life. (In a profoundly moving speech in one episode, Persky’s wife laments that she has not heard Spanish in her neighborhood since the “invasion of white slugs snuffling and crawling over the streets of the Lower East Side, spread like a pustulent ooze in its search for errant space.”25

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Martinez and Weiss cast the shows with a combination of skilled professional actors and rank amateurs. They did not hold tryouts, which they considered demeaning; Weiss just found or created roles for people who were interested, and he booked performers for between-scene interludes of songs, standup, and other cabaret acts the same way. In a 2009 note accompanying an exhibit that included material about Hot Keys, Weiss cheekily described his process: “No auditions. Wanna be in show? What d’ya like to do. Sing? Dance? Take off your pants? High drama? Low Comedy? Wanna blow a dog? Okay, I’ll write you a scene! Come over tomorrow, Welcome Aboard.”26 When I wrote about this work in 1992, I was eager to understand how it could oscillate so revealingly between misanthropy and utopianism, cynicism and sentimentality, and how it could present such crass and ugly material and yet feel so cheery and generous.27 What’s more, an energizing, communal elation surged forth from this work even as it depicted people as selfish, greedy, murderous, mean, depraved, corrupt, and utterly nasty. In part the answer lay in the relief and satisfying sass of a show that defied the sympathy-seeking of more conventional AIDS works, throwing filth in the face of what Douglas Crimp decried during the plague years as “the vast public-relations effort to humanize and dignify our losses for those who have not shared them” and offering an expiating catharsis to those “who have cared and done so little about this great tragedy.”28 The artist Sharon Hayes captured its mysterious force when she commented that “something was happening in the room that exceeded all of us and also depended on all of us. I think we were suddenly finding ourselves as a part of an event or a group or a world.”29 While the audience was diverse—queer, straight, multiculti and multigenerational—the show cast us as a coherent entity each week, replete with common memories that exceeded the ways in which “every play is a memory play,” as the dramatic theorist Marvin Carlson has argued.30 We enacted them as we sang its theme songs, greeted its returning performers, recalled its plot lines, and brought flashlights with us to shine at the action. Entirely unnecessary in practical terms—the spaces were fitted out with at least minimal stage lights—they served as tools of our communal engagement and commitment. We listened intently, ready to flip off the switches on the cue, “blackout.” Participating in taking care of the performance, we recognized and celebrated the communitas of our AIDS work and activism. [ 392 ]

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5 When I reminded myself to bring a flashlight as I prepared to attend the 2015 performances (realizing it now came along unbidden on my iPhone), I was signaling one key reason I anticipated them so eagerly. I wanted to root around in the archive of feelings that the serial had amassed over its multiyear run.31 Specifically, a feeling akin to the one Rebecca Solnit considers in A Paradise Built in Hell: “an emotion graver than happiness but deeply positive” that arises in the face of catastrophe when one recognizes how people are joining with generosity in common, caring purpose. Opening an “extraordinary window into social desire and possibility,” she writes, the human cooperation and solicitude that come to the surface during crises reveal “a glimpse of who else we ourselves may be and what else our society could become.”32 I was not looking back nostalgically, then, but seeking utopian possibility in a performed present. Seeing Weiss’s work again promised the “queer futurity” defined by José Esteban Muñoz: “a temporal arrangement in which the past is a field of possibility in which subjects can act in the present in the service of a new futurity.”33 The performances themselves came about as acts of care. Weiss had shelved his serial projects when Martinez developed Parkinson’s disease around 1999. He started taking acting gigs in plays on and off Broadway and in film and TV in order to amass some savings for the first time in his life, enabling the couple to retire, a few years later, in Weiss’s hometown of Allentown, Pennsylvania, in a house he inherited from his father. Weiss became Martinez’s full-time caregiver. After Weiss broke down from emotional and physical exhaustion himself and was hospitalized for more than two weeks, the cost of the twenty-four-hour private nursing service looking after Martinez in the meantime, drove the men into perilous debt. To raise funds to help, Nicky Paraiso suggested a benefit performance to his friend, the director Brooke O’Harra (best known for directing and cowriting the hilarious lesbian serial, Room for Cream, which played at La MaMa in 2008 and 2009). Explaining how little money can be realized by such events, she helped set up a GoFundMe campaign, instead. It raised $30,000 in twelve days. Still, Weiss responded with excitement when Paraiso mentioned the idea of a performance and they decided to go forward, with O’Harra directing.34 O’Harra rejected the term “revival” for the project: “I think we’re staging the work. I’m resisting this idea that what we are mounting is what existed,” W H O K N OW S W H E R E O R W H E N ?

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she said. “The project itself was never that. It was not predictable and it was never the same, the scenes were used in different incarnations of the work, but often with new scenes added.” Indeed, Weiss gave her some 2,000 pages of scenes from which to assemble the three evenings. O’Harra said she was driven by a desire to understand Weiss’s work better—this would be a “research project” as well as “a labor of love” for O’Harra, who is some thirty-five years younger than Weiss and had never seen his serials. Her motivation, as well the multigenerational casting of the show, evinces a queer-time means of cultural transmission. Operating outside the nuclear family structure’s built-in vectors for passing down culture (within the forward-march process of straight time, which presumes the reproduction of that very family form), queers must create and seek out their queer heritages; they do so in fits and starts as individuals come into their queerness on their own time. (There’s no age-specific moment, like those that are celebrated by a quinceañera or bar/bat mitzvah, to mark entry into queer community.) What’s more, unlike an if-only-they-knew effort to school a young LGBTQ generation about AIDS—the professed intention of the revivals of The Normal Heart in 2011 and, then, in 2016, of the 1992 musical Falsettos—the Rent/Hot Keys transmission flowed in both directions, swirling between those who’d lived through the plague years and those who had not, those who had already played in Weiss’s work and those who had never even seen it.35 Some took roles they’d played years before; some learned parts once realized by actors who have since died. In rehearsing and performing them, the cast literally embodied the transmission of radical queer memory and in turn, conveyed it to a multigenerational audience. Spectators who were newcomers to Weiss’s work had no trouble leaping into its easy-to-learn sing-alongs and flashlight cues; like the young actors, they, too, were interpellated into this queer culture, absorbing collective memory and remaking it anew.

6 Of course the 2015 performances began with the “traditional opening number,” a song that always worked on several levels for Weiss. In the context of Babes in Arms, the 1937 musical for which “Where or When” was written, Lorenz Hart’s lyrics suggest how two young, straight lovers feel so destined for each other that their meeting produces a sense of déjà vu. In the refrain, [ 394 ]

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they marvel that as they converse and gaze at each other, they sense that they’d done so before, though they can’t recall where or when. Weiss’s use of the tune calls forth and claims the let’s-put-on-a-show enthusiasm of the wayward kids in the old musical, a crew Weiss’s own merrily motley company might identify with. At the same time, the song offers a brash queer wink: one can hear it as an exchange between two people trying to place how they know each other when they meet some time after having shared an anonymous sexual encounter. The song comments, too, on the recursive nature of theater, where each performance is both a fresh experience and a repetition, where it’s always the case for an actor that “things you do come back to you / As though they knew the way.” When the tune kicked off the evenings at the Kitchen and we sang our hearts out, new meanings gushed in. Now it also described what was happening even as we belted along: the words and melody I hadn’t crooned in years indeed flooded back on their own; more uncannily, the performances unfolded as both old and new, as familiar as they were strange. This mix of in-the-moment attentiveness and inner musing differed from what happens when, at one and the same time, I might be involved, say, in Oscar Isaac’s Hamlet while recalling Kevin Kline’s or Simon Russell Beale’s or Christian Camargo’s or Scott Shepard’s deconstructive remake of Richard Burton’s, or any of the others that ghost my history of theater-going. Those are interpretive and comparative cognitive operations; revisiting Weiss’s work, in contrast, was more like riding the current of the performance’s ineluctable present tense while simultaneously succumbing to the tug of a retrospective undertow. I was occupying two time zones at once. “Where or When,” in short, had become the theme song of queer temporality. In the years between the original Hot Keys series and the 2015 presentations, queer theory caught up with Weiss; its new terms have made what Weiss had been doing all along more nameable, and they help define the memory work it can accomplish. The memory politics of the 2015 work lie not in a narrative that traces the efforts of AIDS activists, caregivers, or patients, nor in the delivery of information, nor by inducing humanistic identification with the characters. Rather, the work revels in queer failure, thereby opening the way to “more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.”36 Its numerous plots never resolve, and in any event, they are constantly interrupted by songs and vaudeville acts (the interruptions themselves are an instrument of queer time, thwarting the show’s forward progress); some of the old gags and bathroom jokes fall flat, W H O K N OW S W H E R E O R W H E N ?

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Figure 22.2 Jeff Weiss and the Glee Club in And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid at the Kitchen, July 2015. Source: Alisa Solomon.

and decorum would have gone out the window if it had ever arrived at all. The virtuosity of some of the actors highlights the lack of skill of others; similarly, the great performers entertaining in the between-scene interludes make the bad ones all the more likely to draw groans. All of this “failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming” figures most of all the queer failure to participate successfully in heteronormative (or even homonormative) reproduction.37 Parenting in Weiss’s world always goes bust. Connie Gerhardt’s mother makes scatological chit-chat at the dinner table, Connie and Izzy aren’t ashamed to say that they procreated only for the sake of a welfare check, Billy’s sexual daddy is really his daddy. The 2015 performances made palpable one more kind of failure that theater by nature both displays and defies: the body’s, in this case, Weiss’s. Rather than acting in the scenes he once inhabited so thoroughly, Weiss retained only his role as hospitable emcee, leading the songs, announcing scene titles, and calling out “blackout” to end them. Where once he stalked the perimeters of the playing space, sometimes mouthing along with actors in scenes he had no role in, now he had to sit down. His once-forceful voice rusted out on the higher notes of the songs. Even when he was in his fifties, Weiss often preened shirtless onstage; he leapt around and twisted and stretched in every direction, muscles popping. Now, in his mid-seventies, he kept all his clothes on, draped loosely over his thin frame, and while he still hovered on the edges of scenes, sometimes he tottered. Compelling performers transmit an unusual, heightened vitality onstage even as they are always—in Herb Blau’s famous observation—“dying in front of your eyes.”38 While this tension accounts in part for what makes live performance so riveting, we seldom see actors whose vigor has begun to dwindle. Just as he detaches hopeful futurity from the image of the child—children are as vicious and lacking in innocence as anyone else in his work—Weiss defies the spurning of age that rejects old bodies as inadmissible to a future. As a queer performer, already standing outside reproductive teleology, Weiss let his frailty be seen.39 Taking in the pathos of his fragility was especially complicated and unsettling and poignant in the context of work that recalls the loss of men cut down in their prime. Weiss recalled them through his own body—as did other performers. What would they have been like as old men, I wondered as I watched Weiss, who appeared diminished and yet resuscitated by the oxygen of the stage. Most of all, I sensed the spectral presence of Ron Vawter, no doubt both because of the searing power of his acting and because I had known him W H O K N OW S W H E R E O R W H E N ?

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personally. The longtime downtown actor (and a member of the influential experimental collective Mabou Mines), Greg Mehrten, Vawter’s surviving partner, played Jiminy Cricket to a Pinocchio portrayed by the young trans actor Jess Barbagallo. In a scene near the third evening’s end, Pinocchio reveals himself to be an actor merely pretending to be Jiminy’s beloved marionette. (“Jiminy:You’re not a puppet or a real boy, are you? Pinocchio: I’m both those things and more, Cricket. I’m an actor.”)40 Pinocchio dies, and Jiminy cradles him in his arms as he delivers one of Martinez’s bittersweet ballads, another regular in Hot Keys: “Please Let Love Pass Me By.” As Mehrten sang—“I don’t need the thrill, I have lost the skill, my heart be still, I cry”—I could hear that I was not the only one sobbing. It was if Mehrten was singing for Vawter, for everyone. The deliberate schmaltz of the song—Weiss regularly milked sentimentality amid his shows’ mayhem, revealing both its ridiculousness and its utility—gave the audience an opportunity to cry together, a moment of mourning as striking as Valk’s comic evocation of Vawter with that jocular crotch-squeeze. In both instances—and throughout the three evenings— memory mingled with new concoctions of queer excess and queer failure. Jill Dolan has recognized a progressive, prefigurative possibility in the spectator’s whiff of the performer’s mortality: “The actor’s willing vulnerability perhaps enables our own and prompts us toward compassion and greater understanding. Such sentiments can spur emotion, and being moved emotionally is a necessary precursor to political movement.”41 Though I have always been at least sentimentally sympathetic to that notion about theater in general, it never felt so palpably plausible to me as it did at the Kitchen on those July nights in 2015. Far from agit-prop or documentary drama that sets out to spark activist fuses, the Rent/Hot Keys performances, for all their gleeful grossness, did something more delicate, and for all their exuberance, something more internal and quiet: they rekindled my pilot light, readying it to flame into action. But who knows where or when.

Notes 1. Among others, these plays included Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985); William Hoffman’s As Is (1985); Harvey Fierstein’s Safe Sex, (1987); Robert Chesley’s Jerker, or The Helping Hand (1987), Harry Kondoleon’s Zero Positive (1988); and Paula Vogel’s, The Baltimore Waltz (1992) to name just some that

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2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

preceded or were contemporaneous with Hot Keys. An early full-length critical study about theater addressing AIDS—and still the definitive one—is David Román’s Acts of Intervention: Performance. Gay Culture, and AIDS (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 1998. Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London: Routledge, 1997), 3. There is a further, profound literature on the role of memory in the theatrical experience and of the sense of “ghosting” in the theater. See, among others: Herbert Blau, Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theatre (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1983); Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003); and Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in the United States, 1.1 million people are living with HIV (https://www.cdc.gov /hiv/statistics/overview/ataglance.html) and the United Nations counts nearly 37 million people living with HIV worldwide (http://www.unaids.org/sites /default/files/media_asset/UNAIDS_FactSheet_en.pdf). Both accessed December 11, 2018. The CDC projects that if current infection rates continue, half of black gay men and a quarter of Latino gay men in the U.S. will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetimes For a searing account of the harrowing experiences of men of color with HIV in the American South, see: Linda Villarosa,“America’s Hidden HIV Epidemic,” New York Times Magazine, June 6, 2017. https://www .nytimes.com/2017/06/06/magazine/americas-hidden-hiv-epidemic.html. Scott A. Schoettes, “Trump Doesn’t Care about HIV. We’re Outta Here,” Newsweek, June 16, 2017, http://www.newsweek.com/trump-doesnt-care-about-hiv -were-outta-here-626285. According to the CDC, in the United States, only 40 percent of people with HIV have access to the medications. See: “Vital Signs: HIV Diagnosis, Care, and Treatment Among Persons Living with HIV—United States, 2011,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, November 28, 2014, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr /preview/mmwrhtml/mm6347a5.htm?s_cid=mm6347a5_w. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 261. I argue for the inherent queerness of theater as a form in “Great Sparkles of Lust: Homophobia and the Antitheatrical Tradition,” in The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater, ed. Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 9–20. Ross Wetzsteon, “The Spirit of Off-Off Broadway: Underground Legend Surfaces,” The Village Voice, April 26,1976, 111–112. James Leverett, “Gertrude Stein Lights the Lights,” Soho Weekly News, November 9, 1979. W H O K N OW S W H E R E O R W H E N ?

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11. Elinor Fuchs, “Downtown Visions,” Soho Weekly News, May 31, 1979, 68. 12. Ross Wetzsteon, “Theatre: A Funny Walk Home” (review), Village Voice, February 16, 1967, 23. 13. Julius Novick, “Theatre: And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid,” Village Voice, September 1, 1966, 17. 14. Wetzsteon, “Spirit of Off-Off Broadway,” 112. 15. Wetzsteon, “Theatre: Funny Walk,” 12. 16. Fuchs, “Downtown Visions,” 68. 17. Michael Smith, “Theater Journal: Pushover,” Village Voice, November 15, 1973. (Clipping, play files, La MaMa Archives, no page number.) 18. I witnessed many of these aspects of Weiss and Martinez’s work. They are also described in contemporary press accounts, Stephen Bottoms, Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), and Sarah Schulman, Stagestruck: Theatre, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 19. Mark Russell quoted in Ada Calhoun, “She Barely Even Looks like Paul Robeson,” New York Times, March 12, 2006. 20. The scene is quoted in Bill Rice, “Artist in Conversation: Jeff Weiss,” Bomb 10, Fall 1984, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/jeff-weiss-1/. 21. Jeff Nunokawa, “ ‘All the Sad Young Men’: AIDS and the Work of Mourning,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 311; Paul Morrison, The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 55. 22. In 2017, texts of these two plotlines were published in companion volumes: Jeff Weiss, . . . And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid:The Saga of Vicki Sheisskopf and . . . And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid: Billy and His Daddy (Allentown, PA: Blue Heron Book Works, LLC). 23. From script pages for July 16, 2015, kindly supplied by Brooke O’Harra. No page numbers. 24. Hot Keys began at a raw space on W. 17th Street, produced by Naked Angels for the full 1991–1992 season; it continued in the basement of PS 122 the next year and then sporadically there and later at MCC Theater. 25. Script from the July 2015 performances at the Kitchen kindly supplied by Brooke O’Harra. 26. The exhibit was Stuart Sherman: Nothing Up My Sleeve at Participant Inc. at 253 East Houston Street in New York, November 8–December 20, 2009, curated by Jonathan Berger. Thanks to Berger for sending me the text. 27. “A New York (Theater) Diary, 1992,” Theater 24, no. 1 (1993): 7–18. 28. Douglas Crimp, “The Spectacle of Mourning,” in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 198. [ 400 ]

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Crimp made this point in a discussion of his ambivalence about the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, an early, popular form of AIDS memory work. 29. Sharon Hayes, interviewed by Julia Bryan-Wilson for the website of the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (which she received in 2013); interview conducted by email April–May 2013. http://herbalpertawards.org/artist/influences-2. 30. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 2. 31. The phrase is from Ann Cvetkovich: An Archive of Feeling: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 32. Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). Focusing on five historical disasters, Solnit discusses the extraordinary networks of care that LGBTQ communities and their allies forged in the 1980s and beyond very little. Perhaps because AIDS activism demanded that the government respond to the health crisis, the case does not quite fit Solnit’s argument against “top-down responses,” 5–6. 33. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 16. Jill Dolan also makes a compelling case for the power of live theater to forge a sense of utopian commonality. See her Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2005.) 34. These details were recounted in two discussions: by O’Harra in an interview on The Kitchen blog: “In Conversation with Brooke O’Harra,” by Kayla Fanelli http://thekitchen.org/blog/40; and by Jeff Weiss during an event celebrating the life and art of Carlos Ricardo (Richard C.) Martinez, held at La MaMa on May 1, 2017. Thanks to the La MaMa Archive for supplying a video of the event. 35. On the instructional intentions of The Normal Heart on Broadway, see David Román, “The Normal Heart, Then and Now,” in ArtAIDSAmerica, ed. Jonathan David Katz and Rock Hushka (Seattle:Tacoma Art Museum in Association with University of Washington Press, 2015), 120–127. The librettist and director of Falsettos James Lapine said that he was motivated to revive his show after taking a young assistant to see The Normal Heart: “At intermission she looked at me and said: ‘Is this based on fact? I mean I know about AIDS, but I didn’t know it was like this.’ That made me think it was important to tell these stories now to the younger generations.” Ginia Bellafante, “Lessons on Rebelling, from the 1980s,” New York Times, December 1, 2016. 36. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 42. 37. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 42. 38. Herb Blau, Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theatre (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1983), 134. W H O K N OW S W H E R E O R W H E N ?

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39. Significantly, other artists recently making work involving their aging, failing bodies, are also queer. In Ruff, Peggy Shaw (in her seventies) describes and displays the impact of a recent stroke; in Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there’s nothing left to move? (2015), Yvonne Rainer (nearly eighty-one when she made it) joins young and old performers in a range of gesture and movement. 40. Script pages for July 16, 2015 performance kindly supplied by Brooke O’Harra. 41. Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 41.

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CH A P T E R X X III

El Edificio de los Chilenos (The Building of the Chileans) Heroic Memory Revisited by a Post-Revolutionary Daughter MILENA GRASS KLEINER

M

y memory is made up of fragments of assorted media. While writing this paper, I realized that the gaps in between play a crucial role, because trying to fill them creates a narrative, which is always an attempt to make sense of this disparate collection. My experience is not unique. In postconflict societies, the political stakes of balancing private recollection with public memory are high. This complexity is perhaps most fully explored in artistic works that try to grapple with the gaps and contradictions of memory work.

The Autobiographical Documentary Towards the end of the seventies, the militants of MIR exiled in Europe, decided to return to Chile in order to fight against the military Dictatorship. The ones who could would help through legal means, others through clandestinity [sic]. Many had children and couldn’t return with them. So the idea of a community center to shelter these children was born. Proyecto Hogares (Project Homes) gathered 60 kids that were left to [the] care of 20 people who assumed the responsibility of their upbringing for the years to come.1

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The Building of the Chileans (El Edificio de los Chilenos), a documentary film by Macarena Aguiló (born 1971) and Susana Foxley (born 1967) narrates a twofold story: the personal life experiences of Macarena Aguiló as a child living in exile in Proyecto Hogares (Project Homes) with sixty other children and the epic narrative the Revolutionary Left Movement (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, MIR) 2 created about its resistance to dictatorship. In so doing, Aguiló questions the primacy of the male hero in revolutionary movements and the relegation of family life and parenting to a secondary position. She makes the mother-daughter relationship the lens through which several decades of Chilean history are contested and rewritten. In this chapter, I argue that the film becomes an intervention in national memory, challenging a heroic masculine narrative of the past that elided the failure of the MIR to change society. Yet, I also show that the film does not necessarily embrace a feminist perspective and maintains an ambivalent attitude toward radically changing gender roles. The film represents a way for a younger generation to individuate itself from the generation that lived through the dictatorship and its immediate aftermath. It revisits Aguiló’s own history as one of the sixty children in the Proyecto Hogares. It presents the pain and family breakdown that the search for a new social order brought both to the parents who made the decision to return to Chile to fight and to the children they left behind in Europe. Questioning the choices made by her own mother and father, the director strives to assert her own identity, which is often overshadowed by the prominent role played by her parents in national struggle and suffering. In so doing, Aguiló brings to light memory narratives that have been long obscured because they belong to a minority group—children with little agency.

The Subjective Documentary Revisited by Macarena Aguiló The film is part of a trend in which “the documentary has become a new space for the configuration of subaltern identities and citizenships traditionally marginalized in the political and cultural context created by neoliberalism in contemporary Latin America.”3 From the year 2000 onwards, there has been an outpouring of movies by young Chilean directors dealing with dictatorship and memory.4 Together they constitute a generational [ 408 ]

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movement within Chilean cinematography, analogous to other Latin American countries that have experienced state terrorism and are in the process of dealing with historical trauma. Drawing a parallel between the filmmakers with family ties to the MIR in Chile, and the Montoneros in Argentina, Llanos points out that, “The second generation uses film as a means of [creating an] alternate archive where memory is split between ideology and affect in the construction of identity, [especially] gender identity, over patriarchal, traditional roles for women.”5 All these films correspond to a genre described as autobiographical documentary, moving from the detached, objective presentation of historical events that characterized the documentary genre in the 1970s, to a subjective approach which situates the filmmaker’s point of view and sensibility as the organizational axis of the film. In terms of their narrative structure, they revisit the past to construct a “memory road movie,” as Argentine filmmaker Albertina Carri described her own seminal film Los Rubios (Argentina, 2003). In Aguiló’s film, as in any “road movie,” wandering plays a significant role in the development of the plot: searching for her life story, she moves from one place to another looking for the sites where meaningful events (either traumatic or joyful) had taken place. Starting in Villa Grimaldi, where she was kept hostage at the age of three, she then revisits her childhood wanderings through France, Belgium, Cuba, and her final return to Chile. Even though time and its recurrence seem inescapable in this narrative, space plays an equally significant role. In artistic productions related to traumatic experiences, the victims’ identification of the sites where the violations of human rights took place often serves as judicial evidence of the crimes. In these cases, the enhanced importance of space and temporal disruptions—most victims of torture report a very loose sense of time progression—creates a tight chronotope where going back in time means revisiting a particular place.6 Hence the relevance of locus in the commemoration of traumatic memory and in the creation of memory museums. In terms of cinematic language, many of these documentaries also draw on an interplay of found footage, new film sequences—especially interviews—and archival objects such as photographs, documents, and drawings. Even though they all premiered in Europe, and several have won important international prizes, they were featured only for short periods of time in small cinemas circulating mostly among general audiences and scholars sensitive to memory issues.7 Despite these commonalities, these films differ, particularly in terms of the degree of political violence suffered by the directors or their families during the dictatorship, how they use particular EL EDIFICIO DE LOS CHILENOS

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aesthetic resources, and the level of self-reflection and performativity evinced by the filmmaker. Even though Lagos states that El Edificio de los Chilenos belongs to a series of Chilean documentaries that “configures an audiovisual version of what Marianne Hirsch has defined as ‘postmemory’; i.e. the revisitation of the traumatic family history by the second generation by means of the memories of its protagonists or survivors,” this is not the case.8 Aguiló does not base her movie on her parents’ memories but on her own recollections. Hence, her film and those of the generation of filmmakers she belongs to can be understood as an individuation process that allows the documentarians to build their own identities beyond the engulfing shadow of parents who were victims of the military regime. The process of taking their own life stories to the screen allows them to build a memory narrative of their own as they address recent history subjectively. Typically they move away from the construction of a male hero figure to highlight more intimate scenes and a more complex and kaleidoscopic cast of characters. In the process, they divert the focus away from the public arena of traditional political parties towards a reflection on different family models (the Western nuclear family, the single parent family, the socialized family, and so on) that are seen as spaces of conflict that bring politics into the so-called private world.

El Edificio de los Chilenos: A Daughter’s Story In this context, El Edificio de los Chilenos, called by Llanos a “subjective documentary,” has been characterized as personal, performative, and autobiographical.9 The film explores a specific project of the Revolutionary Left Movement. In 1973, the MIR numbered 10,000 members and associates, 585 of whom were murdered by the end of the dictatorship, among them, its most prominent leader, Miguel Henríquez (1944–1974). To accomplish its revolutionary aims—which initially included changing the bourgeois nuclear family and the patriarchal gender system—the MIR took up arms, carrying out spectacular paramilitary operations in its aim to overthrow Pinochet. After the male militants in exile had returned to Chile to fight covertly against the dictatorship, the women expressed their willingness to come back as well. Thus, the concept of the MIR’s new family order was put to the test as the children of these exiles were to remain in Europe. It was legitimately believed that their presence in Chile would endanger their [ 410 ]

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parents’ lives. Macarena Aguiló was kidnapped in 1974 at the age of three by the National Intelligence Directorate (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, DINA) in order to force her father, Hernán Aguiló, then the MIR undersecretary for covert operations, to give himself up to the military authorities. Macarena was released twenty days after having disappeared without being subjected to physical torture. However, the revolutionaries then understood that the secret police would observe no limits when it came to capturing its opponents. Macarena’s film, however, is not about this early experience of political violence but about Proyecto Hogares and her mother’s decision to leave her in France at the age of ten. She then lived with her foster father and siblings in a community model that was to offer a surrogate family for sixty children, moving them from France to Belgium to a final settlement in Cuba in a place known as the Building of the Chileans. In the trailer of El Edificio de los Chilenos we hear Macarena’s own voice-over narrative: In the late 1970s, the MIR decided to send its members back to Chile. My mother decided to return, but she couldn’t take me with her, because she had to enter secretly. She explained that we would be separated, and that I’d live in a community project, with foster parents and many other children. Together we’d be one big family called “Proyecto Hogares.” As is typical in autobiographical documentaries about memory, Macarena’s film brings together different media, including found footage and interviews, but there are also some scenes where the image has been treated to give it a vintage look, thus creating fake documentary moments that the spectator may recognize as such. In so doing, the director dissolves the traditional distinction real/unreal, offering the audience a liminal genre where factual information and emotions are deeply intertwined. What appears here as an aesthetic object is built in part by a range of diverse testimonial objects, which turns it into an account of the process of creating a personal family archive from both family materials and also from broadly circulated images.10 Along with numerous photographs, both private and public, we are shown legal documents, manuscript letters, newspapers cuttings, printed pages, and children’s drawings. The complexity of the visual composition, which also includes animation sequences, is paralleled by the soundtrack, where the filmmaker’s EL EDIFICIO DE LOS CHILENOS

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Figure 23.1 Family photographs handled by the filmmaker.

voiceover guides the chronologically organized narrative from Macarena’s kidnapping to the shooting of the film. The animated sequences build an emotional dynamic that correlates with the realistic images of the filmed footage.Throughout the film the documentarian’s voice is heard reading the letters her mother sent her while she was in hiding in Chile and recalling nightly dreams and the story of her kidnapping.11 Along with the director’s own voice, the soundtrack includes popular children’s songs, some of which are sung by a child in voiceover narration, who might either be Macarena herself in her childhood exile in Paris or her son, also featured in the film. The diverse quality of images and sounds, and the richness of the combination of both, contest an easy divide between the conventions of documentary and feature films.While intensifying the sense of conflicting truths, they also make it difficult for the spectator to identify “the truth.” Every time the depiction of past events comes dangerously close to a factual account that would appeal only to the spectator’s rationality, the director adds an affect intensifier that relocates the audience in relation to a life experience laden with diverse emotions. All these different materials are intertwined not just to tell the untold story of the whereabouts of MIR members’ children during the dictatorship, but also the untold story of MIR’s failure to accomplish the revolution it was seeking. In post-conflict societies, the need to preserve the memory of the victims often tends to overshadow other narratives.12 [ 412 ]

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In the case of the Chilean opposition to the dictatorship, the active political militant has received less attention than the captive submitted to torture and imprisonment without any ability to act. In this context, the MIR case is exceptional, since it has been depicted as the most active, heroic party in the struggle against Pinochet, a representation that focuses especially on its male members. El Edificio de los Chilenos builds a counterhegemonic memory attentive to the dynamics of gender in the construction of memory. As Llanos has pointed out: “Gender and how it shaped militancy is a key issue these films show, highlighting the difference between males and females and how the revolutionary model was male centered and hierarchical and women were asked to masculinize while also accept[ing] general gender expectations.”13 The mother of the documentarian is caught in this double bind, and throughout the film her daughter reveals a painful contradiction: she was traumatically abandoned but for a good cause—to provide a new social and political context for future generations. However, after the revolutionary project failed, her mother remarried in post-dictatorship Chile and raised new children in a perfectly bourgeois family. El Edificio de los Chilenos thus raises the question of the value of individual sacrifice for the sake of the collective from the perspective of mother-daughter bonding. Abandonment is a recurrent topic in the film that sediments into different, parallel layers. Both the children left in Proyecto Hogares and the parents who returned to Chile recall the separation as a traumatic experience of being left or leaving behind. A male militant is explicit in the film: “The unthinkable, the unimaginable, the humanly unbearable . . . there can be no reconciliation without acknowledging that principle [that they were abandoned].”14 In building a counternarrative to the hegemonic heroic saga told by MIR leaders, Aguiló validates the intimate sphere over the public. In her interviews, she has expressed the intent to recover her childhood experiences from silence, to bring to light a subjectivity made invisible by the dominant memory narratives of both the political and revolutionary heroes of the resistance and of the adult victims of repression who were disappeared or tortured: I felt the need to tell this story. [.  .  .] In Chile, there are still many things untold, and the existing documentary production voices the experiences of the first generation, the generation that lived through the events. And they told this in the third person, and very politically. EL EDIFICIO DE LOS CHILENOS

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I’m part of the generation that lived the story, as a child, hence my approach is much more emotional. Even though I might have made a very political or rational elaboration of the facts, my story has the strength of the things told from the heart, the things that one has experienced. And I wanted to make that link, between political and personal, between public and private.15 To do so, she turns personal treasured objects into an organized archive. The material transformation of the letters her mother sent her exemplifies the various displacements of the same artifact among and amidst various fields (political, public, personal, intimate). Along with the exhibition of actual handwritten postcards and letters, we are told that most of the time, their parents’ missives could only reach their children in the shape of microfilm that had to be turned into photographs to be finally read.16 Furthermore, the director goes beyond the exhibition of the documents. We see the process through which Macarena types the contents of all the letters she got, turning them into word files she finally offers her mother and father in a printed compilation. The personal letters in a cardboard case are thus organized, transcribed, and transformed into printed material, removing their original nostalgic individual aura by putting all the letters in one massive volume similar to the judicial files we have seen in the proceedings on disappeared detainees. This procedure is paradoxical: in the same move, it depersonalizes the intimate epistolary archive and makes visible the work of mourning for the lost mother through hours of transcription. The move from being the passive receiver of a letter to the active producer of a trans-mediated version of the original brought from the child past to the adult present is more than a symbolic gesture. It expresses agency, as in the movie at large, where Aguiló eventually succeeds in performing herself. When she offers the printed letters to her mother, conducts interviews, or, finally, makes a movie about her past that is also a political statement, she stops being a character in the story of her parents, someone subject to the actions of others, to being the protagonist who makes the conflict, and a new story, unfold. The emphasis on the filmmaker’s agency and intervention are thus conveyed by the explicit manipulation of her personal archive. Her face looking into the documents, and especially the multiple shots where we see different documents in her hands, highlight the constructedness of the movie. The use of the subjective camera reveals the author’s aim: to produce a personal [ 414 ]

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bond with the spectators who share her gaze and see through her eyes. The constructedness and the effect of “seeing through her eyes” are also reinforced by the framed images that constitute another recurrent aesthetic motif in the film, conspiring against the illusion of unmediated access to reality on which former documentaries were based. The individuation process that Macarena Aguiló materializes through her film relies also on the inversion of the trope of “return” to find the lost child.17 In this case, the narrative of return is framed by the quest for the biological parents. It is a quest that fails because it is impossible to regain the relationship she shared with them before it was disrupted. As Macarena states in voice-over: “I couldn’t imagine how endless this meeting again would prove.” The unstable possibility of a renewed bond comes just at the end of the film when her mother, almost in tears and departing from the self-indulgent mode she has presented so far, admits that she should have stayed with her daughter in exile. Even though this statement does not change the past, it ignites a spark of reconciliation. Nevertheless, what is finally left is the recovery—not of the former nuclear family—but of the community of brothers and sisters who together went through “the most wonderful experience we ever had, but, at the same time, the most horrendous,” as one of Macarena’s foster siblings comments.18 As Aguiló reunites them to revisit their common past in order to create the film, their disenchantment with the meaningless sacrifice of the parent-child bond and the impossibility of coming to terms with their parents’ actions are replaced by the strengthening of the sibling bond.19 El Edificio de los Chilenos offers a way to display Aguiló’s own agency, displacing her mother from the central political role that Chilean official memory of the left has built in relation to its MIR revolutionaries. She has installed herself as the real protagonist of her life.The phantasmal figure who once stood in the shadow of the militant mother has become the distinct creator of her version of the past. But, composed of memory fragments built on subjective family archives, that past remains blurred and uncertain.20 El Edificio de los Chilenos resorts to memory to establish the current identity of the adult Macarena Aguiló. But perhaps the discovery of the past is not its main object. The film does more: it also constitutes a rite of passage from a past in which she was without agency, the child of a heroic mother, to a present where she herself has become a mother, resignifying a chapter of the MIR political history through her own critical filmic narrative. The twofold role of Macarena as director and protagonist obliges her to EL EDIFICIO DE LOS CHILENOS

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Figures 23.2 and 23.3 The materialization of Macarena Aguiló’s individuation process (final scene).

negotiate the difficulties of this double position. To do so, she combines two strategies: herself recalling experiences from her past while revisiting the places where she lived as a child in exile, and incorporating the testimonies of her parents and foster family members who tell their versions of the same story. The more I see this film, the more I find its author looking nostalgically to recreate the past of which she was deprived. The filming of [ 416 ]

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the documentary operates as the magical process that reorganizes her past by manipulating the matter of which it is made. Through this practice, she can become the mother that she herself did not have as a child.

Rewriting Heroic Memory Unlike the other directors of her generation, Macarena Aguiló has not focused on the search for missing relatives. Such a search might be a recursive process that reveals the impossibility of recovering the person who is lost, exerting a gravitational pull drawing one in again and again. In such cases, all the documents and testimonies are attempts to get to a mother or father who only exists as a longed-for absence. By contrast, the parents of the director are alive, and this results in a different kind of film narrative, one of conflict. Precisely because the MIR project was cut short, it is possible to question the political decisions of its members and to escape from the victim/hero mode so hegemonic in the memory narratives of the political left wing. In so doing, Aguiló intervenes in the construction of Chilean collective memory, challenging the revolutionary left memory narrative as simply a heroic odyssey of self-sacrifice. That memory now becomes more complex with the incorporation of two key elements. First, she makes visible the memories of the children of the militants who make evident how parenting and affect were relegated to a position secondary to politics and the “common good.” And, second, she broadens the timespan in which MIR actions are considered, now encompassing not only the fight against the dictatorship after the 1973 coup, but also its aftermath up until 2010, twenty years after free presidential elections were held. This allows the spectator to see both the long-lasting consequences of the decisions made by the militants and the failure of the revolutionary project that instead of preventing the installation of a neoliberal regime in Chile ended up being co-opted by that very regime. The work of mobilizing memory must go hand in hand with a critique of hegemonic memory.21 El Edificio de los Chilenos works as a countermemory on several different levels. It gives voice to “the children of the dictatorship” and creates a new subjectivity that still remains marginalized.22 Their testimonies build a polyphonic generational account of the losses suffered by the children of the heroes of the resistance. The voices of the film’s protagonists critique the usurpation of family ties by the revolution, thus EL EDIFICIO DE LOS CHILENOS

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challenging the official, little-contested version of the story of the MIR. But doing so, do they not also return to a traditional view of family, motherhood, and gender that the MIR tried to redefine? What is interesting about this film from a feminist perspective is the way the tension in the mother/daughter relationship comes to carry the tension between two visions of the country’s past and the role women play in the upbringing of children. On the one hand, the heroic narrative of the militants makes motherhood a role to be subordinated to a larger social good. This collides against the life experiences of the children who were born after the revolutionary ideal of social justice was overthrown by the coup in 1973 and who grew to see how their parents embraced a neoliberal way of life. On the other hand, the director seems to see the mothers’ abandonment of their children as a desecration of the traditional role of the mother, a role she herself seems to have embraced inasmuch as she shows several scenes of herself taking care of her son. In terms of questioning traditional parental roles, it is interesting to highlight the role the male militants play in the two narratives. In the epic story of the MIR that has been reproduced in collective memory, man plays the role of the hero who leaves his family behind. In Aguiló’s film, both her social father, Iván, who raised her and two other children when their parents returned to Chile, and a former male militant—whose name is not revealed (thus becoming the voice of all MIR militants who left their children abroad)—undertake the defense of family bonds. When asked why he left Macarena in Cuba, her social father answers that he did not intend to do so, but he was not allowed by the political party to take her with him when he decided to abandon Proyecto Hogares. On the other side, the male militant breaks into tears and stops the interview, totally unable in the present moment to understand how he reached the political decision to leave his children behind. Both his recollection of babies being separated from their mothers while still breastfeeding, and the numerous details of Macarena’s social father on the day-to-day life of the children under his care, place men in a caring affectionate position towards their sons and daughters. Nevertheless, the strong critique the director builds in the film against her mother—and all female militants through her—makes unclear whether she is trying to vindicate men, portrayed here as sensitive, caring, and affectionate, or just reinforcing the argument against women who are depicted as cold-minded and politically driven. In either case, the documentary recuperates the male militants [ 418 ]

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while strongly critiquing their female counterparts by upending patriarchal gender characterizations. The confrontation between two generations, between mother and daughter, reveals the tension between two sides of history and two forms of social organization. It becomes obvious that women struggled on two fronts in the 1970s: they struggled for the revolution and they struggled for equality with men. There is no doubt that the revolutionary model of the new man envisioned by Ché Guevara and pursued by all members of the MIR was for women an impossible one, since it negated their gendered identity. This historical tension must be recognized today, not only because of the cost it exacted from the children of the revolutionaries but also because it reveals the radical difficulties of transcending the centrality of the nuclear family based on blood relationships and patriarchy as the only legitimate form of social organization. El Edificio de los Chilenos accomplishes something unusual in the Chilean documentary movement: it mobilizes a particular memory of a childhood experience in order to rewrite a national narrative involving what is heroic, what families and motherhood should be. Even though the complexity of the film in terms of its aesthetic resources enlists the affective engagement of spectators, and overturns old masculinist narratives, it also criticizes the revolutionary mother with implicit reference to a more traditional, conservative view of gender roles. Macarena Aguiló is caught in a tricky trap, while escaping from the abandonment that she suffered due to the revolutionary commitment of her parents, she restores the traditional gender roles that have historically compelled women to choose between politics and family.

Notes 1. El Edificio de los Chilenos, directed by Macarena Aguiló and Susana Foxley (Chile: Aplaplac Productions, 2010). 2. The Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) was a leftist political organization (both revolutionary and extra-parliamentary) founded in 1965, defending the armed struggle to support the socialist revolutionary process lead by President Salvador Allende in Chile. The movement spread through the country, being particularly strong in Santiago and Concepción and within the universities. During the Popular Unity (1970–1973), it did not form a governing coalition, hesitating between a critical and a supportive mode. From the very EL EDIFICIO DE LOS CHILENOS

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

beginning of the dictatorship until its end, the MIR was severely repressed and its militants ended up detained, executed, disappeared, or exiled, even though the organization called them to stay secretly in the country to fight the dictatorial forces from within. Bernardita Llanos, “The Politics of Memory and Affects: Chilean Documentaries across Two Generations: Carmen Castillo and Macarena Aguiló” (unpublished document), 1. For example, El Eco de las Canciones (The Echo of the Songs [2010]), directed by Antonia Rossi (Chile, b. 1978); Mi vida con Carlos (My Life with Carlos [2009]), directed by Germán Berger Hertz (Chile, b. 1972); Reinalda del Carmen, mi Mamá y Yo (Reinalda del Carmen, my Mom and I [2006]), directed by Lorena Giachino Torrens (Chile, b. 1972); La Ciudad de los Fotógrafos (City of Photographers), directed by Sebastián Moreno (Chile, b. 2006); El Telón de Azúcar (The Sugar Curtain [2005]), directed by Camila Guzmán (Chile); En Algún Lugar del Cielo (Somewhere in Heaven [2003]), directed by Alejandra Carmona (Chile, b. 1965). Llanos, “Politics of Memory and Affects,” 2. Perhaps the most emblematic film here would be Los Rubios (The Blonds [Argentina, 2003]), directed by Albertina Carri, due to the media and academic interest it raised; and Papá Iván (Father Ivan [Argentina and Mexico, 2000]), directed by María Inés Roqué; Historias Cotidianas (Everyday Stories [Argentina, 2000]), directed by Andrés Habegger; and La Televisión y Yo (TV and I [Argentina, 2003]), directed by Andrés di Tella; among others. Bakhtin defined “chronotope” as an “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships,” and specified: “In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. The intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope.” Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics,” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 84. El Edificio de los Chilenos won several prizes, among them: Gran Premio Embajada de Francia, Festival Internacional de Documentales de Santiago, Fidocs, 2010; Mención honorífica, International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film, 2010; Mejor Documental del Año, ChileReality Festival de Cine Documental de Chillán, 2010; Segundo Premio Coral, Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano de La Habana, 2010; Premio especial Competencia Documental, Festival Internacional de Cine de Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, 2011; Best documentary, Muestra de Cine Latinoamericano de Cataluña, 2010. [ 420 ]

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8. Paola Lagos Labbe, “Primera Persona Singular. Estrategias de (Auto) Representación para Modular el ‘Yo’ en el Cine de no Ficción,” Comunicación y Medios 26 (2012): 20. 9. Stella Bruzzi states that “The performative documentary uses performance within a nonfiction context to draw attention to the impossibilities of authentic documentary representation,” in New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2000), 152. Cf. Michelle Bossy and Constanza Vergara, Documentales Autobiográficos, July 31, 2017, www.documentalesautobiograficos.cl.; Barry Keith Grant. Film Genre Reader III (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012); and Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 10. El Edificio de los Chilenos is a good example of the aesthetic and ethical practices of “postmemory” encompassed by the archival turn that Hirsch has identified as having a “consciously reparative move, [through which] they assemble collections that function as correctives and additions, rather than counters, to the historical archive, attempting to undo the ruptures caused by war and genocide.” Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory. Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 228. 11. This might be read as the memory remediation proposed by Astrid Erll, according to whom novels and films inform the way we build our own memories. See “Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory” in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 389–98. 12. For a full study of the construction of emblematic memory narratives in Chile, see the the three-volume series by Steve Stern, Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989–2006 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973–1988 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); and Remembering Pinochet’s Chile (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 13. Llanos, “Politics of Memory and Affects,” 11. 14. Even though the film refers to a particular situation that took place at the height of the 1980s, the filmmaker has also said that she wanted to address the current situation where children are abandoned because their parents, especially their mothers, immigrate in the search for better jobs, as happens in Chile with Peruvian women—a reference to the present that is not obvious in the film itself. 15. Interview of Macarena Aguiló, Casa de América (Casamerica), 21.03.2011, 1:15– 2:15, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCyhAYiy1gs, last accessed March 25, 2017. It is worth mentioning here that the double bond of personal/political, public/private was essential to the seminal book by Chilean feminist Julieta Kirkwood, Ser política en Chile. Las feministas y los partidos (Santiago, Chile: Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, 1986). EL EDIFICIO DE LOS CHILENOS

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16. The microfilms are shown to the audience to create a truth effect, which is reinforced by the quotation of TV spots, newspaper clips, found footage, etc., which, due to their indexical value, promise a direct link with reality. See Cristina Demaria, Semiotica e Memoria. Analisi del Post-Conflito (Roma: Carocci Editore, 2006); and Janelle Reinelt, “The Promise of Documentary” in Get Real: Documentary Theater Past and Present, ed. Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 6–24. 17. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory. 18. While Macarena herself and most of her foster sisters express their regret and resentment towards their parents, there is one foster brother—in the picture— who represents a counter-example when he recalls his mother asking him whether she should leave him or not: “She asked me, and I said yes. And until this very day, I say yes.” 19. Olin’s approach in this case is very productive: “Any gathering of photographs is a community. The handling of photographs always took part in imagining a nation, especially a diaspora” (Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 229). Indeed, shown here is the diaspora of the foster siblings, whose pictures Aguiló manipulates and also produces. The cinematographic setting mimics a photographic portrait session, and the movie shot is turned into a still image. 20. This slippage of the protagonist from one generation to the next is reinforced by the scenes at the very beginning of the film in which Macarena’s son is extra diegetic in terms of the story being told—that of the Proyecto Hogares.The boy represents the new condition of Macarena; once the child, she now has become the mother. 21. Nelly Richard, Crítica de la Memoria (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2010). 22. Some projects which have dealt with childhood under the dictatorship are Pajarito Nuevo (Laboratorio teatral Escuela de Teatro UC 2008), directed by María José Contreras, which started out as a performance in a research theater initiative in which interviews were conducted with individuals who had been children at the time of the coup in 1973 and at the beginning of the 1980s during the period of anti-Pinochet protests. Another noteworthy project is El Año en que Nací (The Year of My Birth, 2012) by Argentine director Lola Arias, who reproduced in Chile the methodology of her production Mi Vida Después (My Life Thereafter, 2009). Outside the creative arts, Chilean psychologist Elizabeth Lira, who played an important consultation role in the establishment of the Truth and Justice Commissions in Chile, has been working recently on cases of children who had been in the womb while their mothers were being tortured. The issue is a particularly complex one on the contemporary scene because, as there exists no legislation whatsoever in Chile on the termination of pregnancy, the debate surrounding the passing of an act to legitimize abortion under three [ 422 ]

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circumstances (rape, a threat to the life of the mother, or the nonviability of the fetus) is based on the reproductive rights of the mother. However, recognizing in the unborn babies who were tortured in utero the condition of victim implies considering them persons entitled to rights beyond their biological dependence on the mother, which would affect the argument in favor of the aforementioned legislation.This paradox illustrates some of the tensions generated today in Chile between the urgency to spotlight some of the victims of the dictatorship who have not yet been legally acknowledged and the rights that women have not yet been granted.

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CHA P T E R X X IV

Remembering “Possibility” Postmemory and Apocalyptic Hope in Recent Turkish Coup Narratives SIBEL IRZIK

A

prominent feature of the sociopolitical sphere in late capitalism, especially in countries like Turkey that have been inserted into that global system by means of violent military interventions that crushed radical oppositional movements, is the loss of a collective sense of “possibility”—of agency, social relevance, and hope. This could also be seen as the loss of the political, or “policide,” as historian Steve Stern calls what happened in Chile during the dictatorship.1 Stern uses the term to describe how an authoritarian regime’s assault on all political visions and practices deemed threatening can be massive enough to lead to the destruction of political life itself, of the existing ways of understanding and doing politics. “Policide” would be an apt characterization of the aftermath of the 1980 coup in Turkey, where the radical left’s defeat was followed by its fall into irrelevance in a social world dominated by the glitter of the marketplace. Restructuring the economy, the legal and the political systems, education, and the media, military rule eradicated not only oppositional movements but also the forms of collectivity and political culture that had made them possible. The resulting fracture between society and members of the leftist opposition, who were the most direct victims of the coup, as well as the apparent absence of politics from post-coup social life, also led to a fracture between the political and the aesthetic. The literary texts that attempted to register the memories of rebellion and repression in the “post-political” cultural environment of the 1980s were unable, for the most part, to frame [ 424 ]

revolt and defeat within coherent and meaningful life-stories, to present idealism and political action as intelligible modes of being. The repression had been massive and transformative enough to prevent the memories of rebellion from resonating with contemporary social experience.2 One could see Turkish literature’s strategies of indirection and ambivalence in relation to the political in this period—its ironic, self-disruptive absorption of political issues into textual ones—as symptoms of an aesthetic challenge presented by the sociohistorical and affective gap between these texts’ subjects and their contemporary readers. Addressing a readership in a general state of “obstructed agency with respect to the social,” in Sianne Ngai’s words, meant not having full recourse to the traditional modes of telling political stories, as political ideals and alternative visions of society had lost their credibility and emotional appeal.3 Ngai characterizes the general form of this affective discord in the following terms: In the transnational stage of capitalism that defines our contemporary moment, our emotions no longer link up as securely as they once did with the models of social action and transformation theorized by Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, and others. . . . The nature of the sociopolitical itself has changed in a manner that both calls forth and calls upon a new set of feelings . . . more suited . . . for models of subjectivity, collectivity, and agency not entirely foreseen by past theorists of the commonwealth.4 My purpose in this chapter, however, is not to describe the literary traces of this discord with the previously established forms of political life but to consider how fiction might offer strategies for countering the circumscription of political imagination—for envisioning and performing different affective modes of collectivity. To that end, I will discuss two fairly recent works of Turkish fiction that I believe attempt to call forth and call upon alternative structures of feeling undergirding political subjectivities by finding resources of hope in “ghostly” and “postmemorial” connections to the lost possibilities of the past. Even though they are both texts of trauma and mourning, they also use the resources of fiction to remember in ways that generate political hope. As Jonathan Flatley points out, “Fantasies about our happiness are always . . . given their affective force by the extent to which they respond to a past loss,” and, “the melancholic state of mind, then, even as it dwells on ruins and loss, is at the same time liberated to imagine how the REMEMBERING “POSSIBILITY”

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world might be transformed, how things might be entirely different from the way they are.”5 My first example is Murat Uyurkulak’s 2002 novel Tol (Kurdish for revenge), the narrative of a young man’s textual remembering of his family’s history of revolt and defeat. It starts with a simple but haunting sentence that gives expression to “the felt loss of a future”6: “Revolution was once a possibility and it was very beautiful.”7 The second is a text that allows itself to be haunted by this sentence and the same loss: Birgül OОuz’s 2012 book of linked short stories, Hah (That’s it),8 a young woman’s elegy for a dead father, a defeated revolutionary. The central characters in both texts belong, like their authors, to a politically orphaned generation—people who have grown up in the post-coup environment of depoliticization and cultural amnesia following the violent crushing of their parents’ revolutionary aspirations. Both open themselves to the haunting of the political through intergenerational transference and apocalyptic visions, willfully recreating the modes of hope and desire that accompany and perhaps enable collective agency.They portray intergenerational transference as the affective transmission not only of the scars of traumatic violence and repression but also of the promise of collectivity and revolt.

The Haunting of the Political in Tol Subtitled “A Novel of Revenge,” Tol can be read as a carnivalesque restoration of the political by means of a revenge imagined as an intergenerational call and response. The principal narrator Yusuf ’s earliest memory is his mother’s wound-like mouth on her disfigured face spelling out a genealogy of defeat: “They fucked us. They will fuck our children, too.”9 In his thirties now and already an exhausted revolutionary, Yusuf is about to go ahead with his long-planned suicide. But he wakes up from one of his particularly intense drunken stupors one day to find himself in a train compartment in the company of “the Poet.” The Poet is a leftist from the 1968 generation and a friend of the father Yusuf has never known because he left before Yusuf ’s birth to seek revenge for his friends who were murdered during the 1971 coup.The train is headed for Diyarbakır, the symbolic capital of the Kurdish insurrection, where, earlier, Yusuf succumbed under torture. Diyarbakır is also the current site of his father’s ongoing mad quest for revenge. In the train, the Poet hands over to Yusuf fragments of stories [ 426 ]

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about his parents and their friends, which Yusuf edits into the more or less coherent narrative that we are reading. Having worked as a proofreader in a publishing house until recently being fired because of his political past, Yusuf is not thrilled by this opportunity to author a self-begetting narrative. “I will read the stories one by one during the entire train ride, and as I read, a book will be written, right?” he says cynically, “I have corrected scores of such books.” But he is taken aback when the Poet asks in response: “And did they indeed become correct?”10 Confronting cynical textual self-consciousness with a seemingly naive commitment to an extra-textual truth, this exchange, I believe, signals a shift of emphasis away from writing as a more or less recuperative act in relation to past trauma. Although Tol does narrate traumatic events and selfconsciously displays their traces in its form and language, what makes it a “novel of revenge” is the fact that it is much more concerned with what its being written enables “outside” in the (fictional) world, with the politically redemptive force of a collective memory of unrealized and barely articulable possibilities, than with the effects of the act of writing/recollecting on Yusuf as wounded subject. Yusuf becomes “fat with stories” during this journey of return to his father’s past.11 An intense transference of memory and emotion brings his father and him together as orphans, defeated revolutionaries, and secret poets. “My father . . . has lived my life,” he says, recognizing not only how the two are “implicated in each other’s traumas” but also that their stories amount to an intergenerational repetition compulsion.12 This birth of the narrative out of the scattered fragments of different lives unconsciously mirroring each other can be seen as an articulation of postmemory, which Marianne Hirsch characterizes as being “mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation,” an investment of the kind Yusuf makes in his father’s life, enabled by “The Poet.”13 As a child,Yusuf knew his father only from fragments of stories his mother told her, “always beginning at some odd point, as if continuing an interrupted story. But that point would never be the continuation of something. It was as though there was a terrifying story in the background and my mother did not want it to come together in my little head.”14 It is precisely those kinds of discontinuities and the unspoken yet powerfully present background stories that narratives of postmemory render historically and affectively intelligible: “Postmemorial work . . . strives to reactivate and re-embody more distant political and cultural memorial structures by reinvesting them with resonant individual and REMEMBERING “POSSIBILITY”

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familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression.”15 The novel makes the political narratable by restoring violently disrupted familial connections and weaving the pains and hopes of the past generation into the memories of the present one. On the other hand, it also uses those connections to blow the story out of and beyond familial dimensions. Outside the train in which the narrative is being composed, all over the country, a series of bombs is set off by an “unknown power,” destroying the most prominent official institutions and buildings that represent big money, state terror, and oppression. People launch a massive rebellion in a superbly carnivalesque atmosphere, one that even spreads to other countries, and when the Poet and Yusuf arrive at the last station, Yusuf closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and thinks, “how beautiful the revolution is, when it is a possibility.”16 The moment the radio announces that all the explosions have taken place in the sewage system underlying the buildings, Yusuf and the Poet realize simultaneously that another returning child, Ada, is responsible for the bombings. Ada is the Poet’s child, conceived (or adopted while still in the womb) in another train compartment, miscarried and lost in a hotel toilet during the days of violence. Genderless, ageless, and wordless, this fruit of society’s bowels is endowed with powers to heal and to forge mysterious connections among people.Yusuf ’s father, for example, is healed by Ada after being beaten and left for dead by the police: “When I smiled, Ada came to sit on my lap, began to lick the blood on my arms. Cleaned me all over by licking. The saliva smeared all over me shone like diamond in the light of the moon and sweetly burned my skin.”17 After the healing, the two become inseparable like a strange pair of siblings in an unlikely household with the mother who never gave birth to Ada and the Poet, who may or may not be the biological father of the miscarried fetus. “Not of or for anyone,” Ada walks on the ceiling, bites into electric cables, downs wine by the bottle and vomits for hours, swallows and disgorges rats, performs self-immolations, and builds scaffolds to hang him/herself.18 Ada has in fact been disappearing and returning periodically throughout the novel, in rhythm with every uprising and its violent repression, always anticipated and sought for despite being eerily grotesque, or perhaps because of it. The Poet “blows” the name “A-DA” into the mother’s mouth at the moment of orgasm, and she sings a song that “suits the name.” Afterwards, she roams the railway platforms, “murmuring the thick, short word, whispering A-DA, A-DA, A-DA like a terrible cheer into the ears of [ 428 ]

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the men who clamber onto her body in return for a sesame roll.”19 Ada’s latest disappearance before the invisible return through the explosions at the end of the novel occurs when yet another revolutionary uprising is followed by yet another massacre during a “deluge of September rain” on “one, one, zero, nine, one, nine, eight, zero,” the eve of the unpronounceable September 12, 1980 coup.20 The Poet tells Ada everything he remembers while Ada is asleep, and Yusuf ’s father says, “I read what I write only to Ada. Because Ada does not listen to me. And I learn most from Ada. Because Ada never speaks. Ada does, Ada hits, loves, breaks, bites, cuts, caresses, plucks.”21 A silent reservoir of others’ words and memories, a shapeless corporeal thing of grotesque beauty that arrives with incantational whispers and songs, a strangely eroticized and ageless child with powers of fierce destruction and regeneration, Ada is hard to see as anything but the ghost of “the revolution” that never took place—a cataclysmic change in an as yet unimaginable form that is to redeem the violence of the past.22 As Avery Gordon puts it: The ghost is primarily a symptom of what is missing. It gives notice not only to itself but also to what it represents. What it represents is usually a loss, sometimes of life, sometimes a path not taken. From a certain vantage point the ghost also simultaneously represents a future possibility, a hope. . . . The ghost is alive, so to speak. We are in relation to it and it has designs on us such that we must reckon with it graciously, attempting to offer it a hospitable memory out of a concern for justice.23 The “revenge” carried out by Ada enables Tol to offer a hospitable memory to the word “revolution,” making it utterable again, investing it with desire.24 This is a haunting in reverse, where the return to an uncanny history enables future possibility to haunt the present as the image of its symbolic destruction. Ada as the ghostly figure of potentiality also exposes the limits of Tol’s rigidly gendered world.The novel often articulates political struggle in terms of male desire and rivalry and defeat in terms of crises of masculinity. It imagines an exclusively male “scene of writing” as restoring and preserving a political legacy. But Ada’s unimaginable lack of form and identity presents a striking contrast to this gendering of politics and authorship, not simply as a genderless neutrality but as an alternative figuration of social change, REMEMBERING “POSSIBILITY”

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where the lost possibility of the future persists within and beyond gender divisions. The name Ada and many of Ada’s functions and characteristics are conventionally feminine: healing and providing care, earthliness, “making” families, silence, corporeality, and exclusion from organized politics. Ada combines these qualities with various forms of destructive and regenerative power—physical, affective, mnemonic, sexual—and carries them beyond the limits of conventional femininity. Motherly but a child, a forger of families but outside kinship structures, wordless but also a word circulating as poetry, connected without belonging, Ada could be seen as a challenge against the gendered world of writing and politics described in the novel. By realizing its “revenge” against past defeats through Ada and through the connection it establishes between Ada’s explosions and the writing/reading going on in the train compartment, the narrative links Ada’s challenge against gender to the power of writing and to political hope. It is perhaps not accidental that the female author of Hah frames the same power and the same hope within and beyond a father-daughter genealogy.

Mourning Possibility in Hah Hah is dedicated to Tall Sad, the father “who departed saying there is yet another revolution,” a statement that uses the similarity between the word for revolution, ihtilal, and the one for possibility, ihtimal, to play on the lyrics of a popular song that asks: “There is yet another possibility, and that is to die, would you say?” The father mourned in the stories, a worker who is understood to have taken part in the leftist movement in the seventies and suffered the political repression and violence perpetrated through the military coup of 1980, has drowned himself at a later point in life, possibly as a result of posttraumatic depression. This initial conjunction of the notions of possibility, revolution, and death reverberates throughout the elegiac narrative with implications about the loss of revolutionary hope as a deadly exhaustion, the death of “possibility.” Just as the son Yusuf and the child Ada in Tol take over the defeats and the desires of the parents, the daughter in Hah works through the trauma of the father’s suicide, finally ordering him to get out of her life and the book but simultaneously making room for his voice and for his desire. The stories begin with the different reactions of three daughters to their beloved father’s death. In the course of the book, these initial voices seeking [ 430 ]

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proper mourning for the father and trying out the alternatives that range from madness to the performance of traditional rituals gradually merge into a single melancholic female subjectivity that deepens and expands as the daughter obsessively summons the father and reproduces his death on her own body. At the same time, this private mourning gets anchored in history and politics by being linked to the still not quite namable event of the coup, “the year nineteen-eightyseptember.”25 But the search for proper mourning is not so much an effort to trace the effects of the traumatic violence as it is a striving to understand what was lost in the father with his defeat and his death, what to take over from him, and how. “But what about Cuba, who is gonna love her?”26 asks the daughter soon after the father’s death. The question refers to a postcard featuring Fidel Castro waving to the people in the house of mourning as well as to the enthusiastic crowd in front of him. This postcard must have been there, unceremoniously tacked on a door, probably since long before the daughter knew the name of the man in the picture, who he was, or what he might have stood for. It is in that sense a good example of a postmemorial artifact. Like many other things associated with the father’s legacy, like particular words, clothes, gestures, silences, reactions to the news and images on TV, like the cat named Trotsky, and learning what not to say at school, the postcard is part of a process in which the political commitments, hopes, fears, and disillusionments of the earlier generation are adopted by the generation that follows, “as a structure of inter- and transgenerational return of traumatic knowledge and embodied experience,” or as “unthought knowledges.”27 One of the questions that Marianne Hirsch poses at the beginning of her explorations into the structures and trajectories of “inter- and transgenerational transmission” in The Generation of Postmemory is the following: “Why is postmemory particular to traumatic recall: cannot happy or otherwise transformative historical moments be transmitted across generations with the ambivalent intensity characterizing postmemory?”28 The overall answer to this question seems to be negative, and with good reason. Certain kinds of lived experiences become postmemories because their direct expression and transmission as experience are impeded if not altogether impossible. However, because they are crucially formative for those who undergo them, they are nevertheless transmitted to the following generation “so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.”29 Hence the genesis of postmemory through trauma. REMEMBERING “POSSIBILITY”

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But the transmission of radically oppositional political aspirations and allegiances between generations is also often impeded even though they are not traumatic in content. It is impeded by fears and imposed silences or sometimes simply because what is to be transmitted falls into irrelevance. Culturally established discourses or iconographies for articulating certain transformative political experiences, even those that have been exhilarating rather than traumatic, can become unavailable in different sociopolitical contexts, especially in the aftermath of such a massive and effective repression as the 1980 coup in Turkey. Yet the experiences, commitments, and hopes are crucially self-defining, and they are inevitably passed on in reconfigured forms through processes that I believe can be characterized as postmemorial. Like Tol, Hah illustrates and performs such intergenerational political transferences, expanding the archive of postmemory to include the beliefs, hopes, and utopias of the earlier generation rather than keeping it limited to suffering and trauma. Again, like Tol, it invites the unfulfilled promises of the past to return to the present as gentle, stubborn, and rebellious ghosts. In the earlier stories, before the three daughters become more or less subsumed into one voice, they speak separately as narrators and each responds to the father’s death in a different kind of failure to mourn. They seem to stand for impaired subject positions that are unable to achieve the necessary ethical relation to the father’s death. The first sister Gül’s response is the obliteration of memory in madness. She turns away from the fresh grave in adamant refusal to acknowledge the death: “Consciousness is anguish to the soul and I never let my soul taste it.”30 The second sister Gülnigar, born in the year of the coup, is an interesting figuration of postmemory. Although it is not she but the yet unnamed third sister who asks the question, “What about Cuba, who is gonna love her,” she seems to be the one guided by the answer, “We will sweetheart because he can’t.”31 Her reaction to losing the father is similar to what she did as a child when the neighborhood dogs killed the family’s cat Trotsky. In both cases, she tries to fill the emptiness with what is left behind, only to make the lack more visible. When the cat died, while Gül asked with rage and denial what kind of person God was and the other sister paced the house thinking about how to make do with the only God at hand, Gülnigar “assembled all sorts of cat things—food and water bowls, whiskers fallen out here and there or hair gathered on the carpets and the smell of sleep that permeated the pillows—in a photograph where an emptiness the shape of Trotsky was most revealing.”32 In the wake [ 432 ]

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of the father’s death, Gülnigar jealously clings to his political legacy and tries to be him by taking up the flag he has left behind: I too was born atop Cumhuriyet newspaper. Year: nineteen-eightyseptember. Nearly everything that happened, happened before me. I only heard about it. On my behind the giant black type of the newspaper upon which I was born. A lump in my mouth that grew as I chewed: There was yet another possibility, I was told, and it was so very—so very very—very beautiful.33 The flag passed down to her, however, is “shot through and blackened,” and her plan to mourn her father with that flag is not very promising. It seems, in fact, to hint at the inadequacy of the appropriative and heroizing memorial practices that still plague some leftist groups. The third daughter rejects precisely this kind of political filiation. In the story titled “Stop” (which also has connotations of “stand guard” or “watch over”), this narrator identifies mourning with writing: “For a long time, I have been thinking as I stop and look at this long paragraph, with my forefinger pointed at my temple.  .  .  . A tall sad barrel at my temple. I stop.”34 Despite the threatening “name of the father” (“Tall Sad”) pointed at her temple and the explicit phallic associations between barrels, knives, and the pen she is holding, she voices a gender-conscious refusal to turn “yas” into “yasa” (mourning into law) and to turn her elegy for the father into an Oedipal mode of authorial and political genealogy. She knows that what she is taking over through her elegiac writing is not the place of the father, not even his legacy, but his wound, his brokenness: Because they love their mothers early, and their fathers close to their deaths. . . . Once [fathers] are loved, they quickly get shorter and die. People call this mourning first, and then law. It happens like this. The child takes the gun. On the tip of the barrel: an indecipherable father. Then terrible things happen.  .  .  . And before you know it, Father is a pale emblem in the sky. A hollow coin no longer in currency. You see, I needed a father whom I would defeat. . . . If he slipped, I would immediately step on him, and grow taller. Then I would get my gun and my moustache would begin to grow. . . . As for me, I am the accident caused by a bullet. I am the failed apprentice of an already wounded father.35 REMEMBERING “POSSIBILITY”

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She is repeatedly referred to in the later stories as holding a knife which can at any moment cut into the hand with which she is clutching it. It is this daughter, who takes up a position not in law but in accident and defeat, who links writing not to masculinity but to brokenness, who goes back and forth throughout the narrative among voices, words, and texts, between life and death, constantly immersing herself in the wetness of the drowned father, of death, and of the womb, and who pulls herself out each time—it is this daughter named Ru’ya (dream) who brings the father back in the penultimate story titled “Recall,” where she is named for the first time. “People call this mourning first, and then law.” Ru’ya distances herself with these words not only from the law of Oedipus but also from the “natural” laws of survival where the living replace the dead and from the cultural laws according to which women perform the affective and ritualistic work of mourning facilitating that replacement. In a way that is somewhat similar to Ada’s relationship to conventional femininity in Tol, Ru’ya commits herself to the task of mourning but takes it beyond the gendered work of social recuperation. Her imaginary identification with the dead father violates gender boundaries as well as genealogical norms and temporalities, clearing a space for the dead among the living, and for the past within the present, culminating in a haunting vision of merging voices, bodies, and histories. In the story “Recall,” at the scene of the dead father’s return to Ru’ya, there is something strongly reminiscent of Freud’s famous account of the dream with the burning child, which Cathy Caruth discusses in the “Traumatic Awakenings” section of Unclaimed Experience.36 It is the dream of a father who has lost his child after watching beside the child’s sick-bed for days and nights on end. He dreams about this child in the night that follows the child’s death, when he goes into the next room to lie down, leaving the door open so that he can see from his bedroom into the room in which his child’s body is laid out with tall candles standing round it. After a few hours’ sleep, the father dreams that the child is standing beside his bed, catching his father by the arm and whispering reproachfully: “Father, don’t you see I’m burning?” He wakes up, notices a bright glare of light from the next room, hurries into it and finds that the wrappings and one of the arms of the dead child have been burned by a lighted candle that has fallen on them. “The explanation of this moving dream is simple enough,” says Freud, “the glare of light shone through the open door into the sleeping man’s eyes and led him to the conclusion . . . that a candle had fallen over and [ 434 ]

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set something alight in the neighborhood of the body.”37 What he finds striking is that the dream takes its power not from its relation to inner wishes but from its external reference, the fire the father sees through his sleep. Yet, the dream that shows him this reality through sleep also delays his response, preventing him from immediately rushing to save the dead child from burning. “In the context of a violent reality,” Caruth asks with Freud, “why dream rather than wake up?”38 Freud’s answer is that while the dream shows the reality of the burning outside, it hides the reality of the child’s death. “If the father had woken up first and then made the inference that led him to go into the next room,” says Freud, “he would, as it were, have shortened his child’s life by that moment of time.”39 As Caruth puts it, “the dream thus tells the story of a father’s grief as the very relation of the psyche to reality: the dream, as a delay, reveals the ineradicable gap between the reality of a death and the desire that cannot overcome it except in the fiction of a dream.”40 Caruth then turns to Lacan’s question about the same dream. “What is it that wakes the sleeper?” Lacan asks, and answers that it is the reality in the dream: the child’s taking his father by the arm, whispering, “Father, don’t you see that I am burning?”41 “What is particularly striking for Lacan,” writes Caruth, “is that this contradiction of the wish to sleep does not come simply from the outside, from the noise or the light of the falling candle, but from the way in which the words of the child themselves bear precisely upon sleeping and waking.”42 She goes on to explain that it is the dream that wakes the father and forces him to confront the reality of his son’s death. “His awakening to death is . . . a paradoxical attempt to respond, in awakening, to a call that can only be heard within sleep.”43 Caruth’s discussion points to the possibility of seeing the dream as a kind of model for literature. Literature, like the dream, suspends the knowledge of reality’s limitations, lets desire overcome reality, providing a temporary compensation for a lack in life. But at the same time, it uses the very means of that imaginary compensation to bring about an awakening or a response to reality, to make reality seen as it can be seen only from within the imaginary world it constructs. And this is especially true for the literary genre Hah belongs to, the elegy, which, at least in its modern form, is not a consolation or recuperation but the act of bringing the dead back the way only literature can, to call for an ethical response not only to the death of the other but also to what the other stands for. In the process of doing this, Hah also reveals the political dimension of this impossible-to-fulfill responsibility REMEMBERING “POSSIBILITY”

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toward the death of the other, not only because it mourns the death of a defeated revolutionary but also, and more importantly, because it turns itself into a textual site for collectively mourning unrealized possibilities. In Hah as in the dream recounted by Freud, there is a specific scene that hides the reality of death from consciousness and postpones mourning. The father comes to the side of the grieving daughter’s bed just like the dead child in the dream, and he caresses the daughter’s hair with his hand dripping wet from his death by water. As in the dream, the story turns this deadly touch into a call for an awakening to the reality of the father’s death and the responsibility to live on: It happened during one of those moments, moments she would visit again and again, that night: the sliding door opening and Father entering the bedroom, dripping-wet . . . Father sitting down at the edge of the bed, quickly. Stroking Ru’ya’s sweaty hair, touching her cheek, her forehead, trying to understand, how are you, he was saying, full of news from far far away I am, he was saying. . . . as though these letters falling upon a blank page drip drop But all at once out went the light in Father’s eyes. His hand stroking Ru’ya’s hair froze solid. . . . Father was holding a clump of hair as he stared at her. . . .You’re dying, daughter, said Father. Like saying lovely day, isn’t it: Ru’ya, you, dyi. . . .44 Being exposed to the touch of the father is to be exposed to death, of course. The impossibility of dying the father’s death, of being united with him, becomes articulated and taken over as the burden of life when the letters dripping onto the page from the father’s dead body are interrupted, when the hair the father caresses falls out, when the dead father says “daughter, you are dying,” just as the dead child in the dream had whispered “father, I am burning,” when he runs out of breath with the words “Ru’ya, you, dyi . . .” The Turkish title of the story, “An,” means both “moment,” and “recall” or “remember.” It refers to the moment of recognition, of awakening, of “hah,” and to the imperative to recall, the demand for a kind of memory beyond forgetting and remembering, one that calls back, calls again. Ru’ya’s awakening enables the textual burial of the father in the following and last story of the book, the story titled “Leave,” which begins with the first verse of Eliot’s “Burial of the Dead”: “April is the cruelest month of the year, breeding.” “Leave” is the daughter’s request from the dead father [ 436 ]

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to exit from within her and from the book. And yet, the Turkish title Çık also means “get out of,” “emerge from,” “climb,” and “come out from hiding.” Despite the burial, or rather because of it, the final story also makes the father’s voice heard as it speaks from the impossible place of his own death. His words make the weight of his physical death palpable while at the same time they express a defiant hope to “breed” (“to green”), to come out of the daughter’s open mouth, to speak in the name of the dead: Open your mouth and stick your tongue out so far I too can stick to it a little and green Come on let me stick because I do not think April shall green me April won’t green me now would you like me to hope for yet another possibility Shall I hope for a revolution, guguck So that that door is open always That mouth of yours45 In the earlier story “Revol,” in a May 1st International Workers’ Day demonstration where bullets had interrupted the word “revolution,” we had already encountered this speaking of the dead.46 The demonstration had been portrayed as a carnival of collective haunting with the dead reaching out from inside the living bodies of the demonstrators and coming to voice. The speaking of the dead father at the end of the book thus becomes a “getting out,” which is something other than death as an exit. In her capacity as dream, or as writer, Ru’ya brings the father back and enables him to be part of a collective haunting, to bring back the image of a lost possibility and to re-enact politics as haunting: Everyone had a strangled corpse they paraded around inside them (inside everyone, all of them), everyone had a corpse that marched up from their stomach to their gullet and from there to their mouth. . . . [The dead] were opening those mouths and sticking out their scarred, dented heads. As soon as their heads were out, they were propping their elbows on people’s molars (on the molars of the people), resting their chests on the mouths’ ledges (on the ledges of the mouths of the people), and waving to the other dead who’d stuck their heads out of other mouths, saying what’s up? Isn’t it a beautiful morning, so, have you gotten used to being a corpse?47 REMEMBERING “POSSIBILITY”

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The overall textual strategy of Hah could perhaps be characterized as just such a spirit possession—being possessed by the past so as to be able to express hope in the figure of apocalyptic rebellion. The feminist dimension of the text’s politics, its disruption of narrow patriarchal conceptions of political practice and expression, is more complex than a simple shift from a father-son to a father-daughter genealogy. In the same story “Revol,” after the yet unnamed daughter narrates the May 1st demonstration from the past, there is another, seemingly unrelated comical scene in which she confounds a sexual harasser by performing a lewd song and dance on the street. Her parodic embodiment of the voices and gestures of patriarchal aggression becomes a carnivalesque rebellion in its own right, repeating on a miniature scale the grotesque merriment of the dead sticking their heads out of living bodies to greet each other. It is possible to see in this brief narrative aside an image of an irreverent feminist politics of the everyday as a structure of feeling that links the collective with the personal and mourning with laughter. Both Tol and Hah generate structures of feeling that reclaim the space of the political. Unlike many earlier Turkish coup narratives of melancholic loss, they return rhythmically to political scenes of something like happiness “irrupting apocalyptically into historical time.”48 Their allegorical representations of the unfulfilled possibilities glimpsed in the political struggles of the past confirm, as Eagleton puts it, that “it is the past that furnishes us with the resources of hope, not just the speculative possibility of a rather more gratifying future. It is thus that Ernst Bloch . . . can speak of ‘the still undischarged future in the past.’ ”49 Tol’s and Hah’s dramatizations of how gender comes into play in articulating and reconfiguring political legacies, of how recognizing and opening oneself to the undischarged futures in the past requires the birth of new modes of subjectivity, also provide glimpses of feminism’s potential for a politics of hope.

Notes 1. Steve J. Stern, Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London 1998 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 31. 2. For more detailed discussions of this aspect of Turkish coup d’état literature, see Sibel Irzık, “The Constructions of Victimhood in Turkish Coup d’état Novels: Is Victimhood without Innocence Possible?” in Betraying the Event: Constructions of Victimhood in Contemporary Cultures, ed. Fatima Festic (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), 3–20; and “Textualized Memories of Politics: [ 438 ]

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Turkish Coup d’état Novels,” in From Literature to Cultural Literacy, ed. Naomi Segal and Daniela Koleva (London: Palgrave, 2014), 43–61. 3. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 3. 4. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 5. 5. Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 73 and 37. 6. Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism (London:Verso, 1989), 103; quoted in Terry Eagleton, Hope without Optimism (London: University of Virginia Press, 2015), xi. 7. Murat Uyurkulak, Tol (Istanbul: Metis Yayınları, 2002), 11. 8. Birgül OОuz, Hah, trans. Kenneth Dakan et al. (London: World Editions, 2016). Originally published as Hah (Istanbul: Metis Yayınları, 2012). 9. Uyurkulak, Tol, 11. 10. Uyurkulak, Tol, 30. Hazal Halavut sees this exchange as a pre-emptive move against the jaded reader of postmodern fiction and comments that it is a reminder about the impossibility of “correcting” history. Hazal Halavut, “Tol: Bir ԭntikam Romanı,” Mesele 28 (2009): 36. 11. Uyurkulak, Tol, 226. 12. Uyurkulak, Tol, 96. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 24. 13. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 5. 14. Uyurkulak, Tol, 25. 15. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 33. 16. Uyurkulak, Tol, 262. 17. Uyurkulak, Tol, 173. 18. Uyurkulak, Tol, 150. 19. Uyurkulak, Tol, 136. 20. Uyurkulak, Tol, 186–7. 21. Uyurkulak, Tol, 181. 22. Ada’s similarities to Morrison’s eponymous ghost in Beloved are many and probably intentional. 23. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 63–64 (italics mine). 24. In another coup novel, Kuߞ Diline Öykünen (One who imitates bird language) by Ayߞegül DevecioОlu, there is a scene of the failed return of the word “revolution,” again, in the figure of a child. This is a maimed child who never speaks. Cheerful colors and usual children’s clothes don’t suit him. Quite late in the novel, we learn that one of his eyes had to be removed because of a disease that was not attended to while his parents were in prison and the family was short of money. Throughout the novel, he is referred to as “the Child” by everyone in his family. Only at REMEMBERING “POSSIBILITY”

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the very end, his aunt calls out to him while he is playing in the park: “Devrim! [Revolution] she called . . . Suddenly, she realized that it was the first time she was saying the child’s name out loud. The name had shot out of her mouth like an escaping prisoner. . . . Then she repeated the name stubbornly, with an obsessive effort. . . . Everything was as it had been a few minutes before. As if this name had never been uttered.” Ayߞegül DevecioОlu, Kuߞ Diline Öykünen (ԭstanbul: Metis Yayınları, 2004), 218. Although written earlier, Tol reads like a response to this call. 25. OОuz, Hah, 30 (italics in the original). 26. OОuz, Hah, 24. 27. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 6. Gabriele Schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 7. 28. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 6. 29. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 5. 30. OОuz, Hah, 15 (translation modified). 31. OОuz, Hah, 24. 32. OОuz, Hah, 27. 33. OОuz, Hah, 30 (translation modified). 34. OОuz, Hah, 24–25. 35. OОuz, Hah, 28–29. 36. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 91–112. 37. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–74), 5: 509. Quoted in Unclaimed Experience, 94. 38. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 94. 39. Freud, Standard Edition, 5: 509. Quoted in Unclaimed Experience, 95. 40. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 95. 41. Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1973), 58–59. Quoted in Unclaimed Experience, 97–98. 42. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 98–99. 43. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 99. 44. OОuz, Hah, 87. 45. OОuz, Hah, 91–92. 46. The International Workers’ Day demonstrations at Taksim Square in Istanbul in 1977 turned into a massacre when bullets were fired on the crowd and at least thirty-four people died. 47. OОuz, Hah, 53. 48. Terry Eagleton, Hope without Optimism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 28. 49. Eagleton, Hope without Optimism, 30. [ 440 ]

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CHA P T E R X X V

Müfide Ferit Tek’s Aydemir Meets Neߞide K. Demir Or How Women in Mourning Impede Gendered Memories of a Genocidal Past H Ü LYA A DA K

I

n this article, I analyze prominent works of “Turkish nationalism” by leading twentieth-century women writers, illustrating how Müfide Ferit (Tek) (1892–1971), Halide Edib (Adıvar) (1884–1964), and Sâmiha Ayverdi (1905–93), respectively, contributed to the culture of denial around the Armenian Genocide (1915–1916). I argue that by drawing on the motif of a militarized and nationalized mode of mourning, women’s narratives of nationalism, such as Aydemir, Ateߞten Gömlek (The Shirt of Flame), and Türkiye’nin Ermeni Meselesi (The Armenian Question in Turkey), helped to obliterate the Armenian genocide from public memory, limiting the possibility of transformative politics. Even though these women writers contributed to the forgetting of a genocidal past, it would be erroneous to use a seamless trajectory of denial to categorize the work of Müfide Ferit (Tek) during the Committee of Union and Progress Regime (1908–1918), Halide Edib (Adıvar) during the Independence Struggle of Turkey (1919–1922), and Sâmiha Ayverdi during the denialist campaign in the face of ASALA terror (1975–1985).1 A detailed exploration of the writers’ biographies or works suggests that it is problematic to see them as only producing political treatises of denial. As I show here, it was also the reception of these works in nationalist projects that reified either a specific work out of the many that the author produced or a particular interpretation of these women writers in collective memory. This issue is most strikingly evident in the works of Müfide Ferit [ 441 ]

(Tek) and Halide Edib (Adıvar), since the complexity of their works and their own philosophical development were entirely ignored throughout the twentieth century. Halide Edib and Müfide Ferit had a reputation for publicly criticizing the violent policies of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) during World War I. For instance, Halide Edib was the only intellectual to condemn the massacres of Armenians in 1915–1916 in a lecture delivered to roughly 700 Unionists in a meeting of the Türk OcaОı (Turkish Hearth), a national club of the Unionists.2 Nonetheless she chose to support the independence struggle of Turkey by ennobling nationalists and simultaneously trying to erase from memory the embarrassment of the violence inflicted on the Ottoman Armenians, as evident in her most prominent novel Ateߞten Gömlek. Even though Halide Edib promoted nonviolent resistance in her analyses of anticolonial struggles in the 1930s, she would not revise her denialist position regarding the genocide of the Armenians in 1915. Toward the late 1920s, writing about the paranoia of losing the eastern provinces of Anatolia to an independent Armenia, she depicted the violence after 1915 as “Armeno-Turkish massacres,” i.e. as mutual massacres.3 With the aim of exploring two novels (Müfide Ferit’s Aydemir and Halide Edib’s Ateߞten Gömlek) and one work that aspires to history (Sâmiha Ayverdi and Neߞide K. Demir’s Türkiye’nin Ermeni Meselesi/The Armenian Question in Turkey), I find it useful to illustrate differences in the ways narratives can be categorized. In this chapter, rather than just doing a textual analysis, I analyze the interaction between the production and reception of texts, the ways in which texts make truth-claims, and the way those truth-claims are received by their audiences. Myth, history, and nonfiction all make truthclaims, while fiction does not. Myth, history, and nonfiction enjoy varying degrees of credibility (with their audiences); however, nonfiction does not possess the same credibility as history or myth. Myth is also imbued with authority. The production of a work can be fundamentally different than its reception: fiction does not make truth-claims, but it can be elevated to the status of myth, giving the work of fiction credibility and authority as it is received by its audiences. Myth “creates an intellectual and cognitive monopoly in that it seeks to establish the sole way of ordering the world and defining worldviews.”4 Aydemir and Ateߞten Gömlek were produced as works of fiction but gained mythic authority after publication and interaction with Turkish audiences. Türkiye’nin Ermeni Meselesi was produced making truth-claims, and the front [ 442 ]

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cover of the text dictated that it be categorized as history.While the work was elevated to the status of myth in the Turkish context (in the 1970s and 1980s), its English translation (The Armenian Question in Turkey) did not receive much attention as it interacted with its American audiences in the 1980s. Although the texts vary in the truth-claims they make and the ways they were received by different audiences, all are texts of mourning. A few of the texts give the sense of being chronologically organized (for instance, Türkiye’nin Ermeni Meselesi); however, time in the works is structured as a frozen state of mourning. Static mourning eclipses linear time and prevents historical change and the development of characters. As characters are aligned in this fixed state of mourning, the Turks are allocated unchanging roles of perfection, innocence, vulnerability, and victimhood, while the Turk’s Others (including Armenians in Türkiye’nin Ermeni Meselesi, Greeks and Armenians in Ateߞten Gömlek, and Russians in Aydemir) are labeled as perpetrators, evildoers, and enemies. This frozen state of mourning is gendered; the female character can only be the mourner (Hazin in the novel Aydemir, and Neߞide K. Demir and Sâmiha Ayverdi in Türkiye’nin Ermeni Meselesi), while the one lost, the male, is hyperbolized to the status of national hero (e.g. Aydemir or the assassinated diplomat Bahadır Demir in Türkiye’nin Ermeni Meselesi). In Ateߞten Gömlek and Türkiye’nin Ermeni Meselesi, the death of one single Turkish son/ man is tantamount to the obliteration of the memory of the deaths of 1 million victims. By focusing on the death of the idealized Turkish national hero, these women write exclusively about heroes and not heroines. The women affiliated with these heroes, either through motherhood, sisterhood, or a love relationship, are valorized for their deep and incurable sense of mourning. Petrified in her sorrow, the mother/sister/beloved woman is further victimized, an allegory for the victimized nation who lost her sons. Precluding the possibility of forming bonds across ethnic lines or making alliances based on feminist solidarity, this position of victimhood is exploited so as to obliterate a genocidal past as well as to take and justify antifeminist racist political action (such as war), as exemplified in Ateߞten Gömlek and Türkiye’nin Ermeni Meselesi. Even though the narratives have been written by women writers, the texts do not provide a meaningful existence to independent women, unless they are affiliated with an idealized but victimized national hero (as mothers, sisters, beloveds, wives, etc.). Further, because the narratives do not prioritize women, rarely does a “mother in mourning” mourn a daughter, sister, or lesbian lover. M Ü F I D E F E R I T T E K ’ S AY D E M I R M E E T S N E ߸ , D E K . D E M I R

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The public role attributed to the mother/lover-in-mourning in all the texts I analyze is neither a guarantee of political subjectivity nor an escape from gender regimes of domesticity. Rather, it guarantees the continuation of political passivity through compliance to a heteronormative, patriarchal, sexist concept of “motherhood/womanhood” in the national imaginary. Further, differing from radical mothers, these women form alliances exclusively along national lines, refusing to “translate particular passionate loyalties to children and kin into political action on behalf of the well-being of other children and other mothers.”5 Paradoxically, the texts, while idealizing the petrified mother/lover-inmourning, and the deceased national hero, desexualize their characters, denying them not only sexuality but reproduction necessary for the longevity of the nation. As they idealize and freeze their Turkish characters in an unchanging state of mourning, the texts carry anxieties over preventing a promising national future (with future generations, children of the nation, etc.). In this respect, they are full of inconsistencies in making claims for a future but simultaneously preventing the possibility of its coming into being.

On Maternal Thinking, Women Writers, and Denial In 1989, when Sara Ruddick published her Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, the complexity of maternal politics was already a topic of discussion among feminist scholars, and much has been published since. Ruddick’s most significant contributions included unsettling the myth that there is something “foreordained” about maternal response or that “mothers are naturally loving.” Instead, she described “mothers” as those individuals (both men and women) who are “committed to meeting the demands that define maternal work.”6 Maternal Thinking includes an exploration of how “maternal political rhetoric” and how actual women and children can at times serve “the most racist, narrowly nationalist, thoroughly militarist causes.”7 Ruddick ends, however, on a positive note. Drawing on examples from women’s resistance movements particularly in Chile and Argentina, Ruddick analyzes maternal politics that lead to a feminist politics of peace, “a climate in which peace is desired.”8 Similarly, in the comprehensive volume The Politics of Motherhood, Alexis Jetter et al. identified many instances of progressive maternal politics around the globe, though the contributors to that volume also focused on how [ 444 ]

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resurgent nationalist sentiment, particularly in post-Cold War East Europe, encouraged “traditional gender roles.”9 In particular, Claudia Koonz’s “Motherhood and Politics on the Far Right” illustrated “the powerful evidence of the murderous potential of women who defend maternal concerns that underwrite the oppression of other women,” hence drawing attention to the “dangers of maternalism unmoored from any broader ideological content.”10 In the Turkish context, studies of motherhood have focused mostly on the contributions of mothers to progressive politics, exemplified in the activism of the Saturday Mothers or Peace Mothers.11 Few studies have been published on conservative regimes and maternal politics.12 Further, the protagonists of the history of denial as well as the histories of perpetrators of the Armenian genocide have exclusively been men, and scholarship on women and the history of denial of 1915–1916 is, with few exceptions, nonexistent.13 Hence, this study serves not only to illustrate the impact of women writers on the history of denial in Turkey but to explore gendered narrative strategies (such as stereotypical depictions of motherhood, women in mourning, idealized masculinity, or the national hero) in the way they serve to obliterate the Armenian genocide from collective memory. Last, I try to complicate textual interpretation with a discussion of the reception of the works.

Aydemir or The Immaculate Turk14 During World War I, Müfide Ferit Tek’s Aydemir (1918) was considered the most important novel of Turanism, i.e., “a mythic glorification of Turkish nationalism, a strengthening of mono-ethnic nationalism within the Ottoman Empire, and a political and cultural union with other Turkic peoples in Central Asia.”15 Müfide Ferit (Tek) (1892–1971) spent five years in exile in Sinop and Bilecik, together with her husband Ahmet Ferit Tek, for opposing the CUP regime and its violent policies. Written during her exile years, Aydemir is about the quest for the union of all Turks under the imaginary empire of “Türkistan.” According to the protagonist Aydemir, awakening feelings of nationalism in Turks under the Russian flag is his most important mission. The main protagonist Demir Bey, leaving behind his comfortable life in the imperial capital, Istanbul, sacrifices all personal gratification by completely immersing himself in the mission of disseminating Turkish nationalism in central Asia. In doing so, he becomes the leader Aydemir. M Ü F I D E F E R I T T E K ’ S AY D E M I R M E E T S N E ߸ , D E K . D E M I R

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The female protagonist Hazin adores Aydemir. From the beginning of the novel, she idealizes and yearns for Aydemir and after his death mourns his loss. The melodrama is enhanced as Aydemir cannot unite with his beloved Hazin. The mourning lover Hazin only serves to exaggerate the significance of the national hero Aydemir and his mission. Müfide Ferit Tek propagated the image of the “immaculate Turk,” and the civilizing mission of the Ottomans in Central Asia through the figure of Aydemir. Aydemir’s aim is to reconstruct Turkishness through art and love. In his self-sacrificing mission, he is coined an “apôtre” and “hermit” in intellectual circles in Istanbul.16 Aydemir starts carving out a space for ur-Turkishness. He argues that Buddha was a Turk and historically predated Jesus Christ. According to Aydemir, Jesus is a bad imitation of Buddha and cannot compete with Buddha in his depth of affection, mercy, pity, and love toward humans and animals alike.17 The novel Aydemir does not mention the expansionist policies of the Unionists toward the East. Instead, the novel presents the Ottoman mission civilisatrice, using the figure of Aydemir, as one entailing peace, solidarity, and education, particularly the teaching of Turkish history and identity to the Turkic peoples of Central Asia suffering under Tsarist colonialism.18 In his endeavors in Central Asia, Aydemir aims to visit the cities of Khiva, Bukhara, Samarkand (in contemporary Uzbekistan), and Kashgar (one of the westernmost cities of contemporary China) in order to educate Turkic peoples and spread Turanism. Obliterating from memory the militaristic dimension and the expansionist policies of the Ottoman war effort in the East during World War I, Müfide Ferit Tek’s novel Aydemir only problematizes Tsarist colonialism and makes it next to impossible to conceptualize (Ottoman) Turks as perpetrators. At the beginning of the novel, Hazin and Aydemir’s definitions of “mission civilisatrice” are different. Hazin would like to promote Turanism in Istanbul and Anatolia, whereas Aydemir’s goal is to work with the Turks of central Asia since they are “crushed under the iron feet of the intelligent enemy,” who suppresses the Turks with rationality and calculation.19 The only aim of the Russians, according to Aydemir, is the Russianization of Turks; hence, schools, mescids, i.e., places of worship or prostration in prayer, and people’s minds are Russianized.20 Similar to many female characters in national narratives, Hazin is not allowed political or intellectual autonomy in the text. Reduced to the position of following Aydemir’s mission, Hazin concedes. After Aydemir’s death, Hazin takes on the role of mourning [ 446 ]

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Aydemir by embracing his mission in Central Asia (and does not follow her earlier plans for Anatolia). Müfide Ferit Tek opposed the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) as it gradually took the form of a military dictatorship toward 1915 and wrote Aydemir as a Turanist utopia in an attempt to illustrate the possibility of a pacifist Turanism. Published in 1918 shortly before the end of World War I, the novel takes place during the same war. In its aspiration to construct a new image of Turkishness associated with pacifism, antimilitarism, nonviolence, education, conscience, and “civilization,” it bypasses the geography of Anatolia altogether and the recent violence that has taken place there against the Armenians. In an attempt to alter the image of the “barbaric Turk,” the “Turk as perpetrator” is also concealed, and the Turanist expansion to Central Asia is legitimized as a “mission civilisatrice” to free the Turks of Central Asia from Russian domination. The dynamics of “imperial expansion” to the east (Central Asia) and the violence in the geography of Anatolia are dismissed in the process. Further, frozen in time and her perpetual mourning, Hazin is not the only character who is desexualized in the novel. Aydemir, likened to Buddha and Jesus, is also severed from any association with sexuality and his quest to sacrifice his life for the benefit of the Turks and the Turkish nation is presented as his sacrifice of personal desire.21 The last few hours before his death, Aydemir ponders a life full of passion with his beloved Hazin but remarks that he is joyous and merry that his death will be a sacrifice for the Turkish nation. He adds that there was no other way to achieve that end but to give up a life of physical pleasure.22 The choice to part from the path leading to sexual fulfillment idealizes the male protagonist as a pacifist, holy leader at the service of Turanism. As Sara Ruddick has argued in discussing narrative choices denying or simplifying sexuality, “the predatory assaultive sexuality of soldiers can be concealed, while the allure of the warrior goes unexamined.”23 Such a choice may also disable any possible relationship between “Turk” and “perpetrator of sexual violence,” dissociating Aydemir from the contaminated image of the “barbaric Turk” who perpetuated sexual violence during the lengthy years of the deportation and massacres of Armenians, Greeks, and other minorities.24 Perhaps Müfide Ferit Tek’s utopia was written to illustrate the stark contrast between the historical reality; the militant Unionist regime and the ills of Ottoman militarism; and the ideal, perfect characters of Hazin and Aydemir and their utopian pacifist mission in Central Asia, and hence M Ü F I D E F E R I T T E K ’ S AY D E M I R M E E T S N E ߸ , D E K . D E M I R

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to underline her critique of militarism. As the work was made into myth through its reception in the last year of World War I, what remained was the mourning for the “ideal/immaculate Turk” as if this were a representation of historical reality. This “holy Turk,” the mourning Hazin and their mission civilisatrice made Aydemir so popular that Müfide Ferit Tek’s debut novel was ranked with the works of significant authors of early national literature, such as Ömer Seyfettin, Halide Edib, Ahmet Hikmet MüftüoОlu, and Aka Gündüz, and the protagonist Aydemir was hailed as a “missionary of nationalism.”25

Ateߞten Gömlek (The Shirt of Flame): Mourning and Collective Amnesia26 That the foundational myth of Turkey was founded upon “collective amnesia” regarding the Armenian genocide is suggested in the opening section of Halide Edib’s Ateߞten Gömlek. In order to believe in the nation and fight in the national struggle of Turkey (1919–1922), the narrator Peyami suggests willfully forgetting and obliterating the violent past.27 I see that we did this not for others, but for ourselves [. . .] Publications in French or English, let alone in Europe, could not be published if it were to our praise [. . .] When we told the world that they had committed worse crimes than the ones they threw at our faces as mistakes, murder, etc., we felt the entire world had heard us and that it had thought us right. [. . .] Maybe the best part of this profoundly childish propaganda was this. In order to suffer the pains of the Independence Struggle, [. . .] initially, we needed to start believing in ourselves.28 This “childish propaganda” or the belief in “ourselves” is only possible through “historiographic perversion,” as the possibility of being a perpetrator to atrocities on a mass scale is erased out of the collective consciousness of a people and a new narrative of “victimhood” is inscribed in its place.29 The novel is entirely about willful forgetting/obliteration of the Armenian genocide through the victimization of a Turkish “mother in mourning.” The leading female protagonist Ayߞe’s mourning is her struggle. Having lost her son and husband to the Greeks, Ayߞe is the “wounded Anatolia,” whose [ 448 ]

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sons and fathers have been killed. Her “justified” struggle is the struggle of Anatolia against “invasion.” In Ateߞten Gömlek, with multifarious Turkish knights kneeling before her, the mourning mother (Ayߞe) is like a lady out of medieval romance.30 Her asexuality is Janus-faced: idealized and worshipped, she is the sacred Mother of the Turkish nation.Victimized, in perpetual mourning, her desire lost, she will not be able to conceive any other “sons” for the nation. Her mourning and pain are channeled into the national struggle, her idealized body-inpain is the emblem of immobility. She will not be able to catalyze political action (meaning politics of any kind), her motionless dead body at the end will be utilized as proof of her victimhood and as justification for the erasure of a genocidal past with “Ottoman Turks” as “perpetrators.” Ateߞten Gömlek is the text marking Halide Edib’s transition from a liberal, progressive intellectual and activist to a denialist/nationalist. In the 1910s, “mourning” had found other expressions in her public and literary writings. As the first woman to apologize in a public letter for the Adana massacres of 1909, when roughly 30,000 Armenians were killed, Halide Edib talked about feelings of shame and of guilt for belonging to the perpetrators; she also spoke about issues related to the ethics, responsibility, and justice involved in bringing the perpetrators into the light.31 In the letter, Halide Edib mourned her Armenian sisters and brothers and appealed to the CUP authorities for the murderers to be found and executed.32 Two Armenian women, Serpuhi Makaryan and Bayzer Torkomyan, appreciated the letter and thanked Halide Edib in the same newspaper immediately following her apology. As mentioned above, she was also the only woman to openly and harshly criticize the Armenian genocide as it was taking place in 1916 in a lecture delivered to roughly 700 Unionists in a meeting of the Türk OcaОı.33 However, toward the end of World War I and during the independence struggle of Turkey, Halide Edib lost her harshly critical tone in her Memoirs and The Turkish Ordeal, which she wrote originally in English.34 She silenced Unionist atrocities under the denialist rubric of “mutual massacres” between Turks and Armenians in her political history of Turkey titled Turkey Faces West: A Turkish View of Recent Changes and their Origin, a book based on the lectures she delivered at the Williamstown Political Institute as their first woman lecturer in 1928.35 Halide Edib’s work gradually became more and more defensive in its narration of 1915–1916, starting with Ateߞten Gömlek, which she wrote originally in Turkish, and continuing with her other work in English in the 1920s. She discusses her own denialist narration of this M Ü F I D E F E R I T T E K ’ S AY D E M I R M E E T S N E ߸ , D E K . D E M I R

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history as a response to racist descriptions of Turks by lawyers and activists such as André N. Mandelstam (1869–1949) who produced documentation for the Armenian massacres, making essentialist arguments about the “barbaric Turks” as the perpetrators.36 Halide Edib wrote against Mandelstam’s racist evaluations of Turks and against his proposal for Russian intervention which, according to her argument, could not be divorced from Russian plans for imperial expansion.37 She continued this line of thought in Turkey Faces West: A Turkish View of Recent Changes and their Origin.38 In the introduction to the work, Edward Mead Earle discussed Halide Edib’s unique perspective of political nationalism, suggesting it did not entail justification of massacres or policies of extermination.39 However, the work itself yet again illustrates Halide Edib’s gradual shift from a critic of genocide to one defining the events of 1915–1916 as “mutual massacres” of Turks and Armenians.40 In Turkey Faces West, Halide Edib further criticizes European and Russian imperialisms, blames Armenian rebels for the massacres perpetrated by the Unionists, condemns “Russians for massacring Turks in the eastern vilayets” to retaliate for the Armenian massacres in 1915–1916, and communicates her fears of an independent Armenia.41 Hence, under the rubric of fear of other imperialisms, paranoia over secession and national autonomy to Armenia, Halide Edib ignores the Armenian victims of 1915–1916.

Türkiye’nin Ermeni Meselesi and The Armenian Question in Turkey: Appropriating the Role of the “Mourning Mother”42 The mother in mourning of Ateߞten Gömlek is carried to new heights in the most influential denialist propaganda text written by a woman writer in the 1970s. During the “decade of terror” (1975–1985), or the period of assassinations of Turkish diplomats by the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) and the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide (JCOAG), denialist narratives and defensive propaganda on the Armenian genocide proliferated.43 Many editions of the memoirs of Talat Paߞa, one of the masterminds behind the Armenian genocide, were published.44 Retired Turkish officials wrote denial narratives (much in line with Talat Paߞa’s memoirs) to criticize the violence of ASALA and JCOAG against Turkish diplomats.45 Such narratives included a historical inversion as well as a role change from perpetrator to victim. After equating all past [ 450 ]

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Turkish violence with Armenian violence, these writers “argued that current Armenian violence against the Turkish diplomats was a continuation of the past Armenian violence.”46 In the same period, among the women writers who propagandized the official narrative of Turkey, Sâmiha Ayverdi’s (1905–1993) narrative is the most striking in terms of the way in which it exploits the mother in mourning.The Sufi mystic and novelist Ayverdi set out to pen her work Türkiye’nin Ermeni Meselesi (Turkey’s Armenian Question) in 1976.47 Published in English and Turkish, the text highlighted the role of the mother in mourning of the martyred Turkish diplomat Bahadır Demir, assassinated in 1973 in Los Angeles by Kurken Yanukyan.48 In lieu of her own name, Ayverdi used the authorial signature of the real mother of the assassinated diplomat, signing the work as “Neߞide Demir” in the first three editions of the book in Turkish and in the English version. In the last few editions of the work, the text was published under the name of Sâmiha Ayverdi herself, since the immediacy of the murders during the decade of terror and the names of the mourning mothers had long been forgotten, while Ayverdi had gained some notoriety as a writer. Prior to writing Türkiye’nin Ermeni Meselesi and The Armenian Question in Turkey, Ayverdi had promoted “historiographic perversion”49 regarding the Armenian genocide, arguing that the violence was perpetrated by Ottoman Armenians against Turks in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire.50 Türkiye’nin Ermeni Meselesi begins with the lines “what history tells the mother of a martyr,” narrating an essentialist history of Armenians from the Middle Ages to the present, as a race of barbarians, evildoers, war-seekers, traitors, and ingrates.51 According to Ayverdi, the Byzantines, Seljuks and Ottomans showed undeterred generosity and tolerance to the “rebellious and unappreciative Armenians.” The Turks throughout centuries tried to bring peace to Anatolia, not appreciated or sought by the “warthirsty Armenians.”52 The text generalizes from the “individual” (the assassination of a Turkish diplomat in 1973) to the “victimized Turkish nation” during World War I and in earlier episodes in history. According to Demir/Ayverdi, the Byzantines, Seljuks, and Ottomans all suffered from the Armenians.53 Demir/ Ayverdi even interprets the differences between the Armenian and other Christian doctrines as “yet another example of the inherently rebellious and treacherous nature of Armenians.”54 Having refused to embrace specific propositions regarding divine services and Jesus’s death on the cross, M Ü F I D E F E R I T T E K ’ S AY D E M I R M E E T S N E ߸ , D E K . D E M I R

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Demir/Ayverdi concludes, “Armenians are naturally harsh, it is very difficult to establish and continue friendship with them. Later on we shall see that Armenians even shot at the nations who helped them, they are a community of non-appreciatives.”55 Demir/Ayverdi reaches this conclusion only to prove that theological and practical unity with Armenians could not be achieved on the basis of religious doctrines. The paratextual materials of the English edition transform Sâmiha Anne (mother Sâmiha), as the mother of one single individual (appropriating motherhood from Neߞide Demir), into “the nation’s mother.”56 Further, friends, relatives, and Turks in Washington contributed to this propaganda mission by mailing each and every individual in the House of Representatives in the United States a copy of the text by the nation’s mother.57 The publishing house that still publishes Sâmiha Ayverdi’s works continues sanctifying the Neߞide/Samiha mothers. In 2014, at a conference on “Writing Women’s Lives,” the film team from the Kubbealtı publishing house attended the panel that I was speaking at, assuming that my presentation would include praise for Türkiye’nin Ermeni Meselesi. The film team had originally made an appointment with me for an interview immediately after our panel. Needless to say, my presentation on the denialist elements of Ayverdi’s works was a huge shock to them. Without waiting for the discussion after the papers had been delivered, they left the conference hall. Exposing the sacred mothers Samiha/Neߞide as denialists could only be interpreted as sacrilege.

Immobilizing Gendered Memories In the interpretation of the women writers’ works, an equally significant issue is that of “reception.” Müfide Ferit Tek’s novel is the only work remembered in the national imaginary because writer, economist, and historian ߸evket Süreyya’s (1897–1974) revived interest in the novel with the appropriation of the last name “Aydemir” in 1934. As a soldier fighting in East Anatolia, Süreyya’s fantasies of reaching Turan were enhanced by this holy book of Turanism, i.e, Aydemir, that he held in his hands during his time as a soldier in World War I. He continued struggling in the war to one day become an Aydemir himself and after the war took on the last name of Aydemir, dismissing perhaps too lightly that during World War I, he too was trying to reach central Asia with his gun and not his pen.58 [ 452 ]

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Müfide Ferit Tek’s opposition to the CUP regime’s militant policies during World War I is neither remembered, nor researched. Further, Halide Edib’s letter of mourning and apology to the Ottoman Armenians massacred in Adana in 1909 or her speech harshly criticizing the atrocities in 1915–1916 were entirely ignored while Ateߞten Gömlek, the novel promoting collective amnesia of violence against the Armenians, was hailed as the most prominent work in the national literary canon. Not surprisingly, Halide Edib’s turn toward nonviolence, peace activism, and conscientious objection, and her experiments in Inside India to write a feminist history of pacifism in the 1930s were entirely ignored in literary criticism in Turkey. In the 1930s, Halide Edib did not reassess the works she wrote in the 1920s in which she took a defensive position regarding 1915–1916. However, in her works on India, Halide Edib was closer to siding with heroines of maternal peacefulness and peaceful struggle, such as Kasturba Gandhi (1869–1944), rather than mothers in mourning (e.g. Ayߞe in Ateߞten Gömlek), whose sorrows serve no purpose other than to incite further violence.59 Lastly, the only mother who has not undergone change and whose legacy persists is Sâmiha Ayverdi. Kubbealtı Publishing House that Ayverdi herself established continues her denialist legacy. Müfide Ferit Tek’s Aydemir, Halide Edib’s Ateߞten Gömlek, and Sâmiha Ayverdi’s Türkiye’nin Ermeni Meselesi/The Armenian Question in Turkey enhance our understanding of how women writers contributed to the erasure of a genocidal past. As women writers drew on mourning, and wrote for audiences who were at the time of publication of their texts also in a deep state of mourning, they made men, and especially Turkish men, the only people who were to be mourned.60 In so doing, they mythified their lost national heroes at the expense of mourning Turkish women, mourning men and women from other ethnicities, recognizing the pain and losses of non-Turkish others, and writing histories of 1915 and its aftermath with Turks outside of the position of “victims.” Paradoxically, women characters in these texts, suspended in the state of mourning, were prevented from participating in future political possibilities either of a conservative or progressive nature. Hence, ironically, women writers, even the ones hailed for their feminism, such as Halide Edib, contributed to the political immobilization of women in the national imaginary and could neither mobilize women on peaceful grounds nor bring them together across contested histories and space. M Ü F I D E F E R I T T E K ’ S AY D E M I R M E E T S N E ߸ , D E K . D E M I R

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Notes 1. Most renowned for her two novels, Aydemir (Üsküdar: Kaknüs Yayınları, 1918) and Pervaneler (Üsküdar: Kaknüs Yayınları, 1924), Müfide Ferit Tek was educated clandestinely in a high school in Paris. In 1907, she married Ahmet Ferit Tek who brought her to Istanbul during the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. Because of Ahmet Ferit Tek’s opposition to the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the couple was sent into exile to Sinop and Bilecik where they spent most of the wartime years (1913–1918). Müfide Ferit Tek endorsed the national struggle in Anatolia (1919–1922) with articles she published in the newspapers Ifham (Declaration) and Hakimiyet-i Milliye (National Sovereignty). Halide Edib (Adıvar) was an internationally famous novelist, journalist, activist, and politician. One of the most prolific writers of Turkish literature, she produced works in various genres, ranging from autobiography, memoirs, travelogues, and novels to absurdist drama. She took part in the national struggle in Anatolia as a soldier, journalist, translator, and nurse but fell out of favor with the Kemalist regime after 1925 as all opposition was silenced and as suffrage was not granted in the early years of the republic. During her self-imposed exile in London and Paris (1925–1939), she produced a variety of works in English (including but not limited to Memoirs of Halide Edib,The Turkish Ordeal,Turkey Faces West, Conflict of East and West in Turkey, The Clown and His Daughter, Inside India). Critical of the CUP policies during World War I, Halide Edib’s narration of the Armenian genocide altered as she started writing in English for a Euro-American reading group in the 1920s. Sâmiha Ayverdi, a prominent Sufi woman mystic, was a major protagonist of the Turkish Right and a significant figure of the Rifai order. She was popular among Turkish nationalist and Islamist circles not only for her fiction but also for her advocacy of right-wing causes. 2. See also Hülya Adak, Halide Edib ve Siyasal ߸iddet: Ermeni Kırımı, Diktatörlük ve ߸iddetsizlik (Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2016), 39; Halide Edib, Memoirs of Halide Edib (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2004), 387. 3. Halide Edib, Turkey Faces West: A Turkish View of Recent Changes and Their Origin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1930), 76. 4. George Schöpflin, “The Functions of Myth and Taxonomy of Myths,” in Myths and Nationhood, ed. Geoffrey Hosking and Schöpflin (New York: Routledge, 1997), 19. 5. Meltem Ahıska mentions in this volume that, since 1995, the Saturday Mothers’ gatherings every Saturday in a public square in Galatasaray is “a feminist mode of performance that recognizes difference as a crucial strength,” (see chapter 7, this volume, Ahıska, “Memory as Encounter”). Ahıska quotes from Audre Lorde’s article “The Master’s Tools will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” in Sister [ 454 ]

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 110–3; Sara Ruddick, “Rethinking ‘Maternal’ Politics,” in The Politics of Motherhood: Activist Voices from the Left to Right, ed. Alexis Jetter, Annelise Orleck, and Diana Taylor (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 370. Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), xi, 17. Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, xx. Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, 244. Orleck, “Overview: Good Motherhood as Patriotism: Mothers on the Right,” in The Politics of Motherhood, 225. Orleck, “Overview, in The Politics of Motherhood, 226–8. This volume has several articles on the Saturday Mothers, most significantly, Ahıska’s “Memory as Encounter: The Saturday Mothers in Turkey.” See for instance Zeynep Gülru Göker’s “The Mourning Mother: Rhetorical Figure or a Political Actor?” in The Making of a Neoliberal Turkey, ed. Cenk Özbay, Maral Erol, Ayߞecan TerzioОlu, and Z. Umut Türem (New York: Routledge, 2016), 131–48 for an exploration of contemporary maternal politics under the AKP Regime. A few examples include M. Talha Çiçek, War and State Formation in Syria: Cemal Pasha’s Governorate During World War I (1914–1917) (New York: Routledge, 2014) and Hans Lukas Kieser’s forthcoming book Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). As one of the few articles on women and denial, see Hülya Adak, “Gendering Denial Narratives of the Decade of Terror (1975–1985): The Case of Neߞide K. Demir/Samiha Ayverdi and Hatun Sebilciyan/Sabiha Gökçen,” Journal of Genocide Research 17, no. 3 (2015): 327–43. This is the title of Müfide Ferit Tek’s (1892–1971) novel published in 1918 before the end of World War I as a utopia of Turanism, i.e., the cultural/national unity of all Turks. Hülya Adak, “Literary Heritages of the Late Ottoman Empire (1914–1918),” in International Encyclopaedia of the First World War (1914–1918), ed. Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson (Berlin: Freie Universitaet Berlin, 2018). Ay-demir is the combination of “mooniron,” the name of the male protagonist of the novel. On the eve of and during World War I, the discussions revolving around Turkishness and Turanism were varied. A group of intellectuals associated Turanism with expansionist and militarist policies, justifying the expansionist policies of CUP leaders to the east of the borders of the Ottoman Empire. Others argued that Turkishness entailed a linguistically and culturally unified nation. Debates on secularization, improving education, and professional opportunities for women were also included under discussions of Turkishness and Turanism. Among such

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debates, Müfide Ferit Tek’s character Aydemir defines his mission in central Asia as a “mission civilisatrice,” with aims of rescuing the Turks under Russian rule using pacifist methods. Müfide Ferit Tek, Aydemir, 27. 17. Müfide Ferit Tek, Aydemir, 18. 18. For details of Russian assimilation policies and violence against indigenous Central Asian people, see Edward Dennis Sokol’s The Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). 19. Müfide Ferit Tek, Aydemir, 14–15. 20. Müfide Ferit Tek, Aydemir, 16. 21. Müfide Ferit Tek, Aydemir, 117. 22. Müfide Ferit Tek, Aydemir, 117. 23. Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, 216. 24. The recent scholarship discussing sexual violence during 1915–1916 includes Lerna EkmekçioОlu, “A Climate for Abduction, a Climate for Redemption: The Politics of Inclusion during and after the Armenian Genocide,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 3 (2013): 522–53; Ayߞe Gül Altınay and Yektan Türkyılmaz, “Unraveling Layers of Silencing: Converted Armenian Survivors of the 1915 Catastrophe,” in Untold Histories of the Middle East: Recovering Voices from the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Amy Singer, Christopher K. Neumann, and Selçuk A. Somel (New York: Routledge, 2011), 25–53; and Vahé Tachjian, “Gender, Nationalism, Exclusion: The Reintegration Process of Female Survivors of the Armenian Genocide,” Nations and Nationalism, 15, no. 1 (2009): 60–80. 25. Ömer Seyfettin, Bütün Eserleri, Makaleler 2, ed. Hülya Argunߞah (Istanbul: Dergah Yayınları, 2001), 234–7. 26. Halide Edib’s Ateߞten Gömlek is a national romance about the national struggle of Turkey against the Greeks and occupying forces in Anatolia, which received international fame as it was translated into English, German, Russian, Swedish, and French. See Hülya Adak, Halide Edib ve Siyasal ߸iddet: Ermeni Kırımı, Diktatörlük ve ߸iddetsizlik (Istanbul: Bilgi Üniversitesi, 2016), 8. The first English translation was published in New York by Duffield and Company with the title The Shirt of Flame, whereas a second and different English translation was published in India in an effort to endorse the anticolonial struggle in India in 1932. This last translation brought much fame to Halide Edib in India. The novel is considered to be one of the most significant works in the canon of Turkish national literature. 27. See Adak, Halide Edib ve Siyasal ߸iddet, 49. 28. Halide Edib, Ateߞten Gömlek (Istanbul: Özgür, 1997), 15–17 (my translation). 29. In The Historiographic Perversion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 1, Marc Nichanian starts with the analysis of the term “genocide” as “not fact . . . because it is the very destruction of the fact, of the Notion of fact, of the factuality of fact.” Beginning with Ateߞten Gömlek, we witness different narrative [ 456 ]

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strategies in Turkish literature which contribute to the falling from memory of the genocide of 1915–1916. Ateߞten Gömlek does not just remain one of the most significant nation-building texts of Turkish literature but gains international recognition as well. The novel has been translated into English, German, Arabic, Russian, Swedish, and French. See Hülya Adak, “An Epic for Peace,” introduction to The Memoirs of Halide Edib (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2004), xii. In the 1930s, a different translation into English by publishers in Lahore brought the text center-stage in the Indian anticolonial struggle. Adak, “An Epic for Peace,” xv. 30. Halide Edib, Ateߞten Gömlek, 40. 31. On May 18, 1909, in the Unionist newspaper Tanin (The Voice), Edib published a letter of apology to Armenians regarding the Adana massacres in 1909. When she wrote the letter, Halide Edib was in exile in Alexandria, fleeing from the counterrevolution in Istanbul. See Adak, Halide Edib ve Siyasal ߸iddet, 35. 32. The following is an excerpt from the letter: “My poor Armenian brethren, you are the greatest victims of the Hamidian nightmare. The fiery joy of my soul for our re-established liberty turns to ice in the face of your darkened, desolate lands, the sad fate of your homeless, motherless little ones! Our national joy falls in the dust with shame before this awful tragedy, reflected in the eyes of your bereaved women! The ruins of Adana! O vast, bloody grave of my countrymen, you are a humiliation, not only to the Turks who caused it, but to the whole human race. My soul lies in the very dust of shame of kinship with the race that murdered you, while it moans and weeps in pain and sorry for you all.” The text is an excerpt from the letters of Miss Dodd to W.M. Ramsay in The Revolution in Constantinople and Turkey: A Diary (London: 1909), qtd. in Mushirul Hassan, Between Modernity and Nationalism: Halide Edib’s Encounter with Gandhi’s India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010), 210. 33. Türk OcaОı (Turkish Hearth) was the national club of the Unionists, a meeting place for discussions of music, arts, literature and in the context of “Turkishness.” 34. See Adak, Halide Edib ve Siyasal ߸iddet, 51–70. 35. Adak, Halide Edib ve Siyasal ߸iddet, 70–74. Also see Edib, Turkey Faces West. 36. See André N. Mandelstam’s Le Sort de l’Empire Ottoman (Lausanne: Payot et Cie, 1917), for a discussion of the history of Unionist policies and the Armenian massacres. 37. For a discussion of Edib’s responses to Mandelstam, see Adak, Halide Edib ve Siyasal ߸iddet, 54–56. 38. See Halide Edib, Turkey Faces West, 133–43. 39. Edward Mead Earle, introduction to Turkey Faces West,” xi. 40. Halide Edib, Turkey Faces West, 76. 41. Halide Edib, Turkey Faces West, 142, 170. M Ü F I D E F E R I T T E K ’ S AY D E M I R M E E T S N E ߸ , D E K . D E M I R

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42. Ayverdi, Sâmiha. Türkiye’nin Ermeni Meselesi (Turkey’s Armenian Issue) (Istanbul: Kubbealtı, 2007). In the text of The Armenian Question in Turkey in English, the name of Neߞide Demir appears as the writer (Istanbul: Kuߞak Ofset, 1980). 43. The aim of the militant organizations, ASALA and JCOAG, was to push Turkey to recognize the Armenian genocide. ASALA also had claims of “a territorial nature for an Armenia to be established in Eastern Anatolia and part of Soviet Russia.” See Adak, “Gendering,” 329. Killing roughly forty-six people and injuring several hundred, ASALA operated from 1975–1985. 44. Adak, “Gendering,” 330. 45. Adak, “Gendering,” 330. 46. Fatma Müge Göçek, Denial of Violence, qtd. in Adak, “Gendering” 330. 47. Sâmiha Ayverdi is a major figure of the Turkish Right and a significant leader in the Rifaî order. Popular among Turkish nationalist and Islamist circles, she has become renowned as a novelist and an activist for right-wing causes. See Adak, “Gendering,” 331. 48. Adak, “Gendering,” 331. 49. I borrowed the concept from Nichanian’s book Historiographic Perversion. 50. According to Aytürk and Mignon, this historical inversion reached its “paroxysm in her call for the Turkish state to finance an international campaign and distribute color brochures documenting the massacres committed by the Armenians. See Adak, “Gendering,” 332; ԭlker Aytürk and Laurent Mignon, “Paradoxes of a Cold War Sufi Woman,” New Perspectives on Turkey 49 (2013): 82. 51. The term is “nankör” in Turkish. Demir, The Armenian Question, 12. 52. Demir, The Armenian Question, 13. 53. Adak, “Gendering,” 332. 54. Adak, “Gendering,” 335. 55. Demir, The Armenian Question, 12. 56. Ergun Göze, “Sâmiha Ayverdi,” Tercüman, May 3, 1987, in Ayverdi, Türkiye’nin Ermeni Meselesi (Istanbul: Kubbealtı, 2007), 187. 57. Göze, “Sâmiha Ayverdi,” 187. 58. Aydemir, Suyu Arayan (Istanbul: Remzi, 1965), 135–7. “Turkey’s Surname Law of June 1934 enfored the adoption and registration of hereditary surnames in Turkish.” Citizens of the new republic had a maxiumum of two years to adopt surnames. See Meltem Türköz, “Surname Narratives and State-Society Boundary: Memories of Turkey’s Family Name Law of 1934,” Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 43, no. 6 (2007): 893. 59. For Halide Edib’s exploration of Kastuba Gandhi, please see Edib, Inside India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 39–40. 60. Aydemir and Ateߞten Gömlek were published in the immediate aftermath of 1915–1916, whereas Türkiye’nin Ermeni Meselesi was published during the ASALA assassinations of Turkish diplomats. [ 458 ]

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CHA P T E R X X V I

Hilando en la Memoria Weaving Songs of Resistance in Contemporary Mapuche Political Cultural Activism M A R Í A S O L E DA D FA L A B E L L A L U C O

S

ince its national formation in 1810, the Chilean state has been in ongoing conflict or war with the Mapuche, the country’s most populous first nation. In the epic poem La Araucana by Ercilla (1569), the Mapuche, or Araucanos as they were called until the mid-twentieth century, are celebrated as the great noble heroes of the newly “discovered” territories. Even today, this poem and the Araucanos play a crucial role in Chile’s identity as a nation. Yet for centuries the Mapuche have been ideologically construed by the state as abject and dangerous, a true nemesis of Chilean national identity. They have become civilization’s “constitutive other,” its “internal enemy” that must be rejected and dominated to ensure order, peace, and prosperity.1 Consistently throughout history, the Mapuche have resisted this many-sided oppression, striving for ways to transform it. In a post-9/11 scenario, the Mapuche’s position as internal enemies has enabled the State to claim that they are “terrorists,” resulting in many becoming victims of the violence of the carabineros, the national police. In spite of the official recognition of fourteen wrongful killings, no one has been judged guilty in Chile.2 In recent years however, this impunity has been rebuked internationally. In 2015, the Chilean State was condemned by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for wrongfully judging Mapuche leaders as terrorists. Importantly, this positive shift seems to be coalescing in Chile too. On January 25, 2018, Chile’s Attorney General denounced that through “Operación Huracán,” an institutional operation launched by [ 459 ]

the Ministry of the Interior and the Police, the carabineros were planting falsified proofs to wrongfully prove that ten Mapuche leaders were terrorists.3 This is an historic event: for the first time the Chilean State is split and one institution (the Judiciary) accuses another State institution (the Executive) of violating the rights of Mapuche subjects merely for being Mapuche.4 What made this shift in history possible? In this essay, I focus on the writing by Mapuche women collected in the two volumes of anthologies of the Hilando en la Memoria (Weaving in Memory) project, which has been ongoing since 2004. I critically trace one manifestation of their resistance, seeking to understand the mechanisms that have been able to shift the historical naturalization of the Mapuche as the internal enemy that must be annihilated. Indeed, during Chile’s second decade of transition to democracy (2000–2010), Mapuche women’s poetry broke through the barriers of social abjection and could be heard registering cultural and political dissent. Since then, not only has their poetry been widely published and translated, but they have begun to be able to make their livelihoods from their political-cultural Mapuche activity. In this context, the performance of their poetry exhibits a transformative power whose effects we are witnessing in Chile today. In Mapudungun there are only two gender positions: male (wentru) and female (malen). However, Mapuche gender construction is a contested field in which traditional Chilean dichotomous heteronormativity is resisted by a fluid understanding of gender based on a “set of complimentary and mutually respectful confluences that seek the balance of küme felen, the good life.”5 Importantly, there is mobility between gender identities. In this essay, I am using the term “women” to refer to the materiality of the lived bodies of the poets themselves and how they recognize and refer to their own gender. Poetry becomes a stage where the Mapuche political community and its aspirations (including gender identity) are performed. As such, Mapuche poetic discourse has the potential of “queering” Chilean national discourse, hereby resisting and undoing the constitutive constraint of Chilean national identity formations, including gender identity. An example of how these creative women have been able to transform their position in Chilean society is afforded by Graciela Huinao, co-editor of both the Hilando en la Memoria (2006) and Hilando en la Memoria; Epu Rupa (2009) anthologies.6 Huinao was introduced into the Chilean Academy of Language in 2014 and has travelled twice with President Michelle Bachelet during her first presidency. This honor has also been awarded [ 460 ]

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to Faumelisa Manquepillan who travelled with President Bachelet to the United States in 2008 and has become a strong spiritual, cultural, and social leader in her home community of Puquiñe. Another notable example is Roxana Miranda Rupailaf, co-editor of the second anthology, who has won many national and international prizes, among them the National Writers Fellowship (2006 and 2008) and in 2012 the prestigious Municipality of Santiago Prize for Poetry, the same that Gabriela Mistral won in 1914. My intention in this essay is to explain how political cultural agency, including my own, can mobilize memory and vulnerability to unleash the performative force of written poetry. In doing so, I underscore the political efficacy of written as well as oral poetry in postcolonial and transitional contexts. Through poetry and performance that embodies and shares strategies for surviving oppression, Mapuche women exemplify the transformative effects of political/cultural engagement.7 Poetry has been a powerful medium for the expression of national identity struggles not only in Chile but also in other parts of Latin America. Poetic language can put forth new discourses capable of naming previously unintelligible realities.8 Following Judith Butler in her article “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” I argue that poetic discourse, both written and performed, has constituted a “form of political assembly” whose genealogy we can trace not on an urban map but in a library or on the web: “If we think about recent forms of political assembly, they do not always take place on the street or in the square. Sometimes that is because streets and squares do not exist or do not form the symbolic center for a specific political community and its aspirations.”9

Hilando en la Memoria (Weaving in Memory) Returning to Chile after completing my doctoral studies in the year 2001, I could not find any published poetry by Mapuche women in Chile. In 2002, a Fundación Andes postdoctoral fellowship allowed me to continue to explore the problematic relationship between bodies, knowledge, and nation I had been investigating in my dissertation on the abject and exiled body of the poet Gabriela Mistral. The fellowship ended with the threeday international congress “Bodies, Knowledges and Nation.” Its closing act was a performance of Mapuche poetry where women’s voices were HILANDO EN LA MEMORIA

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outstanding. It is here that I began to work with Graciela Huinao and Faumelisa Manquepillan. As a feminist I believe in the disruptive power of the body and its materiality. As an activist I felt an obligation to do something about the lack of recognition accorded the aesthetically vibrant and culturally compelling voices of Mapuche women. I set out to find allies with whom to create a “grand performative act” that would simultaneously achieve political and poetic justice. Hilando en la Memoria, an ongoing multidisciplinary research-action project, was thus born in 2004 out of a shared commitment to redress an injustice and produce change. Its objective—to critically engage with Mapuche women’s poetic voices while facilitating their emergence and legitimation in the public sphere—led to the creation and publication of the first two anthologies of Mapuche women’s poetry in Spanish and Mapudungun (the Mapuche language)—Hilando en la Memoria (2006) and Hilando en la Memoria; Epu Rupa (2009). The project is based in ESE:O, an independent nongovernmental organization (NGO) in the city of Santiago that is dedicated to promoting human rights and disseminating written local knowledge. From the beginning, this project was envisioned as a collective effort wherein the Mapuche women were put at the forefront in all possible ways.10 The people and institutions involved steadfastly implemented this decision. As a part-time academic, I was able to facilitate a process already underway among the Mapuche women themselves. As the cofounder and director of ESE:O, I was able to coordinate relations with civil society and other donors: the Instituto de Humanidades and the Escuela de Escritura Creativa of Universidad Diego Portales, Editorial Cuarto Propio (Chile’s feminist press), Centro Cultural de España (the Spanish cultural cooperation agency).11 All donations were approved by the Mapuche members of the project. Furthermore, the Mapuche women themselves are the authors and sole owners of the books’ rights. Establishing these principles and rules has been key to the success of the Hilando en la Memoria project. Once the team of coordinators was convened, we set out to design a performative stage for the entrance of Mapuche women poets into the Chilean public sphere and literary canon, in both book form and embodied presence. For this we developed the following substages: (1) the ESE:O online campus to produce the manuscript; (2) the launching of the first book to produce social impact; (3) an international congress [ 462 ]

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with a famous keynote speaker to ensure attendance and recognition by the Chilean literary and academic sphere; (4) an intensive communication and dissemination strategy with local and foreign press led by the women poets themselves. To identify participants, we asked the Mapuche poet Graciela Huinao to invite two poets. One of them was Faumelisa Manquepillan. They, in turn, reached out to others. Decisions about whom to integrate into the project were discussed collaboratively, but the last word was that of the Mapuche women, as per our project’s rationale. In just a few weeks, Mapuche lamien (sisters) had contacted and selected each other. More than half of the poets lived in places far away from Santiago and had never met face to face. Sometimes they did not know each other at all. The ESE:O online campus, based on feminist critical theory and a methodology of collaborative online work, allowed for the emergence of an intimate space in which to meet and share knowledge. It was a virtual political assembly that generated a resilient and sustainable community.12 We transformed a necessity—lack of funds for travel and need for creative and political autonomy—into a virtue. Technology such as Facebook, notwithstanding its limits, allowed our collective to accomplish many things that would not have been possible before. In Chile and elsewhere in Latin America the internet has been a crucial tool for democratization of access to knowledge, information and communication.13 Nevertheless, I am grateful for the teachings of so many lamien who refused to work online, insisting on the necessity of physical proximity. During all these years of working together, they have emphasized the irreplaceable value of human contact and face-to-face communication. The books were put together by the Mapuche women themselves, in coordination with other members of the project. The feminist independent press Cuarto Propio, who have been unfailing sisters in arms, published both books, respecting all decisions made by the authors. Both anthologies were launched in coordination with international congresses of poetry and performance with renowned keynote speakers, ensuring a consequential reception and recognition by key national and international figures. In critically analyzing and describing the Hilando en la Memoria project, I am functioning as a writer/scholar-in-dialogue, weaving a self-reflexive and genealogical text based on many dialogues I have engaged in over the years in a variety of different formats. The weaving analogy has been part HILANDO EN LA MEMORIA

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of the project from the beginning. As the second volume’s editor Roxana Miranda Rupailaf, described it: Hilando en la Memoria is an effort to register the acclaimed voices of Mapuche women’s poetry, as well as the newer and more contemporary ones. . . . this anthology as well as the earlier one are the weaving of a greater work that still awaits future threads and colors to be discovered  .  .  . [This experience] has been enriched by this minga (“potlatch”) of words in which we have participated to create a tonality, a kaleidoscope of memory writers, literary critics, professors, editors, coordinators and all other contributors.14

Mapuche Poetry’s Roots in Oppression The newly-independent Chilean state’s incapacity to forge alliances with the Mapuche, in contrast to the Spanish crown, resulted in two wars: the “War to the Death” (1819–1832) and what is still perversely called “War of Pacification of the Araucanía” (1860–1930). Despite its name, the socalled war of “pacification” never led to a political settlement during its seventylong years. The underlying conflicts—the land issue and the refusal of the state in successive constitutions to recognize the Mapuche as a sovereign people—have stood in the way of meaningful dialogue and agreements until this day. Human rights abuses—such as brutal police incursions into Mapuche communities in search of weapons or criminal suspects— continue to be reported. In 2014 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights condemned the Chilean state for violating the human rights of Mapuche spiritual and political leaders.15 In spite of sanctions imposed by the court, this situation has not improved and Mapuche people continue to endure violence and injustice, while continuing to resist it through both violent and peaceful means.16 This has remained constant, despite the momentous political changes Chile has experienced in the second half of the twentieth century. The government of President Salvador Allende (1970–1973) went some way to recognize and repair Chile´s historic debt to the Mapuche through its process of agrarian reform. Alas, the coup d’état of 1973 and the civilmilitary dictatorship that resulted swiftly ended this. During the dictatorship [ 464 ]

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(1973–1990) state violence was more generalized, aimed at the center and left-wing political opposition. The Mapuche were included in this group, and they formed political alliances along the whole range of political parties in the opposition. Historically, poetry has been one the most prominent mediums for articulating the Mapuche’s political and cultural resistance to centuries-old repression. This is understandable: poetry’s closeness with oral tradition and its flexibility in giving voice to diverse imaginaries make it a paradigmatic genre for the joining of voices across generations. On the precise beginning of modern Mapuche poetry opinions are divided. Iván Carrasco dates it as 1966, four years before Allende, when Sebastián Queupul Quintremil published his Poemas Mapuches in Castilian, a small volume that has four bilingual poems in Mapudungun and Castilian.17 Elicura Chihuailaf, however, places the beginning much earlier, in the 1930s, when Mapuche poems appeared frequently in the newspapers La Voz de Arauco (Temuco), El Heraldo, and El Frente Araucano (both from Santiago).18 The year 1939 is notable for the publication of the Canarero Araucano by Anselmo Quilaqueo, identified by Chihuailaf as “an editorial milestone” and “perhaps the first work created and also published and disseminated on the initiative of our brothers.”19 As a consequence of the dictatorship’s imposition of censorship, terror, and exile, the circulation of people and published material was restricted. Writers organized locally, either in Chile or in exile, forming literary workshops that inspired new forms of expression, including the publication of bulletins. Mapuche women writers participated in these from the start and also formed their own organizations.20 The literary workshops were a key space for the production and dissemination of Mapuche poetic creation during this period. For example, the Aumen Literary Workshop inaugurated in the city of Castro in Chile included women Mapuche poets such as Sonia Caicheo, Jeannette Hueitra, and Miriam Torres Millán. It became “a fundamental space for the practice and production of poetry in the area, and later, for the south of Chile.”21 In addition, political and cultural bulletins abroad, leaflets, booklets, and small and sporadic magazines published Mapuche poetry. Some of these platforms of international circulation were the Mapuche Bulletin in England between 1978 and 1981, where stories and poems were published in Mapundungun; and Huerrquen, published by the poet Rayen A. Kvyeh in Belgium between 1982 and 1984. Huerrquen became the official newssheet of the Mapuche Exterior Committee.22 Through this medium María Teresa HILANDO EN LA MEMORIA

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Panchillo published the poem “Caliber 2.568” in the mid-1980s, highlighting the importance of poetry in the years of dictatorship as a political strategy and as a space for the reconstruction of history. It was only with the return to democracy that Mapuche poets finally began to be recognized as authorities and equals not only culturally but also institutionally. With some notable exceptions, most are women.23 Certainly, the circumstances that made this “emergence” possible are related to the social and the political roles that women played in the struggle for the return of democracy and their empowerment through local and transnational solidarity movements and feminism. It is also no doubt related to the social role Mapuche women play in keeping alive oral tradition and preserving memory. Among the significant acts of institutional recognition are that Graciela Huinao was elected to permanent membership in the Academia Chilena de la Lengua (Chilean Academy of Language) and Roxana Miranda Rupailaf won several prestigious national and international poetry awards. Both poets are members of Hilando en la Memoria. Also, in addition to receiving many awards, Elicura Chihuailaf was nominated for the Premio Nacional de Literatura (National Prize of Literature). The end of the civil-military dictatorship in 1990 opened up the public sphere in a time of intensified globalization and desire to integrate long under-represented identities. Since 1990 the Mapuche have been able to keep their specific plight and voice at the center of the political stage. Together with other social subjects, such as women and LGBTI communities, they have fought for their democratic right to “appear” as autonomous political and cultural subjects. Yet their political and cultural practices, and their claims, tended to disrupt the celebratory atmosphere of the beginning of the transition to democracy—the campaign slogan of the plebiscite against Pinochet was “La Alegría ya Viene” (Happiness is coming). Mapuche voices remain highly critical of Chile’s new neoliberal democracy. Their discourse undermines established discourses of domination and colonization, underscoring the violent matrix that is still at play.24 Today, oral traditions and memories of the violence and killings from first-generation survivors of the relocations to reservations are still alive. Disturbing examples of humiliation, rape, and murder of Mapuche are threaded through accounts of human rights violations of loved ones during the dictatorship. The proximity of oral tradition and poetry has produced a rich, aesthetic coming together of voices from different generations, which allows for a [ 466 ]

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multiplicity of political and cultural memories. In the words of Graciela Huinao, author and co-editor of Hilando en la Memoria: Just like our grandmothers when they weaved in their tapestry the absences, the silence of sadness and the joys, today [we] brood our lives and that of our ancestors to keep on weaving in memory with the hope that the thread of the spun word will never break. We find ourselves knotting with the same literary thread oral tradition, writing and memory. It has not been easy to set up this literary loom with our own smells, tastes and codes.25

Mapuche Politico-Cultural Resistance as Poetry The ever-present matrix of violence described above produces memories that activate the traumatic experiences both of Mapuche and Chileans. A complex tapestry of postmemory is woven into Mapuche cultural resistance, producing vulnerable and permeable subjectivities and sociabilities. “Postmemory,” Marianne Hirsch argues, “describes the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before—to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up.”26 Importantly, Hirsch points out that postmemory keeps “alive” events that happened in the past, creating an “uneasy oscillation between continuity and rupture.” Mapuche women’s poetry shows that vulnerabilities resulting from centuries of oppression, discrimination, and nonrecognition are also capable of subverting national identity and memory formations. Following Judith Butler’s understanding of vulnerability as a form of resistance, I would suggest that poetry can help transform vulnerability into agency, shaking off the oppressive status quo and unleashing new forms of desire for being in the world with full access to human rights, specifically here in Chile. Activism that began with an urgency to disrupt and transform the contemporary public sphere’s status quo, affirming “para que nunca más” (so that it never happens again), has evolved to raise many new questions: How does Mapuche political cultural resistance surface and displace authoritarian affective memories that have been passed on through many generations? How do these practices engage with global movements and reshape national identities in the future? HILANDO EN LA MEMORIA

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There is a hint of this potential for a new direction in ¡  .  .  . Escucha, Winka! . . ., an historical study in which three Mapuche historians and a sociologist lay bare the tensions between Mapuche and Winka (white) society: Maybe we could stay with this [dichotomized] vision and put you in the position of the enemy. However, we are certain that there will mature in them (you) a position that is neither paternal nor messianic towards us, and that will break down your Winka masks and reboot the hard drive engraved in you, the criollo (Spanish and European colonial elites), the only true winka. When you are considered not only masses of voters or consumers, but also differentiated subjects of a plurinational nation the category winka will become obsolete. We also aspire to let go of our absolute condemnation towards you for the role played by your State in our domination and impoverishment. At least, we are politically conscious that to think the future . . . brings us to accept your presence and assume the possibility of mutual deep and respectful understanding.27 The clear and poetic words of María Teresa Panchillo, one of the zomo weycafe (women warriors) of Hilando en la Memoria express how poetic discourse can not only be political, but transformative as well:28 Why do I write? Seeing the terrible reality of the dictatorship made me write; anyone could have been killed during a protest day. [It is related] to that fear experienced in dictatorships when you cannot say what you feel. My first verses were of political denunciation and resistance. At the time, no one saw a future ahead, let stand [a future] for originary peoples. . . . I am conscious that poetry is also a weapon in the struggle and that it teaches, it educates with our language. As a Catalán poet (Gabriel Celaya) said “Poetry is a weapon loaded with future.”29 The poetry of Karla Guaquin, published in the second volume of Hilando en la Memoria, also takes on the voice of the zomo weycafe (woman warrior). In “Deshidratándole la Vida” (“Dehydrating Life”), a forceful voice exclaims: There is no more running water through these lands [ 468 ]

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those selfish green giants mandated by the out-of-town invader swallowed it all.30 Her poetry makes use of images from children’s literature to stress the moral tone of her complaint. She denounces the neoliberal legacy of the dictatorship’s economic model of natural resource extraction, a feature of more than thirty years of democratic transition. She also highlights the multiply foreign character of this economic model: it is not only foreign morally and culturally but also territorially, symbolized by the “out-of-town invader.” The laconic poetic language is like a set of Chinese boxes, each image contained inside the other, displaying generational memories that overlap in a gradient. With the image “out-of-town invader,” she simultaneously denotes someone foreign to the rural island of Chiloe (her home); the officials of the lumber companies who live in the big cities; the transnational headquarters of the lumber industry as well as the new kind of colonialism it has set in place; and the ancestral burden of historic colonial oppression. The phrase concisely references a succession of interlopers superimposed on one another. In Chile as elsewhere in the Americas, poetic discourse serves multiple purposes, including forging a public arena for developing and debating political ideas, particularly ideas linked to precarious infrastructure, authoritarian rule, inequality, social injustice, and neoliberalism.31 Some examples from the Mapuche poets will illustrate these points.

The Resistance Aesthetic Integrating oral tradition with contemporary experiences, Mapuche poets connect new meanings to older forms. Poet Elicura Chihuailaf refers to Mapuche poetic texts as oralitura (oral literature).32 The author and critic of Hilando en la Memoria Maribel Mora Curriao explains: every reading event of poetry done by the author in front of an audience is for me a performance, as by reading my poems I adopt a coherent attitude in regard to my discourse  .  .  . [This] entails an artistic will . . . to act according to the given event and given public.33 HILANDO EN LA MEMORIA

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The performance of poetic discourse has the capacity to exceed the textual page and suffuse creative energy beyond itself, creating the conditions for the emergence of new worlds of transformative energy. The work of María Huenuñir exemplifies this pattern. A native speaker of Mapuzungun, Huenuñir sings and writes bilingual texts. She migrated from Cayumapu Alto to Santiago in the early 1980s due to the economic crisis of those middictatorship years. Her poetry speaks of her memories of her native land and of the oral tradition she received from her elders, creating links between rural and urban cultures and between generations. Currently, in addition to performing for a varied audience, Huenuñir works as a traditional educator for the Ministry of Education to preschool children; her poem “Meli” (Four) is part of the curriculum she teaches.The voice in “Meli” sings about this sacred number in the Mapuche cosmology by figuratively linking her cultural genealogy with the forces of her native habitat. Its last stanza reads: My four grandfathers and mothers are marking my trails protecting my destiny from all modernities.34 At first, the language in the poem flows harmoniously, there is only a hint of precariousness, a trace that points to the fact that something else is going on: the “blood” she is made from is “broken.” However, when the word “modernities” breaks brusquely with the pastoral tone of the language and brings in contemporary and political energy, we begin to understand what is at play. The poem is imbued with the idea of küme felen (the good life, living well), which is shared by other Andean indigenous peoples, such as the Quechua and Aymara. This concept informs the Mapuche critique of the Chilean way of life, or “being in the world.” In many aspects, it expresses a desire for the antithesis of the Chilean neoliberal development model based on reduction, fragmentation, and disembodied immediacy; it urges its rejection, critique, and transformation. As Juan Paulo Huirimilla states, küme felen seeks to achieve an “equilibrium between the piwke (heart), rakiduam (thought), kalül (body) and püyü (spirit).” Huirimilla also mentions that it is often articulated with another concept, that of itrofil mogen, meaning respect for all things living and biodiversity: ‘“totality without exclusion,” or “integrity without fragmentation of life, of all living beings.”35 [ 470 ]

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“Meli” is not only about Huenuñir’s oral tradition, it is also about how her ancestral memory increases her ability to prevail against a threatening political situation. The poem enacts a specific vulnerability of being a rural Mapuche woman in Santiago, one that the poetic subject resists. As such, the poem works as a talisman, performing a transfer of identity and memory that constructs a doubly resilient body: one textual and the other embodied. The intensification and amplification of transference enables audiences to be mobilized to seek their ancestral roots and memories, geographical as well as genealogical. It enjoins them to become more resilient. “Meli” is one of María Huenuñir’s most popular poems; in performances her chanting is melodious until it breaks at the end with the strangeness of the entoned word “modernities.” In this poem, orality and performance reinforce one another: poetic energies surpass the written page. Indeed, when the stage is infused with the vitality and urgency of the here and now, such powerful audience engagement becomes a form of political assembly. In a context of historical exclusion of Mapuche voices from the Chilean public sphere, poetic performances such as hers provide a weapon of resistance to criminalization, domination, and colonization.36 In “Meli,” the voice is protected from the assailing modernities by Huenuñir’s ancestors. In contrast, in “Paseo Ahumada” (“Ahumada Passage”) by Faumelisa Manquepillan, the weapons of protection from danger are more precarious: being seen and recognized and being able to write letters to her loved ones. The subject in the poem is a live-in housekeeper (nana) in an upper-class neighborhood of Santiago who travels to the center of town on her day off: In the upper neighborhood one could find her With an apron dressed as a “nana” With a blond child That she sometimes kissed.37 The precariousness is performed in the impersonal tone of the poem, the lack of attachment to her surroundings, and the “blond child” that she must look after. Her alienation comes through the monotonous rhyme of the verses in Spanish, ending in “-aba,” mimicking the sound of an idiotic character. The voice of the poem stresses that the woman seeks protection in people´s gazes. First this protection is symbolized by a hat, then by a plea. HILANDO EN LA MEMORIA

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However, it is only when she writes letters home to her loved ones describing her life in Santiago that she is able to materialize her need to escape: Of this capital she sometimes told In her long letters that she always sent Between fire and smoke they have me trapped Help me to get out From the Paseo Ahumada When writing home, the monotonous tone and the impersonal subject dramatically shift; an anguished voice erupts. It is only through this link with her home that the woman’s voice can come into contact with desire and emerge as a cry for help: Help me to get out From the Paseo Ahumada. In Hilando en la Memoria, Faumelisa Manquepillan explains her conscious decision to return to her homeland: In the womb of Pukiñe (The First Ones), fifteen kilometers from Lanco: I live. . . . I chose to live in the countryside in spite of all the “lacks” of development. Here I am one more tree. There was a time when I lived outside of my community. My stay in Santiago was very difficult, and when I go back to the city I have needed to make amends [with it].38 In contrast with the assertiveness of “Meli,” “Paseo Ahumada” exhibits a marked vulnerability. It is in the poem’s reception as an act of transference that the spirit of the küme felen is embodied. Indeed, this poem has become an iconic text about the alienation suffered in Santiago not only by Mapuche women, but by all women who have to endure the hardship of rural to urban migration to become live-in nanas in upper class and/or winka households. María Lugones, a leading voice on feminism and decolonization, names one of the most poignant conditions that emerge from this field—the culture of “indifference” that has sustained colonial domination and supported gender domination. She claims that “[t]his indifference is insidious as it sets [ 472 ]

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up impassable barriers in our struggle as women of color for our own integrity, self-determination, in the very core of our struggles for liberation of our communities.”39 One can read “Paseo Ahumada” as staging the culture of “indifference” that Maria Lugones denounces, that indolence that needs to exist to sustain colonial domination based on race, class, and gender. The poem contrasts starkly with the exquisitely ironic neo avant-garde voice of poet Enrique Lihn, whose epic El Paseo Ahumada, written during the economic crisis of the 1980s, denounces the precarious livelihoods of the denizens of this emblematic pedestrian walk in Santiago. In this sense, it represents the emergence of a new kind of subject and desire, the voice of one of the “voiceless” people that Enrique Lihn portrayed. Faumelisa Manqupillan short-circuits the electric and voracious voice of Lihn—who invokes the “father of Chilean poetry” Pablo Neruda’s magnum opus, Canto General—by bringing on stage the thin and impersonal voice of a third person on the verge of collapse, almost nonexistent, barely surviving, trapped between the “fire and smoke” of the big city. Manquepillan’s discourse mobilizes other memories very different from the traditional Chilean cultural canon. It is not a monumental voice that claims to speak for others or to gesture at totality; instead, the voice lives through its vulnerability in claiming as its last resource the persistent memory of home. The enactment of this position of vulnerability produces new kinds of relationships and sociabilities that resist, critique, and transform canonical Chilean imaginaries, such as the ones represented by Lihn and Neruda. Holding this position, the vulnerable subject mobilizes collective lived and embodied memories to imagine new ways of being in the world. As in “Meli,” the subject of “Paseo Ahumada” finds solace and strength when in contact with her ancestral home, which she symbolizes as a womb, reinforcing the matrilineal heritage of her family and her own female desire.

Conclusion Hilando en la Memoria increased access to the poetic voices of Mapuche women as political and cultural activists. Their poetic discourse teaches us that the traumatic horror imposed during the dictatorship is part of our history and persists in the present: it is we “democratic” Chileans who for centuries have perpetrated crimes against the humanity of indigenous peoples, violating their most basic human rights with our laws and way of life. HILANDO EN LA MEMORIA

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It is my belief that to come to terms with the dictatorship and almost thirty years of transition to democracy—Chile is still governed by the dictatorship’s constitution and economic neoliberal model—we must call attention to the scope of the violence experienced by the Mapuche. The damage inflicted by the Chilean State is ongoing; it continues especially since the “Mapuche movement” started claiming lands in 1997. We must also call attention to Mapuche political cultural resistance through poetic discourses that activate and transmute suppressed memory in the service of resistance to a restrictive Chilean national identity. The emerging of their poetic and political voices has allowed for the emergence of new desires and knowledges, including respect for their human rights. The circulation of new language and ways of seeing and being can ultimately prompt dissident capacities to contest norms and develop new imaginaries for the construction of a post-dictatorship society. The poetic discourse of Mapuche political cultural activists is part and parcel of the political struggle against state and cultural violence in Chile, thus constituting a form of political assembly. Mobilizing Mapuche collective memory and transforming vulnerability into agency, the Mapuche women poets are both undoing and recreating a Chilean “us.”

Notes 1. Soldedad Falabella, Graciela Huinao et al., eds., Hilando en la Memoria: Curriao, Huinao, Millapan, Manquepillan, Panchillo, Pinda, Rupailaf (Santiago de Chile: Cuarto Propio, 2006). 2. The Mapuche martyrs are young men who have been shot by carabineros since Chile’s return to democracy. Their names are: Agustina Huenupe Pavian (2001), Mauricio Huenupe Pavian (2001), Jorge Antonio Suárez Marihuan (2001), Edmundo Alex Lemunao Saavedra (2002), Julio Alberto Huentecura Llancaleo (2004), Zenén Alfonso Diaz Nécul (2005), Jose Gerardo Huenante Huenante (2005), Lonko Juan Lorenzo Collihuin Catril (2006), Matias Valentin Catrileo Quezada (2008), Johnny Cariqueo Yañez (2008), Jaime Facundo Mendoza Collío (2009), Rodrigo Melinao Lican (2013), José Mauricio Quintriqueo Huaiquimil (2014),Victor Manuel Mendoza Collío (2014). See “Mapuches asesinados en la ‘Democracia Chilena,” Werken Noicias, accessed December 12, 2018, http:// werken.cl/portada-2/mapuches-asesinados-en-la-democracia-chilena/. 3. See: Bio Bio Chile. “Operación ‘Huracán’: Abott tilda como gravísima e inédita presunta falsificación de datos.” January 25, 2018, accessed August 9, 2018, http:// [ 474 ]

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4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

www.biobiochile.cl/noticias/nacional/chile/2018/01/25/operacion-huracan -abbot-tilda-como-gravisima-e-inedita-presunta-falsificacion-de-datos.shtml. The extent of the dismantling of “Operación Huracán” has been so powerful that it has impacted President Bachelet’s undersecretary of state and general Blu of the Carabineros who was directly in command. Blu is now in preventive custody. Every day there are new convictions, and the discrediting of the excecutive and Carabineros in relation to the Mapuche is increasing. As a result, former Mapuche terrorist convictions are now being denounced as government set-ups. El Mostrador, “Vuelco en operación Huracán,” http:// www.elmostrador.cl/dia/2018/07/27/vuelco-en-operacion-huracan-corte-de -apelaciones-de-temuco-dictamina-prision-preventiva-para-general-r-blu/, accessed August 8, 2018. Indeed, on August 9, Amnesty International launched a special report “PreJuicios Injustos” (Unjust Pre-Trials/Judgements) on the implementation of the antiterrorist law. It states that “It is unacceptable that the Chilean State continue to bring to trial Mapuche people, without due process warranties and using an “antiterrorist” law that has been condemned by the Interamerican Court of Human Rights.” It also reminds us that this law was passed under the civilmilitary dictatorship led by Pinochet. (AI) Francisco Huichaqueo, interviewed by author, June 26, 2016, Santiago, Chile. Many of the Mapuche women in the first anthology had not finished their elementary education and had travelled to Santiago from the South of Chile at a very young age, sometimes eleven or twelve years, to work as nanas, live-in house workers. Their social status has been likened to that of slaves. At first in Hilando en la Memoria we used the word “poet” to refer to the women writers, but through the years we had to struggle to find a proper expression to name their poetic activity, since there were signs of protest each time they were labeled as poets or artists. They pushed language to find an expression that would not separate their daily work as creators from their political beliefs and activities. They constantly resisted being assimilated to winka (white Chilean) culture and ways of life. They insisted that their work was not art but an integrated practice that involved cultural, spiritual, and political forces. This is how we agreed on the term “political cultural activists.” The poet freedom-fighter’s mobilizing power is best captured by Cuba’s national hero José Martí, poet and founder of the Cuban Revolutionary Party (Ramos). The poetry of the struggle for a new way of life freed from domination can be traced from Alonso de Ercilla, La Araucana (1569); Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855); José Martí, Versos Sencillos (1891); Pablo Neruda, Canto General (1950); Langston Hughes, Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951); Alan Ginsberg’s Howl (1954); Gabriela Mistral, Poema de Chile (1967); Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969); and Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014). HILANDO EN LA MEMORIA

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9. Judith Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance” in Vulnerability in Resistance, ed. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay (Durham, NC: Duke Universtiy Press, 2016). 10. During my PhD at UC Berkeley I had the opportunity critically to study the problematic relationship between the voice of Rigoberta Menchú’s testimony and the authorship of Elizabeth Burgos. I participated in seminars with Antonio Cornejo Polar, Beatriz Manz, and Arturo Arias, which included meetings with both women involved. This experience and knowledge are a fundamental backdrop to the Hilando en la Memoria project. Another fundamental inspiration was the work of Diana Taylor and her involvement with the Maya women of Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya (FOMA). 11. ESE:O’s mission is to build capacity in literacy in the global South. It seeks to make visible and value local voices so that they can improve their lives and promote human rights by the production and dissemination of local knowledge according to international standards (www.eseo.cl). 12. See Soledad Falabella et al., “Genealogía de la crítica de la modernidad desde una perspectiva de la diferencia sexual: Cartas para la Educación Estética de la Humanidad de Schiller,” in Actas del Simposio-La Actualidad de Friedrich Schiller para una Crítica Cultural al Inicio del Siglo XXI, ed. Horst Nitschack and Reinhard Babel (Santiago de Chile: LOM, 2010). 13. Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL), “Estado de la banda ancha en América Latina y el Caribe 2016.” (Santiago: Naciones Unidas, 2016), http://repositorio.cepal.org/bitstream/handle/11362/40528/6 /S1601049_es.pdf Acceso 4 de Abril 2017. 14. Roxana Miranda Rupailaf, in Soledad Falabella et al., Hilando (2009), 9 15. Instituto Nacional de Derechos Humanos, “CIDH Condena al Estado de Chile por Aplicación de Ley Antiterrorista a Dirigentes Mapuche,” Le Monde Diplomatique, July 30, 2014. 16. Instituto Nacional de Derechos Humanos. “CIDH Condena al Estado de Chile,” accessed January 25, 2017. 17. Iván M. Carrasco, “Literatura Mapuche,” América Indígena 48, no. 4 (1988): 695–728, here at 73. 18. Elicura Chihualilaf, “Poesía Mapuche Actual: Apuntes para el Inicio de un Necesario Rescate,” Liwen 2 (1990): 36–40. 19. Chihualilaf, “Poesía Mapuche Actual,” 38. 20. Maribel Mora Curriao, and Fernanda Moraga García, Antología Poética de Mujeres Mapuches (Santiago de Chile: LOM, 2011), 126–30. 21. Mora Curriao and García, Antología Poética, 126. 22. Mora Curriao and García, Antología Poética, 129. 23. See Mora Curriao and García, Antología Poética, 129 and Falabella et al., Hilando (2006). [ 476 ]

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24. Tito Tricot, Autonomía, El Movimiento Mapuche de Resistencia (Santiago de Chile: Ceibo, 2011), 182. 25. Graciela Huinao, in Soledad Falabella et al., Hilando (2006), from the back cover of the book. 26. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 5. 27. José Millalén, Pablo Mariman, et al., ¡ . . . Escucha, winka . . .! (Santiago de Chile: LOM, 2006), 13–14. 28. María Teresa Panchillo was born in the community of Küyumko, very close to the conflict border, the Bio-Bio River. 29. Falabella et al., Hilando (2006), 150. 30. Soledad Falabella et al., Hilando (2009). 31. Later, Butler clarifies her understanding of the conditions for the political and its relationship with vulnerability: “At such a point, the condition of the political is one of the goods for which political assembly takes place—this might be the double meaning of ‘the infrastructural’ under conditions in which public goods are increasingly dismantled by privatization, neo-liberalism, accelerating forms of economic inequality, and the anti-democratic tactics of authoritarian rule,” 2. 32. Elicura Chihuailaf, cited in Vivian Campo, “Elicura Chihuailaf: En la oralitura habita una visión del mundo,” Revista Hispanoamericana de Poesía 3 (2000): 49–59. 33. Falabella et al., Hilando (2006), 19. 34. Falabella et al., Hilando (2006), 29. 35. Elicura Chihuailaf, “Elicura Chihuailaf: En la Oralitura Habita una Visión del Mundo,” Revista Hispanoamericana de Poesía 3 (2000): 49–59. 36. Millalén, Mariman, et al., ¡ . . . Escucha, winka . . .! 37. Faumelisa Manquepillan, “Paseo Ahumada,” Sueños de mujer/ Pewma Zomo (CONADI: Temuco, 2009), 14–15. Subsequent quotes in the text are to this edition. 38. Faumelisa Manquepillan, in Soledad Falabella et al. Hilando (2006), 129. 39. María Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System,” Hypatia 22, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 188.

HILANDO EN LA MEMORIA

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Contributors

Bürge Abiral is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She received her bachelor’s degree from Williams College, United States, and her master’s degree in cultural studies from Sabancı University, Turkey. She is currently working on her dissertation project on the ecological food movement in Turkey. Her interests include human-environment relations, food studies, social movements, and gender and sexuality. Hülya Adak is associate professor of comparative literature at Sabancı University and Humboldt Experienced Research Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her publications include Performing Turkishness:Theater and Politics in Turkey and its Diasporas (Special Issue of Comparative Drama, with R. ErtuО Altınay, Winter 2019), Halide Edib und Politische Gewalt (2018), and Critical Approaches to Genocide: Aesthetics, History and Politics of 1915 (2019, with F. Müge Göçek and Ronald Suny). Meltem Ahıska is professor of sociology at BoОaziçi University, Istanbul. She has written and edited a number of books, including Occidentalism in Turkey: Questions of Modernity and National Identity in Turkish Radio Broadcasting. She has published widely on Occidentalism, social memory, monuments, political subjectivity, gender, and feminism. She is a member of the editorial board of the e-journal Red Thread, and of the editorial advisory board of the e-journal Critical Times.

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Ay e Gül Altınay is professor of cultural anthropology and director of Sabancı University Gender and Women’s Studies Center (SU Gender). Among her recent publications are The Grandchildren: The Hidden Legacy of Lost Armenians in Turkey (with Fethiye Çetin, trans. Maureen Freely, 2014), and Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories: Feminist Conversations on War, Genocide and Political Violence (co-edited with Andrea Petö, 2016). Carol Becker is professor of the arts and dean of Columbia University School of the Arts. Her books include: The Invisible Drama: Women and the Anxiety of Change; The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society and Social Responsibility (editor); Zones of Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions, Gender; Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art; Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production; and Losing Helen. Dilara Çalı kan is currently pursuing her PhD in anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She is also a graduate fellow at the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at UIUC and the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University. Her work focuses on the mother and daughter relationship among trans women in Turkey and nonnormative forms of memory transmission across time and space. María José Contreras Lorenzini (PhD in semiotics) is a renowned Chilean performance artist and theatre director. She is a professor at the faculty of the arts in Universidad Católica de Chile. Her performance work has been shown in Chile, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, Canada and the United States. She has published several articles and book chapters addressing the complex relation of memory and the body both in case studies and in her own artistic practice. Andrea Crow is an assistant professor in the English department at Boston College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Early Modern Women, Shakespeare Quarterly, and SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, and she is completing a monograph on food scarcity in seventeenth-century England. Her research interests include food history, gender and sexuality studies, the intersection of England and the Arab world, and academic labor. Silvina Der-Meguerditchian, born in Buenos Aires 1967, has lived and worked in Berlin since 1988. The reconstruction of the past and the building of archives are a common thread in her artistic research. Her work has been shown at many international exhibitions, including Hamburger Bahnhof (2018), the Biennale di Venezia (2015), and MartinGropius-Bau (2005). [ 480 ]

CONTRIBUTORS

María Soledad Falabella Luco is the director of ESE:O (www.eseo.cl), an NGO in Santiago, Chile, promoting collaborative and action-based writing projects for local and global participation. She is also a professor of literary and feminist critical theory, performance and poetry in the Department of Literature and the Master in Latin-American Gender and Culture, at the University of Chile. Dr. Falabella brings over fifteen years of experience in academia, activism, and the arts. Marcela A. Fuentes is assistant professor in the department of performance studies at Northwestern University. Her book Performance Constellations: Networked Protests and Activism in Latin America (forthcoming, University of Michigan Press) explores virtual sit-ins, pots-and-pans, flash mobs, and hashtag campaigns as transmedia and transnational tactics of revolutionary collectivity in contexts such as Neo-Zapatismo, the 2001 Argentine financial crisis, the Chilean Winter, the post-Ayotzinapa insurgence, and the Ni Una Menos (Not One Woman Less) feminist tide. Nicole Gervasio is a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. She received her doctorate in English and comparative literature from Columbia University. Her work has also appeared in Modern Language Studies. Milena Grass Kleiner, translator and theater scholar, is an associate professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and directs the Millennium Nucleus on Arts, Performativity and Activism. She has published Spanish translations of English, American, and French plays, as well as books on Chilean history and theater studies. Alyssa Greene holds a PhD in Germanic languages and literatures from Columbia University. She is a former organizer with the Graduate Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers Local 2110. She is a fiction editor for Quarterly West and an editorial assistant for the Lambda Literary Review. Her scholarship has appeared in Germanic Review, and her creative work appears or is forthcoming in The Southeast Review, Passages North, Gone Lawn, Jellyfish Review, and others. Marianne Hirsch writes about the transmission of memories of violence across generations, combining feminist theory with memory studies in global perspective. Her recent books include The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust and Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, co-authored with Leo Spitzer. The director of Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference, Hirsch teaches comparative literature and gender studies. CONTRIBUTORS

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Katherine Hite is professor of political science on the Frederick Ferris Thompson Chair at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She is the author of Politics and the Art of Commemoration: Memorials to Struggle in Latin America and Spain (2012) and When the Romance Ended: Leaders of the Chilean Left, 1968–1998 (2000), as well as several publications on the politics of memory in Chile. Jean E. Howard, George Delacorte Professor in the humanities at Columbia University, writes on Renaissance drama, modern drama, and feminist issues. Her books include Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration: Stagecraft and Audience Response; Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (with Phyllis Rackin); The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England; and Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598–1642. She is completing a new book on the different import of the twentieth-century history play in America and Britain. Andreas Huyssen is the Villard Professor Emeritus of German and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York, a founding editor of New German Critique, and founding director of Columbia’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. His books include After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986); Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (1995); Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (2003); the edited volume Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing World (2008); William Kentridge and Nalini Malani: The Shadowplay as Medium of Memory (2013); and Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film (2015). Sibel Irzık is a professor of comparative literature currently teaching in the cultural studies and gender studies programs at Sabancı University. She has recently published articles on Orhan Pamuk,Yaߞar Kemal, Latife Tekin, and Turkish coup d’état novels. She was the academic coordinator of Sabancı University’s Gender and Women’s Studies Forum from 2010 to 2016. She is currently working on issues of political violence, mourning, and memory in literature. Banu Karaca works at the intersection of political anthropology, art, and critical theory. Her recent publications examine the entrenchment of art in state violence, censorship, and gendered memories of political violence, and include “Visual Literacy” (Gender:War!, 2017) and “Tracing the Legacies of Nazi-Looted Art in Berlin’s Museums” (Orphaned Property in Europe, 2019). Karaca continues her research on how dispossessed artworks have shaped the writing of post-Ottoman art histories. [ 482 ]

CONTRIBUTORS

Nancy Kricorian is a writer and organizer who lives in New York City. She has published three novels focused on post-genocide Armenian diaspora experience, and is at work on her fourth, which is about an Armenian family in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer who lives and works in New York. She is the author of several publications including Carnival Strippers (1976), Nicaragua (1981), Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997), and A Room Of Their Own (2017). She has codirected two films: Living at Risk (1985) and Pictures from a Revolution (1991). Mediations, a survey exhibition of her work was recently exhibited at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Jeu de Paume, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Noémie Ndiaye is an assistant professor of English and comparative literature at Carnegie Mellon University, where she works on early modern theatre, gender, and racial performance. She has published articles in Renaissance Drama and Early Theatre, and she is currently at work on her first monograph, tentatively entitled Racecraft: Early Modern Repertoires of Blackness. Lorie Novak is an artist and professor of photography & imaging at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and associate faculty at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. Major ongoing web projects include migraineregister.net (launched in 2014), randominterference.net (launched in 2012, now at www.nyu.edu/projects/novak/randominterference/) and collectedvisions.net (launched in 1996, it is one of the earliest interactive photographic storytelling sites). She is a 2016 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in photography. I ın Önol is a curator from Istanbul, based in New York and Vienna. She is a member of the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University; a lecturer at the arts & design program, Montclair University; and visiting curator at the art as urban innovation MA program at University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Recent publications include Authoritarianism and Resistance in Turkey: Conversations on Democratic and Social Challenges. Leticia Robles-Moreno holds a PhD from New York University’s Department of Performance Studies. Her research explores how theatre, art, and activism, performed specially by women, can build transnational networks as strategies of resistance and survival in the Americas. She has published in Latin American Theatre Review, Contemporary Theatre Review, CONTRIBUTORS

[ 483 ]

Conjunto, and Hispanic Issues Online. She is visiting assistant professor in the department of theatre and dance at Muhlenberg College. Alisa Solomon is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she directs the MA concentration in arts & culture. Her reporting and cultural criticism have appeared in numerous publications. Her books include Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender and Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof. As dramaturg, her most recent project was Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field. Marita Sturken is professor in the department of media, culture, and communication at New York University, where she teaches courses in visual culture, cultural memory, and consumerism. She is the author of Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (1997) and Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (2007). Diana Taylor is university professor and professor of performance studies and Spanish at New York University. Her new book, ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Taylor is founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. Taylor was president of the Modern Language Association (2017) and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Laura Wexler is founder and director of the Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale and professor of American studies, film & media studies, and women’s, gender & sexuality studies. Her scholarship examines the coproduction of photography, gender, race, and memory in American culture. Author of the award-winning Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of US Imperialism, and numerous other books and essays, she is currently writing about the trauma of white supremacy. Deborah Willis is university professor and chair of the department of photography & imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and has an affiliated appointment with Africana Studies. A MacArthur Fellow, Professor Willis received the NAACP Image Award in 2014 for her co-authored book Envisioning Emancipation. Deva Woodly is associate professor of politics at The New School and has recently published on the political impact of public meanings in perspectives on politics, contemporary political theory, and dissent. She is the [ 484 ]

CONTRIBUTORS

author of The Politics of Common Sense: How Social Movements Use Public Discourse to Change Politics and Win Acceptance (Oxford). Armanc Yıldız is a PhD candidate in social anthropology at Harvard University, with a secondary degree in studies of women, gender, and sexuality. He works on sexuality, race, labor, and coloniality in Berlin, Germany. His article titled “ ‘Turkish, Dutch, Gay, and Proud’: Mapping Out the Contours of Agency in Homonationalist Times” appeared in Sexualities (2017).

CONTRIBUTORS

[ 485 ]

Index

4 Obras Teatro La Candelaria, 361n12 “7/7 and Connective Memory: Interactional Trajectories of Remembering in Post-Scarcity Culture” (Hoskins), 21–22n13 “9/11 Memorial Museum and the Remaking of Ground Zero, The” (Sturken), 20n6 43, The (Ayotzinapa, Mexico), 113–14, 116, 119–22, 121 2012 Declaration: The Seized Properties of Armenian Foundations in Istanbul (Polatel et al.), 299n5 Abandoned Property Commission (Turkey), 287 Abdullah Frères, 296 Abdullahyan, Hovsep, 296 Abdullahyan, Kevork, 296 Abdullahyan, Viçen, 296 Abiral, Bürge, 5, 102n15, 479 Above the Fold (Novak), 252, 252, 256n13

Abu-Lughod, Lila, 150n55 Açıksöz, Salih Can, 103n19 Actas del Simposio-La Actualidad de Friedrich Schiller para una Crítica Cultural al Inicio del Siglo XXI (Nitschack & Babel), 476n12 Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (Román), 399n1 Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Bal, Crewe, & Spitzer), 64n17 ACT UP movement, 159, 384 Adak, Hülya, 13, 17, 454n2, 455n13, 456nn26–27, 457n29, 457nn34–35, 458n50, 458nn43–48, 458nn53–54, 479 Adiseshiah, Sian, 343n6, 345n20 Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems, The (Halliwell), 130n10 Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Flatley), 439n5

[ 487 ]

Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics (Papacharissi), 187n6 “Affective Solidarity: Feminist Reflexivity and Political Transformation” (Hemmings), 103n29 “After Erica Garner We Need to Talk about How Maternal Mortality Affects Black Women” (Mitchell), 234n2 After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Huyssen), 64n9 After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (Chambers-Letson), 189n28 Agamben, Giorgio, 22n25 Agrupación de Familiares de los Detenidos-Desaparecidos, 35–36 Agüero, Felipe, 44n5 Aguiló, Hernán, 411 Aguiló, Macarena, 8, 408–19, 419n1, 420n3, 421n15, 422n20 Aguirre, Andrés, 34 Aharonian, Lara, 102n8 Ahıska, Meltem, 13, 17, 116, 149n27, 151n60, 454n5, 455n11, 479 Ahmed, Sara, 211, 217n13 Aizura, Aren, 217n7 Akabi Hikayesi (Akabi’s Story; Pasha), 290 Akili, Yolo, 235n16 Aktar, Ayhan, 288, 299n8, 299n10 Alcaraz, Florencia, 182–83, 191n41, 191n45 Alev, 206–16 Alexander, Elizabeth, 278, 284, 284n3 Alexander, Marissa, 226 Allende, Salvador, 28, 40, 53, 419n2, 464 “‘All Limits Were Exceeded Over There’: The Chronotope of Terror [ 488 ]

in Modern Warfare and Testimony” (Mahlke), 148n17, 148nn19–20 “‘All the Sad Young Men’: AIDS and the Work of Mourning” (Nunokawa), 400n21 Almada, Selva, 178 Alpsoy, Kazım, 267, 268 Altınay, Ayߞe Gül, 5, 6, 20n2, 23n26, 102n9, 102n15, 103n20, 218, 274n8, 456n24, 480 “America’s Hidden HIV Epidemic” (Villarosa), 399n4 Amich, Candace, 344n17 Amnesty International, 475n4 Anativia López, Teresa, 45n13 Anderson, Benedict, 255n1 And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid (Weiss), 381–82, 386–87, 389–90, 396 And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid: Billy and His Daddy (Weiss), 400n22 And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid: The Saga of Vicki Sheisskopf (Weiss), 400n22 Angelou, Maya, 475n8 Anne Frank House (Netherlands), 9 Antígona (Ariza), 354–60, 361n17, 361nn12–14 Antígona (Ralli), 347–54 Antígona: Tribunal de Mujeres (Tramaluna), 358, 361n13 Antigone in Shatila (Syria), 362n21 Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage (Mee & Foley), 362n21 Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Butler), 361n8 Antología Poética de Mujeres Mapuches (Mora Curriao & García), 476n20–23 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 234n6 Apartheid Museum (Johannesburg), 48 INDEX

April 1, 1999–September 7, 2011 (Novak), 243 Aquí (Contreras Lorenzini), 152–71, 153, 159, 161, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168 Aquí (Santiago), 16 Araeen, Rasheed, 59, 64n15 Aras Publishing, 88–89 Araucanos, 459. See also Mapuche Architecture of Mass Sport, The (Provoost), 45n11 Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, The (Taylor), 103nn32–33, 218n26, 343n2 Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Culture, An (Cvetkovich), 20n2, 401n31 ArchivosChile, 157, 170n13 Arendt, Hannah, 98–99 Argentine Forensic Anthropologists, 119–20 Argunߞah, Hülya, 456n25 Arias, Arturo, 476n10 Arias, Lola, 422n22 Arifcan, Umut, 262, 274nn15–16 Aristotle, 115 Ariza, Patricia, 8, 16, 346, 354–60, 361nn12–14, 361nn16–17, 362n18, 362n20 Arkadaߞıma Dokunma (Turkey), 137 Armah, Esther, 227 Armenian Question in Turkey, The (Demir/Ayverdi), 451, 458n42, 458n52, 458n55 Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), 450, 458n43 Armenians in Modern Turkey: PostGenocide Society, Politics and History, The (Suciyan), 103n26 Armenity (Der-Meguerditchian), 305–15 INDEX

Armenity/Hayoutioun (Cüberyan von Fürstenberg), 316nn2–3 Arondekar, Anjali, 218n27 ArtAIDSAmerica (Katz & Hushka), 401n35 Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture (Bal & Hernández-Navarro), 22n22 Arthur, Enrique González Rojo, 113 “Art in a Time of Atrocity” (Evans & Ettinger), 147n1 “Artist in Conversation: Jeff Weiss” (Rice), 400n20 Asena, Duygu, 217n14 Asibong, Andrew, 379n9 “As If ” (Cankara), 301n19 as if nothing has ever been said before us (2007–2015; Winchester), 289–99 As Is (Hoffman), 398n1 Aston, Elaine, 343n8, 344n11, 344n15, 344n17 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 95, 290 Atay, OОuz, 290, 292, 301n18, 301n20 Ateߞten Gömlek (The Shirt of Flame; Edib), 441–44, 448–49, 452–53, 456n26, 456nn28–29, 457n30, 458nn59–60 Atlidakis, Evangelos, 204n7 At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches (Sontag), 133 Attie, Shimon, 11 Austin, J.L., 180, 189n30 Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), 354 Autonomía, El Movimiento Mapuche de Resistencia (Tricot), 477n24 Avakian, Arlene, 92 “Ayacucho 1984” (Lentz), 130n14 Ayala, Nohora, 355 Aydemir (Ferit), 441–44, 445–48, 452–53, 454n1, 455n14, 456nn16–17, 456nn19–22, 458n60 [ 489 ]

Ayotzinapa, Mexico, 113, 116, 119–22, 128, 182 Ayotzinapa: Horas Eternas (Monaco Felipe), 132n37 Ayotzinapa: La Rabia y la Esperanza (González Villarreal), 132n27 Aytürk, ԭlker, 458n50 Ayverdi, Sâmiha, 441–44, 451–52, 453, 454n1, 455n13, 458n42, 458n47 Azoulay, Ariella, 19, 22n25, 250, 256n3, 256n11 Babel, Reinhard, 476n12 Babes in Arms (Rodgers & Hart), 394 Bachelet, Michelle, 5, 35, 155, 169n6, 460–61, 475n4 “Background Facts on Contingent Faculty” (AAUP), 203–4n2 Baena, Fanny, 355 Baer, Ulrich, 268, 274n9, 275n36, 276n39 Báez Pollier, Verónica, 34, 39–40, 45n17, 46n20, 46n30 Baker, Courtney R., 256n3 Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 420n6 Bakkalcı, Ayߞe, 136 Bal, Mieke, 15, 22n22, 60, 64nn17–18 Bali, Rıfat, 288, 299n9 Balibar, Étienne, 300n15 Baltimore Waltz, The (Vogel), 398n1 Bargu, Banu, 260, 267, 273n6, 274n10, 275n27 Baronian, Marie-Aude, 305, 313, 316n1 Barthes, Roland, 78, 83nn22–23 Bassett, Linda, 335 Batchen, Geoffrey, 255n2 Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973–1988 (Stern), 421n12 Baudrillard, Jean, 49 [ 490 ]

Baydar, Gülsüm, 144, 150nn51–52, 273n5, 274n10, 274n14 Beal, Frances M., 236n33 Beale, Simon Russell, 395 Beausejour, Jean, 46n29 Becker, Carol, 10, 480 Beckermann, Ruth, 11 Behold the World (Misailidis), 290 Beinin, Joel, 150n53 Bejarano, Cecilia, 188n16 Bellafante, Ginia, 401n35 Beneficiary, The (Robbins), 300n13 Benjamin, Walter, 19, 22n25 Bennett, Tony, 49, 53, 55, 64n6, 64n13, 64nn10–11 Berger, Jonathan, 400n26 Berger-Hertz, Germán, 420n4 Beristaín, Carlos Martin, 131n24 Berlin, Germany, 11, 91; Grosse Hamburgerstrasse, 58; Jewish Museum, 9, 10, 48; Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 48–49 Betraying the Event: Constructions of Victimhood in Contemporary Cultures (Festic), 438n2 Between Modernity and Nationalism: Halide Edib’s Encounter with Gandhi’s India (Hassan), 457n32 Between Theatre and Anthropology (Schechner), 130n8, 361n15 “Beyond Lean-In: For Feminism of the 99 percent and a Militant International Strike on March 8” (Davis et al.), 191n40 “Beyond Nuremberg: The Historical Significance of the Post-Apartheid Transition in South Africa” (Mamdani), 300n13 Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Cooper), 236n24 INDEX

“Beyond the Patriarchy: Feminism and the Chaos of Creativity” (Perrault), 344n9 Bhattacharyya, Tania, 204n7 Bilal, 7, 317 Bilal, Melissa, 89, 101n1, 102n8 Bir Adalet Feryadı: Osmanlı’dan Türkiye’ye Beߞ Ermeni Feminist Yazar (EkmekçioОlu & Bilal), 101n1, 102n8 “Birds Nest” stadium (Beijing), 45n8 Biricik, Alp, 103n25 Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, The (Bennett), 53, 64n6, 64nn10–11 Bitim, Zarife, 7, 324 Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Spillers), 82n3 Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, The (Gilroy), 256n14 Blackboards (Winchester), 292–94, 293 “Black Feminism and the Movement for Black Lives” (Smith, Carruthers, & Gossett), 236n37 Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Collins), 236n36 Black Interior: Essays, The (Alexander), 284, 284n3 “Black Joy, We Deserve It” (Charles), 237n42 Black Lives Matter, 16, 77. See also Movement for Black Lives Black Lives Matter Global Network, 223, 227 “Black Maternal Mortality Rate in the U.S. is an International Crisis, The” (Perry), 234n3 “Black Women Have to Work 7 Months in 2017 to Be Paid the Same as White Men in 2016” INDEX

(Wilson, Jones, Blado, & Gould), 235n19 “Black Women: Supporting Their Families with Few Resources” (White), 235n20–21 Blado, Kayla, 235n19 Blake, Harry, 257n18 Blau, Herbert, 397, 399n3, 401n38 Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theatre (Blau), 399n3, 401n38 Bloodlands (Snyder), 12 “Blood-Stained Lands and Seas of Red, The” (Anonymous), 8 Blu, General, 475n4 Bodies (Novak), 246 Bogotá, Colombia Palace of Justice, 57–58 Boltanski, Christian, 58 Bonder, Julian, 156, 170n11 Bonilla, Yarimar, 180, 189n29, 190n32 Bonnefoy Miralles, Pascale, 44nn2–5, 45n14, 46n17 Bono, 46n29 Book and Language Museum (Argentina), 178 Borden, Iain, 104n44, 150n49 Border Country (2003–2007) (Friend), 269, 275n32, 275n35 Boric, Gabriel, 41 Bosch, Hieronymous, 73 Bossy, Michelle, 421n9 Bottoms, Stephen, 400n18 Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics, The (Cohen), 236n31 Bourdieu, Pierre, 157, 170n16 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 104n40 Bow, Leslie, 190n37 Bozkurt, Hatice, 149nn41–44, 150nn45–48, 274n17 Breckman, Warren, 63n1 [ 491 ]

Briggs, Katherine, 344n13 “Bringing the Global Home: The Commitment of Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker” (Amich), 344n17 British Museum—London (Weems), 284 Broad and Expansive Sky—Ancient Rome, A (Weems), 283 “Brotherhood in Dispossession: State Violence and the Ethics of Expectation in Turkey” (Tambar), 96, 103n28 Browder, Kalief, 219 Brown, Laura S., 21n11 Brown, Michael, 159 Brudostova, Olga, 204n7 Bruzzi, Stella, 421n9 Bryan-Wilson, Julia, 401n29 Buenos Aires, Argentina, 18; Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, 18, 60; Parque de la Memoria, 10, 48, 56 BuОra, Ayߞe, 300n14 Building of Chileans, The (Aguiló & Foxley), 13, 407–19, 419n1, 420n7, 421n10 Buitrago, Ángela María, 131n24 Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond (Wenzel), 23n25 Buntinx, Gustavo, 64n6 Burgos, Elizabeth, 476n10 Burke, Tarana, 226 Burt, Jo-Marie, 353, 361n11 Burton, Richard, 395 Butler, Judith, 4, 15, 20n3, 22n24, 22nn19–21, 151n57, 162, 170nn21–22, 212, 217nn15–16, 256n3, 271–72, 276nn45–46, 343n7, 352, 353, 361n8, 461, 467, 476n9, 477n31 Bütün Eserleri, Makaleler 2 (Argunߞah), 456n25 Buzhynskaya, Alexandra, 37 [ 492 ]

Bygrave, Stephen, 217n11 BYP100, 223, 229 Cadde-i Kebir. See Istiklal Street Caicheo, Sonia, 465 Calderón, Felipe, 118, 131n19 Calhoun, Ada, 400n19 Caliban and the Witch (Federici), 188n11 Çalıߞkan, Dilara, 5, 19, 480 Camargo, Christian, 395 Cambodia, S-21 Killing Fields Museum, 48 Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill, The (Aston & Diamond), 343n8, 344n15, 344n17 Campaign Against Battering (Turkey), 94 Campo, Vivian, 477n35 Campt, Tina, 253, 257nn16–17 Canarero Araucano (Quilaqueo), 465 Cankara, Murat, 290, 301n19 Canto General (Neruda), 473, 475n8 Cariqueo Yañez, Johnny, 474n2 Carlson, Marvin, 376–77, 380n14, 392, 399n3, 401n30 Carmona, Alejandra, 420n4 Carrasco, Iván, 465, 476n17 Carri, Albertina, 409, 420n5 Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, 284n4 Carruthers, Charlene, 228–29, 236n37 Carson, Margaret, 361n3 Carson, Rachel, 337, 344n12 Caruth, Cathy, 117, 131nn16–17, 434–35, 439n12, 440n36, 440n38, 440n40, 440nn42–43 Craryl Churchill (Aston), 344n11 Caryl Churchill: Plays 2 (Churchill), 343n4 Caryl Churchill: Plays 3 (Churchill), 344n10 INDEX

Casa José Domingo Cañas (Chile), 154 Casa Viuda (Salcedo), 57, 60, 61 Catrileo Quezada, Matias Valentin, 474n2 Cendrey, Jean-Yves, 379n3 “Centennial Challenges: Denationalizing and Gendering Histories of War and Genocide” (Altınay), 102n9 Center for Investigation and Information (CIINFO), 170n13 Center for Returned Migrants (San Pedro Sula, Honduras), 129 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 399n4 Central American Madres, 127–28 Century of Centuries, A (SALT; Istanbul), 289, 291, 293, 294, 300n16 “Century of Centuries, A” (MacGilp), 302n33 Çetin, Fethiye, 103n22 Chamberlain, Mary, 343n3 Chambers-Letson, Joshua, 189n28 Chancy, Myriam J.A., 272, 276n48 “Changing the Letter: The Yokes, the Jokes of Discourse, or, Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Reed” (Spillers), 82n3 Charles, Cody, 232, 237n42 Charles, Michael Ray, 73 Chauvet, Elina, 186n4 Chávez, Castillo, Susana, 186n2 Chesley, Robert, 398n1 Chihuailaf, Elicura, 8, 465, 466, 469, 476n19, 477n35 Children and the Afterlife of State Violence: Memories of Dictatorship (Jara), 44n1 Chile, 1–2, 4, 9, 17, 152–71, 407–19, 459–74; Estadio Nacional, 27–29, 31–43; La Moneda, 35; Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, INDEX

35, 48, 53, 56; Revolutionary Left Movement, 19; Santiago (See Santiago, Chile); Villa Grimaldi, 5, 10, 32 Chile Actual. Anatomía de un Mito (Moulián), 169n7 Chiritescu, Sandra, 204n7 “Choosing ‘Co-Resistance’ Rather than ‘Turkish-Armenian Dialogue’” (Kricorian), 102n3 Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, 181, 190n35 Churchill, Caryl, 8, 16, 329–45, 343nn3–4, 343nn7–8, 344nn10–11, 344nn13–17, 345nn20–21 Churchill’s Socialism: Political Resistance in the Plays of Caryl Churchill (Adiseshiah), 343n6 Çiçek, M. Talha, 455n13 “CIDH Condena al Estado de Chile por Aplicación de Ley Antiterrorista a Dirigentes Mapuche” (Instituto Nacional de Derechos Humanos), 476n15 Cien Voces Rompen el Silencio: Testimonios de ex Presas y Presos Políticos de la Dictadura Chilena (1973–1990) (Kunstmann Torres & Torres Ávila), 45n17, 46n20, 46n30 Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (Roach), 399n3 Citizen: An American Lyric (Rankine), 475n8 City Cultures Reader, The (Miles, Hall, & Borden), 104n44 Civil Contract of Photography, The (Azoulay), 256n3, 256n11 Civil Imagination (Azoulay), 256n3 “Claiming the Public Space: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo” (Torre), 150n49 Clark, Edmund, 269, 275n31 [ 493 ]

“Climate for Abduction, a Climate for Redemption: The Politics of Inclusion during and after the Armenian Genocide, A” (EkmekçioОlu), 456n24 Clown and His Daughter, The (Edib), 454n1 “Clues Found in Nicaraguan Sugar Cane Worker Kidney Disease Epidemic” (National Kidney Foundation), 82n9 COFAMIDE (El Salvador), 126, 132n33 Cofre, Mauricio, 46n30 Cohen, Cathy J., 228, 236n31 Cohn, Katherine, 6 Colectivo Nichoecológico, 41 Colescott, Robert, 73 “Collective Scream, The” (Ni Una Menos), 191n47 “College President-to-Adjunct Pay Ratio, The” (McKenna), 204n2 Collihuin Catril, Juan Lorenzo, 474n2 Collins, Cath, 44n1, 44n6 Collins, Patricia Hill, 236n36 Coloma, Marcel, 37 Colombo, Pamela, 148n17, 151n60 Comadres (El Salvador), 123, 124, 132n30 “Combahee River Collective Statement: A Fortieth Anniversary Retrospective” (Bow et al.), 190n37, 236n35 Comité ¡Eureka!, 125–26 Committee of Relatives of Disappeared Migrants (Honduras), 123, 447 Committee of Union and Progress (CUP; Turkey), 287, 442, 454n1 Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology (Ingold), 379n4 Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, A (Erll & Nünning), 421n11 [ 494 ]

Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there’s nothing left to move? (Rainer), 402n39 “Conceptual Model of Historical Trauma: Implication for Public Health Practice and Research, A” (Sotero), 235n15, 235nn12–13 Conflict of East and West in Turkey (Edib), 454n1 Constantino, Roselyn, 361nn3–4 “Constructions of Victimhood in Turkish Coup d’état Novels: Is Victimhood without Innocence Possible?, The” (Irzık), 438n2 Consuming Stories: Kara Walker and the Imagining of American Race (Peabody), 69 Contreras Lorenzini, María José, 7, 16, 17, 23n26, 218, 422n22, 480 Cooper, Anna Julia, 278, 284, 284n2 Cooper, Brittney, 226, 236n24 Cooper, Frederick, 150n55 Copeland, Mathieu, 104n40 Cornejo Polar, Antonio, 476n10 Cotter, Holland, 277 “Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today, The” (Young), 20n7 “Counter-Movement, Space and Politics: How the Saturday Mothers of Turkey Make Enforced Disappearances Visible” (Ahıska), 151n60 Cox, María José, 40, 46n33 Cox Vial, Francisco, 131n24 “Crafting an Educated Housewife in Iran” (Najmabadi), 150n55 Craps, Stef, 21n11 “Creating the Collective: Social Media, the Occupy Movement and its INDEX

Constitution as a Collective Actor” (Kavada), 171n42 Creative Time, 65, 82n1 Crewe, Jonathan, 64n17 Crimp, Douglas, 392, 400–401n28 Crítica de la Memoria (Richard), 422n21 Crow, Andrea, 17, 480 Crownshaw, Richard, 21n12 Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence, The (Linfield), 256n3, 275n29 Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (Muñoz), 401n33 Cry for Justice: Five Armenian Writers from the Ottoman Times to Turkey, A (EkmekçioОlu & Bilal), 89, 101n1, 102n8 Cuarto Propio, 463 Cüberyan von Fürstenberg, Adelina, 313n2 Cullors, Patrisse, 236n29 Cultiva tu Memesfera: Somos lo que nos Rodea (Parra), 130n11 Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas, and Possibilities (Firat & Kuryel), 104nn41–42 “Cultural Memory After the Transnational Turn” (Erll & Rigney), 21n12 Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media, The (Van Dijck), 189n29 “‘Cumartesi’Nasıl Baߞladı, Neden Ara Verildi?” (Günaysu), 148n14 Cumhuriyet Dönemi Azınlık Politikaları ve Stratejileri Bagઅlamında 6–7 Eylül Olayları (Güven), 300n11 Curious Steps: Gender and Memory Walks of Istanbul, 10, 84–104, 87 Curl, The (Meadmore), 196 Cvetkovich, Ann, 20n2, 401n31 INDEX

Daddy Gotta Eat (NDiaye), 363 Dakan, Kenneth, 438n8 Dal, Aysenur, 170n23 “Damaged Myth in Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker” (Kritzer), 344n14 “Dance, Discipline, Density, and Death: The Crowd in the Stadium” (van Winkel), 45n11 “Dancing with the Devil We Know” (Kai), 236n25 Daniel, Ute, 455n15 DarıcıoОlu, Leman S., 217n20 Das, Veena, 33, 45n15 Davey, Mark Wing, 340 Davidian, Vazken, 300n12 Davin, Anna, 150n55 Davis, Angela, 191n40, 236n34 Davis, Jenny, 218 Dawkins, Richard, 114–16, 130n3, 130nn5–8 Dayikên ߸emiyê, 143, 150n46 Deathly Still: Pictures of Former Concentration Camps (Reinartz), 269 de Certeau, Michel, 96, 103n27, 104n43 de Chesari, Chiara, 21n12 Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (U.N.), 262, 274n13 de Cortina, Jon, 125 “De la foto a la firma” (From picture to signature) movement, 173 Della Porta, Donatella, 170n19, 171n23 de los Ríos, Marcela, 188n16 Demaria, Cristina, 422n16 Demir, Bahadır, 441–44, 451 Demir, Leyla, 7, 324 Demir, Neߞide K. See Ayverdi, Sâmiha Demirci-Yılmaz, Tuba, 150n55 Demnig, Gunter, 11 Denial of Violence (Göçek), 458n46 [ 495 ]

Der Matossian, Bedross, 287, 299nn6–7 Der-Meguerditchian, Silvina, 7, 15, 480 “Deshidratándole la Vida” (“Dehydrating Life”; Guaquin), 468–69 Desmond, Matthew, 225, 235n22 DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, 73, 82n12 DevecioОlu, Ayߞegül, 439–40n24 Devlet Kaynaklı ߸iddet (Keskin & Yurtsever). See Hepsi Gerçek: Devlet Kaynaklı ߸iddet Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, The (Holquist), 420n6 “Dialogue on the Ethics and Politics of Transcultural Memory, A” (Moses & Rothberg), 22n14 Diamond, Elin, 343n8, 344n15, 344n17 Díaz, Isabel, 161 Diaz Nécul, Zenén Alfonso, 474n2 Diéguez, Ileana, 360n1 Dikbaߞ, Nazım, 147n6 Dillon, Marta, 182, 191n42 Dinges, John, 170n13 Dink, Hrant, 95, 102n16, 103n21, 275n20 Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA; Chile), 411 Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Taylor), 148n22, 191n38, 275n24 Disassembling Antigone (Ralli), 350. See also Antígona (Ralli) Disch, Lisa, 98, 104nn36–38 Disconnected, The (Atay), 290 Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (Rancière), 302n34 di Tella, Andrés, 420n5 Documentales Autobiográficos (Bossy & Vergara), 421n9 [ 496 ]

“Documenting Violations: Rhetorical Witnessing and the Spectacle of Distant Suffering” (Hesford), 276n40, 276n44 Dolan, Jill, 398, 401n33, 402n41 Dominguez, Ricardo, 361n7 Doris Salcedo (Huyssen), 64n16 “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female” (Beal), 236n33 “Dove (e Quando) il Luogo Divenne Spazio” (Farinelli), 170n15 “Downtown Visions” (Fuchs), 400n11, 400n16 Draghici, Marina, 341 Dramatic Revisions of Myths, Fairy Tales and Legends: Essays on Recent Plays (Foster), 344n14 “Dramatization of Futureless Worlds: Caryl Churchill’s Ecological Dystopias, The” (Adiseshiah), 345n20 Duarte, Rafael Ramírez, 125–26 Duarte viuda de Ramírez, Della, 125–26 Duft, Catherine, 299n1 Duncombe, Stephen, 361n7 Durak, Attila, 88, 102n6 Durkheim, Emile, 230 Dystopia(n) Matters: On the Page, On Screen, On Stage (Vierira), 345n20 Eagleton, Terry, 439n6, 440nn48–49 Earl, Jennifer, 170n23 Earle, Edward Mead, 450, 457n39 East Anglia, England, 343n3 Ebru: Reflections of Cultural Diversity in Turkey (Durak & Altınay), 88, 102n6 Échale la vulpa a la heroína: De Iguala a Chicago (Reveles), 131n20 Economic Policy Institute, 224–25 Edge of Time—Ancient Rome, The (Weems), 278, 282 INDEX

Edib (Adıvar), Halide, 8, 441–44, 448–50, 452–53, 454nn1–3, 456nn26–28, 457n30, 457nn37–38, 457nn40–41, 458nn59–60 Eisenman, Peter, 48, 63n1 EkmekçioОlu, Lerna, 89, 101n1, 102n8, 456n24 El Año en que Nací (The Year of My Birth; Arias), 422n22 El Eco de las Canciones (The Echo of Songs; Rossi), 420n4 Electoral Justice Project, 237n45 El Edificio de los Chilenos (Aguiló & Foxley), 407–19, 419n1, 420n7, 420n10 El Frente Araucano (Santiago), 465 “El grito en común” (Ni Una Menos), 191n47 El Heraldo (Santiago), 465 El Heraldo de Mexico, 251 “Elicura Chihuailaf: En la Oralitura Habita una Visión del Mundo” (Campo), 477n35 “Elogio de la furia” (Moreno), 189n26 El Paseo Ahumada (Lihn), 473. “El problema de la violencia sexual es político, no moral” (Segato), 188 El Telón de Azúcar (The Sugar Curtain; Guzmán), 420n4 Emerson, Caryl, 420n6 “Emotional Justice: What Black Women Want and Need” (Paul), 236n30 Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, The (Fassin & Rechtman), 21n11 Emvâl-i Metruke Komisyonu (Turkey), 287 En Algún Lugar del Cielo (Somewhere in Heaven; Carmona), 420n4 Encuentro Nacional de Mujeres (Argentina), 191n39 INDEX

Encyclopedia of Fairies (Briggs), 344n13 “Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory, The” (Chun), 190n35 Eng, David L., 20n2 Enloe, Cynthia, 20n2 “Enough” (Yesayan), 84, 88–89, 101n1 “Enough! Being Able to Hear Zabel Yesayan’s Call to Peace” (Bilal), 102n8 Ensignia, Marco, 45n16 “Entanglements and Aftermaths,” 11 “En un Lugar donde Hubo Muerto, hoy le Dimos una Alegría a Chile” (Beausejour), 46n29 “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts” (Muñoz), 217n19 “Epic for Peace, An” (Adak), 457n29 Erciyes, Cem, 293–94, 301n24 Eren, Hayrettin, 259–60, 262 Eren, Ikbal, 259, 262, 271 “Erkekler Yüksek Politikayı Tercih Ediyor” (Mater), 148n15, 148n24, 149n32 Erkol, Nejbir, 7, 324 Erll, Astrid, 21n12, 170n20, 421n11 Erol, Maral, 455n12 Ertürk, Nergis, 302n37 Escales, Vanina, 173, 187n5, 188n19 “Escape from Amnesia: The Museum as Mass Medium” (Huyssen), 54, 63n3, 64n12 Escenarios liminales (Diéguez), 360n1 Escobar, Alexandra, 355 ¡ . . . Escucha, Winka . . . ! (Millalén, Mariman, et al.), 468, 477n27, 477n36 ESE:O, 462–63, 476n11 Espacio y Lugar: Archipélago de Memorias en Santiago de Chile (Piper & Hevia), 169n3 [ 497 ]

Espinoza, Anjélica, 41, 46n33 Estadio Nacional (Chile), 27–29, 31–43, 42–43; Camarín de Mujeres, 38 Escotilla 8, 37–38 Estadio Nacional (film), 36, 44n5 Estadio Nacional, Memoria Nacional (National Stadium, National Memory), 36, 38–39, 45n17, 46n28 Estado de Emergencia: De la Guerra de Calderón a la Guerra de Peña Nieto (Fazio), 131n21 “Estado de la banda ancha en América Latina y el Caribe 2016” (Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe), 476n13 Etcheves, Florencia, 172, 186n3 “Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics, The” (Rancière), 361n10 Ethics of Psychoanalysis: 1959–1960, The (Lacan), 361n9 Ettinger, Bracha, 133, 134–35, 140, 145–46, 147n1, 147n5, 149n34, 149n39, 151nn57–59 ¡Eureka! (Comité), 125–26 Proyecto Hogares (Project Homes), 407–8, 411–19 Evans, Brad, 147n1 “Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival, An” (Laub), 104n34 “Excerpts from Antígona” (Watanabe), 361n3, 361n6 “Exhibition, Difference, and the Logic of Culture” (Bennett), 64n11, 64n13 Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity, The (Morrison), 400n21 Fabricatorian, Dikran, 107–8 “Fact Sheet—Human Rights in Chile” (CIA), 44n2 [ 498 ]

Falabella Luco, María Soledad, 16, 86, 474n1, 475n7, 476n10, 476n12, 476n14, 477n38, 477nn29–30, 477nn33–34, 481 Falsettos, 394, 401n35 Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Hirsch), 266, 275n23, 275n26 “Family Photography and the Global Drama of Human Rights” (Noble), 273n2, 274n11, 275n28, 276n42, 276n47 Fanelli, Kayla, 401n34 Farinelli, Franco, 157, 170n15 Fassin, Didier, 21n11 Fazio, Carlos, 131n21 Fear of Art, The (Dominguez & Duncombe), 361n7 Federici, Silvia, 188n11 Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy, The (Eng), 20n2 Felipe, Liliana, 128, 132n38 Felman, Shoshana, 104n34, 138, 148n22 “Femininity: Aporia or Sexual Difference?” (Pollock), 151n58 Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary (Wright), 150n54 Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Talpade Mohanty), 187n7 “Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability: Disrespect, Obligation, Action” (Ziarek), 22n19 Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (hooks), 226, 236nn26–28 Femme Vocal, 39 Fen (Churchill), 330–35, 342, 343n3 Fenwomen (Chamberlain), 343n3 “#Ferguson, Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics INDEX

of Social Media in the United States” (Bonilla & Rosa), 189n29 Ferit (Tek), Müfide, 441–44, 445–48, 452–53, 454n1, 455n14, 456nn16–17, 456nn19–22, 458nn604 Ferit Tek, Ahmet, 445, 454n1 Fernández de Kirchner, Cristina, 175 Festic, Fatima, 438n2 Fierstein, Harvey, 398n1 Film Genre Reader III (Grant), 421n9 Finding Zabel Yesayan (film), 102n8 Fineman, Martha Albertson, 22n19 Five Brothers Apartments (Mezirah, Turkey), 108 Fırat, Begüm Özden, 104nn41–42 Flatley, Jonathan, 425, 439n5 Florez, Libardo, 361n16 Flowers, Benjamin, 30, 45n9 Foley, Helene P., 360n2, 362n21 Folktales of England (Briggs), 344n13 Forensic Medicine Institution (Turkey), 207 “Foreword: Bracha’s Eurydice” (Butler), 151n57 “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics” (Bakhtin), 420n6 Forsyth, Alison, 422n16 Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya (FOMA), 476n10 Foster, Verna, 344n14 Foto Galatasaray, 90, 97 Foto Galatasaray: Studio Practice by Maryan ߸ahinyan (Serttaߞ), 102n12, 302n32 “Fotogઅrafı Kaldırmak”: Eߞi Zorla Kaybedilen Kadınların Deneyimleri (Bozkurt & Kaya), 149–50, 274n17 Foucault, Michel, 20n7, 64n10, 209 INDEX

Foucault in an Age of Terror: Essays on Biopolitics and the Defence of Society (Morton & Bygrave), 217n11 Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Lacan), 440n41 Fox, Vicente, 120 Foxley, Susana, 8, 407–19, 419n1 Fradinger, Moira, 360n2 “Fragments of Memory” (Ralli), 349, 361n4 Frames of War (Butler), 256n3 Frattura, Luca, 157, 170n14 Frazadas del Estadio Nacional (Montealegre), 44n5 Fregoso, Rosa-Linda, 188n16 Frente Amplio (Chile), 41 Freud, Sigmund, 434–35, 440n37 Friedman, Elizabeth Jay, 186n2 Friend, Melanie, 269, 275n35, 275nn32–33 From Literature to Cultural Literacy (Segal & Koleva), 439n2 Frontières & Dictatures. Images, Regards— Chili, Argentina (Medina, Mora & Soluages), 170n18 Fuchs, Elinor, 385, 400n11, 400n16 Fuentes, Marcela A., 17, 166, 171n25, 188n14, 481 Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Columbia (FARC), 354, 357, 362n19 Fujimori, Alberto, 353 “Functions of Myth and Taxonomy of Myths, The” (Schöpflin), 454n4 Fuss, Diana, 400n21 Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Koselleck), 22n25 “Galatasaray’ın Kadınları” (Koçali), 149n25 Galatasaray Square (Istanbul), 90–92, 96–98, 135, 454n5 [ 499 ]

Galindo, Regina José, 60 Gallagher, Erin, 190n32 Gálvez, Dr. Elena, 33–34 Gambetti, Zeynep, 20n3, 22n19, 170nn21–22, 476n9 Gandhi, Kasturba, 453, 458n59 Garanti Gallery, 301n16 García, Daiana, 173 Garcia, Felipe, 45n17 García, Santiago, 354, 360n1 Garner, Eric, 18, 159, 219 Garner, Erica, 219–20 Garrett, R. Kelly, 170n23 Garza, Alicia, 227, 231, 236n29, 237n41 Garzón, Baltasar, 29 Gatrell, Peter, 455n15 Gender, Space, Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction (Rendell, Penner, & Borden), 150n49 “Gender, Nationalism, Exclusion: The Reintegration Process of Female Survivors of the Armenian Genocide” (Tachjian), 456n24 “Gender and Cultural Memory” (Hirsch & Smith), 20n2 Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories: Feminist Conversations on War and Political Violence (Altınay & Petö), 20n2, 102n15 “Gendering Denial Narratives of the Decade of Terror (1975–1985): The Case of Neߞide K. Demir/Samiha Ayverdi and Hatun Sebilciyan/ Sabiha Gökçen” (Adak), 455n13, 458n50, 458nn43–48, 458nn53–54 “Genealogía de la crítica de la modernidad desde una perspectiva de la diferencia sexual: Cartas para la Educación Estética de la Humanidad de Schiller” (Falabella), 476n12 [ 500 ]

Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, The (Hirsch), 21n13, 64n14, 102nn4–5, 103n30, 170n20, 218n22, 235n11, 301–2n31, 301n25, 421n10, 422n17, 422n19, 431, 439n13, 439n15, 440nn27–29, 477n26 Geometry of Conscience (Jaar), 56 Gerbaudo, Paolo, 187n6 Geronimous, Arline, 220 “Gertrude Stein Lights the Lights” (Leverett), 399n10 Gervasio, Nicole, 13, 17, 481 Get Real: Documentary Theater Past and Present (Forsyth & Megson), 422n16 Gezi Park (Istanbul), 18, 86, 94–95 Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Gordon), 148nn9–12, 149n29, 439n23 Giachino Torrens, Lorena, 420n4 Gidley, Mick, 255n2 Gilroy, Paul, 253, 256n14 Ginsberg, Alan, 475n8 Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time, The (Pratt & Rosner), 22n16, 275n24, 301nn26–27 “Globalizing Home” (Chancy), 272, 276n48 Gobierno de Chile, 170n12 Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla, 21n11 Göçek, Fatma Müge, 458n46 Gökçen, Sabiha, 95 Göker, Zeynep Gülru, 150n53, 455n12 Gómez-Barris, Macarena, 44n1, 169n9 Gomme, Rachel, 21n11 González, Nohora, 355 González Villarreal, Roberto, 120–21, 132n27 Good Medicine and Company, The, 387, 389 Gopnik, Blake, 82n10 INDEX

Göral, Özgür Sevgi, 147n6 Gordon, Avery, 136, 148nn9–12, 149n29, 429, 439n23 Gordon, Peter E., 63n1 Gossett, Reina, 236n37 Gould, Deborah, 230, 233, 237n40, 237n43 Gould, Elsie, 235n19 Göze, Ergun, 458nn56–57 Graduate Student Advisory Council (GSAC; Columbia University), 199 Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC), 193, 195 Graduate Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers (GWC-UAW), 199–203 Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey (Ertürk), 302n37 Grand Central Station (Novak), 245 Grant, Barry Keith, 421n9 “Great Sparkles of Lust: Homophobia and the Antitheatrical Tradition” (Solomon), 399n8 Greece, Stadium of Kos, 30 Greenberg, Jessica, 218 Greene, Alyssa, 17, 481 Gregory, Steven, 204n4 Griffiths, Linda, 332 Grosz, Elizabeth, 150n54 Group of Personal Friends (GAP), 40 Grown-Ups (NDiaye), 363, 373–78, 379n10 Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani (Peru), 346, 348–54, 356, 362n20 Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes (GIEI), 120, 131nn24–25 Grupos de creación colectiva, 346 Guantánamo: If the Light Goes Out (Clark), 269, 275n31 Guaquin, Karla, 8, 468–69 INDEX

Guerrero, Manuel, 154 Günaysu, Ayߞe, 137, 148n14 Gündüz, Aka, 448 Güven, Dilek, 300n11 Guzmán Orellana, Gloria, 132n30 Habeas Corpus (Contreras Lorenzini), 7, 16 Habegger, Andrés, 420n5 Hadîka Gazetesi, 301n21 Haedicke, Susan C., 379n2 Hafıza Merkezi (Truth, Justice, Memory Center; Turkey), 142, 144, 147n6, 148n7 Hah (OОuz), 430–38, 439n8, 440n47, 440nn25–26, 440nn30–35, 440nn44–45 Halavut, Hazal, 439n10 Halberstam, Jack, 22n18, 401nn36–37 Halide Edib ve Siyasal ߸iddet: Ermeni Kırımı, Diktatörlük ve ߸iddetsizlik (Adak), 454n2, 456nn26–27, 457n31 Hall, Martin, 53–54, 64nn6–8 Hall, Tim, 104n44 Halliwell, Stephen, 130n10 Hanife Mother, 135–36 Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Disch), 104nn36–38 Haraway, Donna, 99, 104n35, 104n39 Haritaworn, Jin, 208–9, 217n12, 217nn7–8 Harrison, Paul Carter, 82n20 Hart, Lorenz, 391, 394 Hartman, Saidiya, 256n3 Harvard Dictionary of Music Online, 253 “Hasan Ocak Dosyası Kapandı . . . Ölümün Zamanı Aߞınmaz,” 148n8 Hassan, Mushirul, 457n32 Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, The (Carlson), 380n14, 399n3, 401n30 [ 501 ]

Hayes, Sharon, 392, 401n29 Hazneci, Mustafa, 291, 293, 294 Hearns, Elle, 229 Heath, Stephen, 83n22 Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 22n25 Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, 358 Hemmings, Clare, 96, 103n29 Henríquez, Miguel, 410 Hepsi Gerçek: Devlet Kaynaklı ߸iddet (Keskin & Yurtsever), 93–94, 102n17 Herman’s Hermits, 391 Hernández, Anabel, 120, 131n26 Hernández, Sara, 125–26, 132n32 Hernández-Navarro, Miguel, 22n22 “Herstory of the Black Lives Matter Movement, A” (Garza), 237n41 Hesford, Wendy, 270, 271, 276n40, 276n44 “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/ Modern Gender System” (Lugones), 477n39 Hevia, Evelyn, 154, 169nn3 Hıdivyal Palas (Istanbul), 89 Higginbottom, Larry, 235n14 HIJOS, 35–36 Hilando en la Memoria: Curriao, Huinao, Millapan, Manquepillan, Panchillo, Pinda, Rupailaf (Falabella, Huinao et al.), 474n1, 475n7, 476n10, 476n14, 477n38, 477nn29–30, 477nn33–34 Hilda (NDiaye), 363 Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park (Japan), 51 Hirsch, Marianne, 20n2, 21n13, 59, 64n14, 85, 102nn4–5, 103n30, 151n56, 170n20, 218n22, 235n11, 256n10, 264, 266, 275n23, 275n26, 294, 301–2n31, 301n25, 380n16, 410, 421n10, 422n17, 422n19, 427, 431, [ 502 ]

439n13, 439n15, 440nn27–29, 467, 477n26, 481 Historial de la Grande Guerre (Péronne), 48 Historias Cotidianas (Everyday Stories; Habegger), 420n5 Historiographic Perversion, The (Nichanian), 456n29, 458n49 Historizar el Pasado Vivo en América Latina (Perotin Dumon), 169n7 Hite, Katherine, 5, 44n1, 44n6, 45n16, 169n7, 482 Hobsbawm, Eric, 63n2 Hoffman, William, 398n1 Hoheisel, Horst, 10 “Holding up the Photograph”: Experiences of the Women Whose Husbands Were Forcibly Disappeared (Bozkurt & Kaya), 149nn41–44, 150nn45–48, 274n17 Holocaust and Memory in a Global Age: Politics, History, and Social Change, The (Levy & Sznaider), 21n13 “Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects on FKBP5 Methylation” (Yehuda et al.), 235n11 Holquist, Michael, 420n6 Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform (Taylor & Constantino), 361nn3–4 Homes and Gardens: Documenting the Invisible (1994–1996) (Friend), 269 “Homes and Gardens: Documenting the Invisible” (Friend), 275n33 Honneur à notre élue (NDiaye), 378–79, 379n1 hooks, bell, 226–27, 236nn26–28 Hope without Optimism (Eagleton), 439n6, 440nn48–49 Hoskins, Andrew, 21n12 INDEX

Hot Keys (Weiss), 382–83, 389–92, 399n1, 400n24 Hot Peaches and the Cockettes, 386 “How a Migraine Happens” (Johns Hopkins Medicine), 256n9 Howard, Jean A., 16, 23n26, 360n2, 380n16, 482 How Housing Matters: Poor Black Women Are Evicted at Alarming Rates, Setting off a Chain of Hardship (Desmond), 235n22 Howl (Ginsberg), 475n8 How to Do Things with Words (Austin), 189n30 Hueitra, Jeannette, 465 Huenante Nuenante, Jose Gerardo, 474n2 Huentecura Llancaleo, Julio Alberto, 474n2 Huenuñir, María, 8, 470–71 Huenupe Pavian, Agustina, 474n2 Huenupe Pavian, Mauricio, 474n2 Huerrquen (Belgium), 465 Hughes, Langston, 475n8 Huichaqueo, Francisco, 475n5 Huinao, Graciela, 8, 460, 462–63, 466, 467, 474n1, 477n25 Huirimilla, Juan Paulo, 470 Humane Insight (Baker), 256n3 Human Rights, Human Wrongs (Owen), 275n25 Human Rights Association (Istanbul), 93, 147n2 Human Rights in Camera (Sliwinski), 256n3 Human Rights Organization (IHD; Turkey), 264. See also IHD (Turkey) Hunt, Jayson, 170n23 Hunter, Kathryn, 336 Hushka, Rock, 401n35 Hutchison, Siklvu, 235n23 INDEX

Huyssen, Andreas, 10, 21n8, 63n1, 63n3, 91, 97, 102nn13–14, 103n31, 299n4, 482 Hyde, Lewis, 71, 82n11 “(Hyper/in)visibility and the Military Corps(e)” (Martin-Baron), 217n12 Ibarra de Piedra, Rosario, 125 IHD (Turkey), 135–36, 264 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Angelou), 475n8 “‘I Lived and Learned’: Violence, Survival and Self-Making in Trans Women’s Lives in Istanbul, Turkey” (TaߞçıoОlu), 217n6 Image–Music–Text (Barthes), 83nn22–23 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Anderson), 255n1 “Immediate Need for Emotional Justice, The” (Akili), 235n16 “Imperialism and Motherhood” (Davin), 150n55 “Imperialist Nostalgia” (Rosaldo), 302n36 “In Conversation with Brooke O’Harra” (Fanelli), 401n34 “Informe de la Comisión por la Verdad y la Reconciliación” (Gobierno de Chile), 170n12 Ingold, Tim, 379n4 Inside India (Edib), 453, 454n1, 458n59 Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (Fuss), 400n21 Instituto de Humanidades (Chile), 462 Instituto Nacional de Derechos Humanos, 476n16 Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (CIDH), 120, 190n34, 464, 475n4 [ 503 ]

Inter-American Court of Human Rights, 459 International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, 56 International Committee of Memorial Museums for the Remembrance of Victims of Public Crimes, 55 International Council of Museums, 55 International Encyclopedia of the First World War (1914–1918) (Daniel, Gatrell, Janz, Jones, Keene, Kramer, & Nasson), 455n15 International Jury for the People’s Permanent Tribunal (PPT), 113, 129, 130n2 International Mission of Observers on Human Rights (MODH), 132n36 “Interrupted Stadium: Broken Promises of Modernity in the National Stadium of Chile” (Rozas-Krause), 45n12 “Interview with the Founders of Black Lives Matter, An” (Garza, Cullors, & Tometi), 236n29 In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Moten), 257n15 In the Wake (Sharpe), 256n3 Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic (Threadcraft), 235nn17–18 Invention of Tradition, The (Hobsbawm & Ranger), 63n2 Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People (Namaste), 216–17n4 Ipekjian, Krikor, 108 Irving, Shalon, 219, 220 Irzık, Sibel, 19, 424, 438n2, 482 Isaac, Oscar, 395 Iߞık, Ayhan, 147n6 Israel, 8; Yad Vashem, 51 [ 504 ]

Istanbul, Turkey, 5, 6, 7, 16, 17, 18, 58, 84–101, 133–47, 206–16, 258–73; Gezi Park, 18; Hıdivyal Palas, 89; Human Rights Association, 93; Mesopotamia Cultural Center, 89; Office of Judicial Support against Sexual Harassment and Rape in Custody, 93–94; Republic Monument, 91; Saturday Mothers, 18, 60, 116; Women’s Museum, 9, 10, 102n7, 102n11. See also Turkey “I Stand Here Ironing” (Olsen), 257n18 Istiklal Street (Istanbul), 85–88, 96–98, 207, 261. See also Curious Steps ԭvegen, Berfın, 144, 150nn51–52, 273n5, 274n10, 274n14 Jaar, Alfredo, 56 Jackson, Giorgio, 41 Jackson, J.S., 235n14 Jacobs, Janet Liebman, 63n5 Jagger, Mick, 46n29 Janz, Oliver, 455n15 Japan: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, 51; Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace, 9 Jara, Daniela, 44n1 Jardine, Alice, 257n18 Jelin, Elizabeth, 170n10 Jerker, or the Helping Hand (Chesley), 398n1 Jetter, Alexis, 444–45 Jeudy, Henri Pierre, 49 Jewish Museum (Berlin), 9, 48; Garden of Exile, 48 Jofre, Mauricio, 40 Johannesburg, South Africa: Apartheid Museum, 48 Joignant, Alfredo, 44n1, 44n6 Jones, Claudia, 236n34 Jones, Heather, 455n15 INDEX

Jones, Janell, 235n19 Jordan, Mark A., 130n13 Justice and Development Party (Turkey), 286 Justice and the Politics of Difference (Young), 234nn8–9 Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide (JCOAG), 450, 458n43 Kacandes, Irene, 22n17 “Kadınlarla Çalıߞmak” (Kayılı), 149n26 Kai, Mayisha, 226, 236n25 Karaca, Banu, 19, 23n26, 103n24, 218, 302n35, 482 Karakuߞ, Filiz, 149n25 Karakutu, 86 Karam, Jesús Murillo, 119 “Kara Walker—Figa” (DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art), 82n12 “Kara Walker & Larry Walker” (BOMB Magazine), 82n18 “Kara Walker: Subtlety as a Big Idea” (Reeder), 82n1 Kardon, Dennis, 76 Karp, Ivan, 64n6, 64n11 Katz, Jonathan David, 401n35 Kavada, Anastasia, 165, 171n24 Kaya, Elif, 7, 324 Kaya, Özlem, 147n6, 149nn41–44, 150nn45–48, 274n17 Kayılı, Erkan, 149n26 Keene, Jennifer, 455n15 Kemal, Mustafa, 288 Keskin, Eren, 93–94, 102nn16–17 Khan, Tasnin, 46n30 Kieser, Hans Lukas, 455n13 Kigali Genocide Memorial Center (Rwanda), 48 Kindred Collective, 224 Kirkwood, Julieta, 421n15 INDEX

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 64n6 Kitchen, The (New York), 382, 396, 400n25 Kleiner, Milena Grass, 13, 19, 481 Kline, Kevin, 389, 395 Kluge, Alexander, 60 Knitz, Andreas, 10 Koç, Vehbi, 300n14 Koçali, Filiz, 149n25 Kohen, Eliza, 88 Kohen, Mazalto, 88 Kohen Sisters (Hemߞireler) Bookstore, 88 Koleva, Daniela, 439n2 Kondoleon, Harry, 398n1 Konstan, David, 130n4 Koonz, Claudia, 445 Korkman, Zeynep, 103n19 Kortun, Vasıf, 300n16 Koselleck, Reinhard, 22n25 Kramer, Alan, 455n15 Kramer, Larry, 384, 398n1 Kratz, Corinne A., 64n6, 64n11 Krauss, Rosalind, 49 Kricorian, Nancy, 16, 22n17, 92, 102n3, 483 Kristeva, Julia, 257n18 Kritzer, Amelia Howe, 344n14 Kunstmann, Wally, 35–36, 45n16 Kuntsman, Adi, 217n12 Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), 262, 318 Kuryel, Aylin, 104nn41–42 Kuߞ Diline Öykünen (DevecioОlu), 439–40n24 Kvyeh, Rayen A., 465 La Araucana (Ercilla), 459, 475n8 Lacan, Jacques, 352, 353, 361n9, 435, 440n41 LaCapra, Dominick, 271, 276n43 [ 505 ]

La Ciudad de los Fotógrafos (City of Photographers; Moreno), 420n4 La Condition Noire, Essai sur une minorité française (NDiaye), 379n11 La Diablesse et son enfant (The SheDevil and Her Child; NDiaye), 369 “La Figure de l’enseignant chez Marie NDiaye” (Sheringham), 380n13 Lagarde, Marcela, 188n16 Lagos Labbe, Paola, 410, 421n5 Lambert, Léopold, 44n7 Lang, Kirsty, 362n21 Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Foucault), 20–21n7 Lapine, James, 401n35 Las Neuvas Formas de la Guerra y el Cuerpo de las Mujeres (Segato), 188n18 “La solidaridad de las mujeres prisioneras en el Estadio Nacional” (Báez Pollier), 45n17, 46n20, 46n30 “La Superación de los Silencios en el Chile Postautoritario” (Hite), 169n7 La Televisión y Yo (TV and I; di Tella), 420n5 Latin American Motherland Women. See MuMaLá Laub, Dori, 98, 104n34, 138, 148n22 La Vendadera Noche de Iguala (Hernández), 131n26 La Voz de Arauco (Tumuco, Chile), 465 Lawson, Kimberly, 189n24 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 475n8 Le Monde à bicyclette, 159 Lemunao Saavedra, Edmundo Alex, 474n2 Lentz, Vera, 130n14 Les Grandes personnes (NDiaye). See Grown-Ups Le Sort de l’Empire Ottoman (Mandelstam), 457n36 [ 506 ]

Les Serpents (NDiaye). See Snakes “Lessons on Rebelling, from the 1980s” (Bellafonte), 401n35 “Letter to the Editor: Voting ‘Yes’ for Unionization at Columbia to Improve the International Student Experience” (Atlidakis et al.), 205n7 Leverett, James, 399n10 Levin, Mikael, 269 Levy, Daniel, 21n13 Liberation of Aunt Jemima, The (Saar), 73 Libeskind, Daniel, 10, 48 Liebens, Marc, 368 Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Das), 45n15 Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (Churchill), 330 Lihn, Enrique, 473 Lin, Maya, 10, 48 Lincoln Memorial (Weems), 279 Linfield, Susie, 255n3, 275n29 Liquidation Commission (Turkey), 287 Lira, Elizabeth, 422n22 Listening to Images (Campt), 253, 257nn16–17 “Literary Heritages of the Late Ottoman Empire (1914–1918)” (Adak), 455n13 “Literatura Mapuche” (Carrasco), 476n17 “Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory” (Erll), 421n11 Llanos, Bernardita, 409, 410, 413, 420n3, 420n5, 421n13 London, England, 8, 11; Hayward Gallery, 59; Tate Modern, 59 “London Bombings: Mobile Witnessing, Mortal Bodies and Globital Time, The” (Reading), 21n13 Londoño, Rodrigo, 362n19 INDEX

Long, J. J., 273n2 Longoni, Ana, 139, 149nn30–31 Look/Not/Look (Novak), 248 López, María Pía, 178–79, 191n43 Lorde, Audre, 149n28, 219, 222, 234n10, 454–55n5 Los Rubios (Carri), 409, 420n5 Los Trabajos de la Memoria (Jelin), 170n10 Lottarini, Andrea, 204n7 Love between Talat and Fitnat, The (Sami), 290–91 Ludlam, Charles, 386 Lugones, María, 472–73, 477n39 Luibhéid, Eithne, 216n2 MacGilp, Alexandrea, 296, 302n33 Macri, Mauricio, 183, 190n34 Madonna (Rafael), 48 Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (Buenos Aires), 60, 113–14, 116, 123, 125–27, 129, 132n30, 136, 140–41, 148n12, 174, 190n36, 267, 275n24 Madres de Soacha, 361n13 Mahlke, Kirsten, 137, 148n17, 148nn19–20 Makaryan, Serpuhi, 449 Making of Neoliberal Turkey, The (Özbay, Erol, TerzioОlu, & Türem), 455n12 Mamdani, Mahmood, 300n13 Mandelstam, André N., 450, 457n36 Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Enloe), 20n2 Manquepillan, Faumelisa, 461, 462–63, 471–73, 477nn37–38 Manz, Beatriz, 476n10 “Mapping Cities: The Bologna SelfMapping Project” (Montanari & Frattura), 170n14 Mapuche, 459–74 Mapuche Bulletin (England), 465 INDEX

Mapuche Exterior Committee, 465 March 8 women’s tapestry project (Chile), 40 Marchand, Laure, 300n14 Mardin Artuklu University, 318 Marie NDiaye (Rabaté), 379n6 “Marie NDiaye” (Tuil), 379n1 Marie NDiaye: Blankness and Recognition (Asibong), 379n9 Mariman, Pablo, 477n27, 477n36 Martain, Nina, 234n5 Martí, José, 475n8 Martin-Baron, Michelle R., 209–10, 217n12 Martinez, Carlos Ricardo, 382, 386–87, 389–93, 401n34 Martínez, Shirley, 355 “Masculinized Power, Queered Resistance” (Açıksöz & Korkman), 103n19 “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other” (Huyssen), 64n9 “Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, The” (Lorde), 149n28, 454n5 Matar, Diana, 269, 275n30 Mater, Nadire, 136, 148n15, 148n24, 149n32 Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Ruddick), 444, 455nn6–8, 456n23 Matrixial Borderspace, The (Ettinger), 147n5, 149n34, 149n39, 151nn57–59 Maus (Spiegelman), 264 Mbembe, Achille, 121, 132n28, 209, 217n11 McKenna, Laura, 204n2 Meadmore, Clement, 196 Medicated (Novak), 242 Medina, Gabriel, 156 Medina, Javiera, 170n18 [ 507 ]

Mee, Erin B., 362n21 Megson, Chris, 422n16 Mehrten, Greg, 398 Meiselas, Susan, 14, 317, 483 Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Crimp), 400n28 “Meli” (Four; Huenuñir), 470–71 Melinao Lican, Rodrigo, 474n2 Melnick, Jodi, 340, 341, 344nn18–19 Melville, Herman, 71 “Mémoire, Tissage et Estéthique du Déplacement” (Baronian), 313n1 Memoirs of Halide Edib (Edib), 449, 454n1 Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory (Jacobs), 63n5 Memorial Las Sillas (Chile), 154 “Memorials, Silences, and Reawakenings” (Collins & Hite), 44n6 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Berlin), 48–49 Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (Sanyal), 302nn40–41 “Memory Boom in Contemporary Historical Studies, The” (Winter), 299n1 “Memory Culture at an Impasse: Memorials in Berlin and New York” (Huyssen), 63n1 “Memory of the Senses” (Seremetakis), 147n4, 150n50 Menchú, Rigoberta, 476n10 Mendia Azkue, Irantzu, 132n30 Mendoza, Moisés, 41, 46n33 Mendoza Collío, Jaime Facundo, 474n2 Mendoza Collío, Victor Manuel, 474n2 [ 508 ]

Meneses, Emilio, 44n5 Mesopotamia Cultural Center (Istanbul), 89 “Mexico: Articles about Bots & Trolls” (Gallagher), 190n32 Middle Passage, 279 Mignon, Laurent, 458n50 Miles, Malcolm, 104n44 Militourism Festival, 86 Millalén, José, 477n27, 477n36 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 361n9, 440n41 Miller, Nancy K., 255n2 Mims, Sekou, 235n14 MinasoОlu, Osep, 296 Mintz, Sidney W., 67, 82n2, 82nn5–8 Minwalla, Framji, 399n8 MIR, 407–19, 419–20n2; see also Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria Misailidis, Evangelinos, 290 Misión Internacional de Observación de Derechos Humanos en la Frontera (MODH), 132n36 Mistral, Gabriela, 461, 475n8 Mitchell, Katie, 234n2 Mi vida con Carlos (My Life with Carlos; Berger Hertz), 420n4 Mi Vida Después (My Life Thereafter; Arias), 422n22 Mobasher, Mostafa, 204n7 Mobilizing Memory: Women Witnessing exhibition, 6, 20n4, 273n1 Moby-Dick (Melville), 71 Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory, The (Breckman, Gordon, Moses, Moyn, & Neaman), 63n1 Mónaco Felipe, Paula, 132n37 Mondragón, Julio Cesar, 119 Monstrous Intimacies (Sharpe), 82n3, 82n19, 82n21, 82nn13–17 INDEX

Montage of a Dream Deferred (Hughes), 475n8 Montagne, Renee, 234n5 Montanari, Federico, 157, 170n14 Montealegre, Jorge, 44n5 Montgomery, Alabama: National Memorial to Peace and Justice, 9 Montoneros (Argentina), 409 Montoya-Moraga, Aarón, 153, 159, 161, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168 Mora, Alexander, 120 Mora, Maira, 170n18 Mora, Rafael, 131n18 Mora Curriao, Maribel, 8, 469, 476nn20–23 Moraga, Cherrie, 234n6 Moraga García, Fernanda, 476nn20–23 Mor Çatı (Istanbul), 94 Moreiras, Alberto, 169n9 Moreno, María, 178–79, 189n26 Moreno, Sebastián, 420n4 Mor Gabriel monastery, 287, 299n5 Morrison, Paul, 390, 400n21 Morton, Stephen, 217n11 Mosca, Lorenzo, 171n23 Moses, Dirk, 12–13, 21n12, 22n14, 63n1 Moten, Fred, 253, 257n15 Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, The (Hirsch), 151n56 “Motherhood and Politics on the Far Right” (Koonz), 445 Mothers of Khavaran (Iran), 123 Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. See Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (Buenos Aires) Moulián, Tomás, 169n7 “Mourning Mother: Rhetorical Figure or a Political Actor?, The” (Göker), 455n12 Mourning Mothers (Iran), 123 INDEX

Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (Phalen), 399n2 Moussawi, Ghassan, 218 Movement for Black Lives, 17, 219, 221–34, 234n7. See also Black Lives Matter “Movement for Black Lives Now, The” (Museum of the City of New York), 236n38, 237n39 Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR). See MIR Movimiento de Migrantes Mesoamericanos (Mexico), 127–28 Moving Politics: Emotions and ActUp’s Fight Against AIDS (Gould), 237n40, 237n43 Moyn, Samuel, 63n1 MüftüoОlu, Ahmet Hikmet, 448 Mujeres con Memoria: Activistas del Movimiento de Derechos Humanos en El Salvador (Guzmán Orellana & Mendia Azkue), 132n30 “Mujeres de la bolsa” (Bag women; Moreno), 178–79 Mujeres en la Plaza (Ariza), 357–59. See also Antígona (Ariza) Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Rothberg), 21n11, 64n14 MuMaLá, 176, 188n15 Muñoz, José Esteban, 217n19, 393, 401n33 Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Chile), 5, 35, 48, 53, 56, 155 Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations (Karp, Kratz, Szwaja, & Ybarra-Frausto), 64n6, 64n11 Museum of Memory and Human Rights (Chile). See Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Chile) [ 509 ]

Museum of the History of Polish Jews (Warsaw), 8–9, 53 Museum Series (Weems), 279 Musser, Amber Janella, 69, 82n4, 83n24 Mussolini, Benito, 278 Mutu, Wangechi, 1 Myth of the Military Nation: Militarism, Gender and Education in Turkey, The (Altınay), 103n20 Myths and Nationhood (Hosking & Schöpflin), 454n4 Nadeau, Chantal, 218 Najmabadi, Afsaneh, 150n55 Naked Angels, 400n24 Namaste, Viviane, 208, 216–17n4 Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, 401n28 Nasıl Hatırlıyoruz? Türkiye’de Bellek Çalıߞmaları (Neyzi), 299n1 Nasson, Bill, 455n15 National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Report, 156–57 National Frame: State Violence and Aesthetic Practice in Turkey and Germany, The (Karaca), 302n35 National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), 194–95, 200, 202, 205n8 National Memorial to Peace and Justice (Montgomery, Alabama), 9 National Women’s Meeting (Argentina), 191n39 “Nation Form: History and Ideology, The” (Balibar), 300n15 Nattino, Santiago, 154 NDiaye, Marie, 8, 13, 363–79, 379n1, 379n3, 379nn9–10, 380n13, 380n15 Ndiaye, Noémie, 13, 483 Ndiaye, Pap, 379n11 Neaman, Elliot, 63n1 [ 510 ]

“Necropolitics” (Mbembe), 132n28, 209, 217n11 “Neden Kadınlar” (Karakuߞ), 149n25 Negative Epiphany (Winchester), 294, 295 Neighbors, H.W., 235n14 Nemser, Dan, 203n1 Neruda, Pablo, 473, 475n8 Neumann, Christopher K., 456n24 New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (Bruzzi), 421n9 New Orleans, Louisiana, 277; SuperDome, 30 “New Technologies and Social Movements” (Earl, Hunt, Garrett, & Dal), 170n23 New York, 5, 6, 11, 16, 18, 159, 381–98; Domino Sugar Factory, 65–73; The Kitchen, 382, 396, 400n25; La MaMa, 386–88; September 11 Memorial and Museum, 5, 8, 48–49, 53; Zuccotti Park, 18. See also specific cities and boroughs “New York (Theater) Diary, 1992, A” (Solomon), 400n27 New York Times, The, 241–48, 252–53 Neyzi, Leyla, 299n1 Ngai, Sianne, 425, 439nn3–4 Nichanian, Marc, 456–57n29, 458n49 Ni tan Elefante, ni tan Blanco: Arquitectura, Urbanismo y Política en la Trayectoria del Estadio Nacional (Rozas-Krause), 45n12 Nitschack, Horst, 476n12 “Ni Una Menos es Todas Más” (Paz Frontera), 187n8, 189n27 Ni Una Menos (Not One Woman Less) movement, 172–91 “#NiUnaMenos: Not One Woman Less, Not One More Death” (Friedman & Tabbush), 186n2 INDEX

Nixon, Rob, 21n11, 22n15, 253, 255, 257n19, 329, 343n1 Noble, Andrea, 267, 271, 273n2, 274n11, 275n28, 276n42, 276n47 Noel, Andrea, 131n23 Nomis, Amnon Ben, 388 Nora, Pierre, 11 Normal Heart, The (Kramer), 384, 394, 398n1, 401n35 “Normal Heart, Then and Now, The” (Román), 401n35 Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (Spade), 216n4, 217n5, 217n10 Nor Zartonk, 95 Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Butler), 22n24 Nothing Human (NDiaye), 378 “Nothing Protects Black Women from Dying in Pregnancy and Childbirth” (Martin & Montagne), 234n5 Not One Woman Less. See Ni Una Menos “Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma” (Brown), 21n11 “Not-So-Brief Personal History of the Healing Justice Movement 2010–2016, A” (PiepznaSamarasinha), 237n44 Novak, Lorie, 7, 15, 241–55, 255n2, 349, 483 November 6 and 7 (Salcedo), 57–58, 61 Novick, Julius, 386 Nunca Más (Never Again; National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons), 189n21 Nünning, Ansgar, 421n11 Nunokawa, Jeff, 390, 400n21 INDEX

Observatorio de la Violencia contra las Mujeres (Argentina), 176 Ocak, Hasan, 135, 265–66 Ocak, Maside, 135, 265–66 Office of Judicial Support against Sexual Harassment and Rape in Custody (Istanbul), 93–94 Ofili, Chris, 73 Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art (Bal), 64nn17–18 Ogઅlum, Kızım, Devletim: Evlerden Sokaklara Tutuklu Anneleri (Temelkuran), 148n13 Ogઅuz, Birgül, 8, 426, 430–38, 439n8, 440n47, 440nn25–26, 440nn30–35, 440nn44–45 O’Harra, Brooke, 393–94, 400n23, 400n25, 401n34, 402n40 Ojeda, Marcela, 172, 186n1 Olsen, Tillie, 257n18 “On Caryl Churchill’s Ecological Drama: Right to Poison the Wasps?” (Rabillard), 343n8 “On Memory, Trauma, Public Space, Monuments, and Memorials” (Bonder), 170n11 Önol, Iߞın, 6, 14, 483 “On Owning and Owing: Caryl Churchill and the Nightmare of Capital” (Howard), 344n17 On Photography (Sontag), 255n3, 295, 301n29 “On Text and Dance: New Questions and New Forms” (Worth), 344n15 “On the Subject of Archives” (Hirsch & Taylor), 256n10 On the Wall (Tekiner), 258–73, 259, 273n1 “Open Forum: Feminist Questions at the Centennial of the First World War” (Petö & Altınay), 20n2 [ 511 ]

Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, 201 Orleck, Annelise, 444–45, 455n5, 455nn9–10 “Osmanlı ve Erken Cumhuriyet Dönemi Türkiye Modernleߞmesinde Annelik Kurguları” (DemirciYılmaz), 150n55 Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in PostWar Britain, The (Araeen), 59, 64n15 Our Honorable Elected Official (NDiaye), 378–79, 379n1 Owen, Nicholas, 275n25 Oxford Handbook of Social Movements, The (Della Porta & Mosca), 170–71n23 “Oyate Ptayela: Rebuilding the Lakota Nation through Addressing Historical Trauma among Lakota Parents” (Yellow Horse Brave Heart), 235n11 Oz, Avraham, 379n2 Özbay, Cenk, 455n12 Özgül, Ceren, 103n24 Öztap, Zeynep, 7, 324 Öztürk, ÇiОdem, 149nn35–36 Özyürek, Esra, 299n3 Paessaggi della Memoria: Il Trauma, lo Spazio, La Storia (Violi), 169nn4–5 Páez, Chiara, 172 Paisajes insurrectos: Jóvenes, redes y revueltas en el otoño civilizatorio (Reguillo), 187n6 Pajarito Nuevo (Contreras), 422n22 Palace of Justice (Bogotá, Columbia), 57–58 Palestinian Museum (Ramallah, Palestine), 9 Palimpsest (Salcedo), 60 [ 512 ]

“Palimpsest of Grief: Writing in Water and Light, A” (Huyssen), 64n16 Palmeiro, Cecilia, 188n11, 191n46 Palomino, Mila Berríos, 39 Panchillo, María Teresa, 8, 465–66, 468, 477n28 Paniagua, Valentín, 347 Papacharissi, Zizi, 187n6 Papa doit manger (NDiaye). See Daddy Gotta Eat (NDiaye) Papá Iván (Roqué), 420n5 Parada, Manuel, 154 Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, A (Solnit), 393, 401n32 “Paradoxes of a Cold War Sufi Woman” (Aytürk & Mignon), 458n50 Paraiso, Nicky, 389–90, 393 Paredes, Camila, 41, 46n30 Parker, Ellen, 332 Parla, Ayߞe, 103n24 Parot, Carmen Luz, 36, 40, 44n5 Parque de la Memoria (Buenos Aires), 10, 48, 56 Parra, Sergio, 130n11 Parra, Violeta, 39 Participant Inc., 400n26 Paߞa, Talat, 450 “Paseo Ahumada” (Ahumada Passage; Manquepillan), 471–73, 477n37 Pasha, Vartan, 290 “Patriarchy from Margin to Center: Discipline, Territoriality, and Cruelty in the Apocalyptic Phase of Capital” (Segato), 188n17, 189nn22–23 Paul, Dalila-Johari, 236n30 “Pavagan E (Yeter!): Zabel Yesayan’ın Banߞ ÇaОrısını Duyabilmek” (Bilal), 102n8 Paz Frontera, Agustina, 179, 187n8, 189n27 INDEX

Paz y Paz Baile, Claudia, 131n24 Peabody, Rebecca, 69 Peace Mothers, 445 Peña Nieto, Enrique, 120, 131n19 Penner, Barbara, 150n49 Pensar en/la postdictadura (Richard & Moreiras), 169n9 People’s Permanent Tribunal (PPT), 113, 129, 130n2 Pérez, Lucía, 175, 182, 191n39 Performance (Taylor), 170n18, 361n15 “Performance Constellations: Memory and Event in Digitally Enabled Protest” (Fuentes), 188n14 “Performance Política y Protesta” (Fuentes), 171n25 Performing Garage (New York), 389 Perotin Dumon, Anne, 169n7 Perrault, Katherine, 344n9 Perrier, Guillaume, 300n14 Perry, Joia Crear, 234n3 Peru, 346, 347–54, 358–60 Pervaneler (Ferit), 454n1 Petö, Andrea, 20n2, 86, 102n15 “Phallic Mother” (Grosz), 150n54 Phelan, Peggy, 399n2 Photographic Interference (Novak), 245–47, 255n2 “Photographs and Silhouettes: Visual Politics in the Human Rights Movement of Argentina” (Longoni), 149nn30–31 Photography: Theoretical Snapshots (Long, Noble, & Welch), 273n2 Photoville (Brooklyn), 251, 256n12 Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (Batchen, Gidley, Miller, & Prosser), 255n2 Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi, 233, 237n44 INDEX

Pınar, Fatih, 259, 263, 267, 273n1 Pindell, Howardena, 73–74 Piñera, Sebastián, 37 Pinochet (Ugarte), Augusto, 5, 7, 28, 29, 35–36, 46n26, 48, 155, 410, 466, 475n4 Piper, Isabel, 154, 169nn3 PKK, 262, 318 Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, 301n16 Playhouse of the Ridiculous (New York), 386 Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement (Bottoms), 400n18 Pleasance, Simon, 104n40 Poema de Chile (Mistral), 475n8 Poemas Mapuches (Quintremil), 465 “Poesía Mapuche Actual: Apuntes para el Inicio de un Necesario Rescate” (Chihuailaf), 476n19 Polatel, Mehmet, 299n5 “Police Violence Report: March 2015, The” (Sinyangwe), 234n1 Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews. 9, 53 Political Performances: Theory and Practice (Haedicke et al.), 379n2 Politics and the Art of Commemoration: Memorials to Struggle in Latin America and Spain (Hite), 44n1 Politics of Common Sense, The (Woodly), 236n32 “Politics of Memory and Affects: Chilean Documentaries across Two Generations—Carmen Castillo and Macarena Aguiló, The” (Llanos), 420n3, 420n5, 421n13 Politics of Memory in Chile from Pinochet to Bachelet, The (Collins, Hite, & Joignant), 44n1, 44n6 [ 513 ]

Politics of Modernism, The (Williams), 439n6 Politics of Motherhood: Activist Voices from the Left to Right, The (Jetter, Orleck, & Taylor), 444–45, 455n5 Politics of Public Memory in Turkey, The (Özyürek), 299n3 Pollock, Griselda, 146, 147n5, 151n58 Poole, Ross, 141, 149n40, 149nn37–38 Port Elizabeth, South Africa: Red Location Museum, 48 Porter, Dennis, 361n9 “Portrait of an Ottoman Armenian Artist of Constantinople: Rereading Teotig’s Biography of Simon Hagopian” (Davidian), 300n12 Posocco, Sylvia, 217n12 Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Craps), 21n11 Post Traumatic Slavery Disorder (Higginbottom, Reid, & Mims), 235n14 “Potential History: Thinking Through Violence” (Azoulay), 22n25 Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Agamben), 22n25 “Power-Drive and the Time of Feminine Politics, The” (Ahıska), 149n27 Practice of Everyday Life, The (de Certeau), 103n27, 104n43 Pratt, Geraldine, 22n16, 295, 301nn26–27 Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (Butler), 276nn45–46, 343n7 “Preface: Feminist Keys for Understanding Feminicide” (Lagarde & de los Ríos), 188n16 “PreJuicios Injustos” (Amnesty International), 475n4 [ 514 ]

“Presence in Silence: Feminist and Democratic Implications of the Saturday Vigils in Turkey” (Göker), 150n53 Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Huyssen), 10, 21n8, 102nn13–14, 103n31 “Primera Persona Singular. Estrategias de (Auto) Representación para Modular el ‘Yo’ en el Cine de no Ficción” (Lagos Labbe), 421n8 “Prólogo” (Kuntsmann), 46nn24–25 “Promise of Documentary, The” (Reinelt), 422n16 “Property, Dispossession, and Citizenship in Turkey” (Parla & Özgül), 103n24 Prosser, Jay, 255n2 Providence (Ndiaye), 363, 365–69, 378, 379n3 Provoost, Michelle, 45n11 Proyecto Hogares (Project Homes), 407–8, 411–19 Publics and Counterpublics (Warner), 104n45 Pushover: An Old-Fashioned Homosexual Mystery Play (Weiss), 388 Puzzle (Trois pièces; NDiaye & Cendrey), 379n3 Pyramids of Rome—Ancient Rome (Weems), 278 Queer Art of Failure, The (Halberstam), 22n18, 401nn36–37 Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater, The (Solomon & Minwalla), 399n8 “Queering Sugar: Kara Walker’s Sugar Sphinx and the Intractability of Black Female Sexuality” (Musser), 69, 82, 83n24 INDEX

“Queer/Migration: An Unruly Body of Scholarship” (Luibhéid), 216n2 Queer Necropolitics (Haritaworn, Kuntsman, & Posocco), 217n12 Queer Temaߞa (DarıcıoОlu), 217n20 ¿Qué son los Estudios de Performance? (Taylor & Steuernagel), 171n25 “‘Quien habla es terrorista’: The Political Use of Fear in Fujimori’s Peru” (Burt), 361n11 Quilaqueo, Anselmo, 465 Quintremil, Queupul, 465 Quintriqueo Huaiquimil, José Mauricio, 474n2 Rabaté, Dominique, 379n6 Rabillard, Sheila, 343n8 Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (Balibar & Wallerstein), 300n15 “Racial/Ethnic Discriminations and Health: Findings from Community Studies” (Williams, Neighbors, & Jackson), 235n14 “Radiant University: Space, Urban Redevelopment, and the Public Good, The” (Gregory), 204n4 Radstone, Susannah, 21n12 Raíces y Semillas: Maestros y Caminos del Teatro en América Latina (Zapata), 360n1 Rainer, Yvonne, 402n39 Raisons pratiques. Sur la théorie de l’action (Bourdieu), 170n16 Ralli, Teresa, 8, 16, 346–60, 349, 356, 358–60, 362n20 Ramsay, W.M., 457n32 Rancière, Jacques, 296, 302n34, 352–53, 361n10 Random Interference (Novak), 246–51, 250, 251, 254, 256n10 Ranger, Terence, 63n2 INDEX

Rankine, Claudia, 475n8 “Rarely One for Sugarcoating: Kara Walker Creates a Confection at the Domino Refinery” (Gopnik), 82n10 Reading, Anna, 21n12 “Reappearance of the Authentic, The” (Hall), 64nn6–8 Rechtman, Richard, 21n11 Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile 1989–2006 (Stern), 44n1, 421n12 Red Location Museum (Port Elizabeth, South Africa), 48 Reed, Pamela, 332 Reeder, Laura K., 82n1 Regarding the Pain of Others (Sontag), 255n3, 295–96, 301n30 Reguillo, Rossana, 187n6 Reid, Omar, 235n14 Reinalda del Carmen, mi Mamá y Yo (Giachino Torrens), 420n4 Reinartz, Dirk, 269 Reinelt, Janelle, 422n16 Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud, Pleasance, Woods, & Copeland), 104n40 Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Abu Lughod), 150n55 “Remembering Argentina’s Mothers of the Disappeared” (Sun), 132n29 Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London 1998 (Stern), 421n12, 438n1 Rendell, Jane, 150n49 Renov, Michael, 421n9 “Report by Grupo Internacional de Expertos Independientes” (GIEI), 131n25 Report of the National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, 29 [ 515 ]

“Report on the Workshop and Tour of East Anglia of Caryl Churchill’s play, Fen, A,” 343n3 “Representing Immigration Detainees: The Juxtaposition of Image and Sound in Border Country” (Friend), 275n35 Republic Monument (Istanbul), 91 Residuos y Metáforas, Ensayos de Crítica Cultural sobre el Chile de la Transición (Richard), 169n8 “Resilience Definitions, Theory, and Challenges: Interdisciplinary Perspectives” (Southwick), 235n14 “Rethinking ‘Maternal’ Politics” (Ruddick), 455nn5–8 “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance” (Butler), 170nn21–22, 217nn15–16, 461, 476n9 Rettig Report, 157, 158 Reveles, José, 131n20 Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia, The (Sokol), 456n18 Revolución Democrática (RD), 41 Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR; Chile), 19, 407–19. See also MIR Revolution in Constantinople and Turkey: A Diary, The (Ramsay), 457n32 Rice, Bill, 400n20 Richard, Nelly, 169n8, 422n21 Ridiculous Theater (New York), 386 Rien d’humain (NDiaye), 378, 380n15 Rigney, Ann, 21n12 “Rise and Coming Demise of the Corporate University, The” (Schultz), 203n1 “Ritual and Performance” (Schechner), 379n4 Roach, Joseph, 399n3 Roaming (Weems), 277–84 Robbins, Bruce, 300n14 [ 516 ]

Robles-Moreno, Leticia, 16, 483–84 Rodgers, Richard, 391 Rodríguez, Marcelo, 37 Román, David, 399n1, 401n35 Rome series (Weems), 4 Roqué, María Inés, 420n5 Rosa, Jonathan, 180, 189n29, 190n32 “Rosa Arjantin’den Cumartesi’yi Selamhyor” (Öztürk), 149nn35–36 Rosaldo, Renato, 297, 302n36 Rosenstein, Maida, 195 Rosner, Victoria, 22n16, 295, 301nn26–27 Rossi, Antonia, 420n4 Rothberg, Michael, 21n11, 22n14, 58–59, 64n14 Rozas-Krause, Valentina, 31, 45n12 Rubio, Miguel, 348, 349, 350 Ruddick, Sara, 444, 455n5, 456n23 Rudner, Sara, 340, 344nn18–19 Ruff (Shaw), 402n39 Rupailaf, Roxana Miranda, 461, 464, 466, 476n14 Rural Women. See Fen (Churchill) Russell, Diana, 188n16 Russell, Mark, 389, 400n19 S-21 Killing Fields Museum (Cambodia), 48 Saar, Betye, 73–74, 75 Sabancı, Hacı Ömer, 300n14 Sabancı University Gender and Women’s Studies Center of Excellence (SU Gender), 86, 101 “Sabiha Hatun’un sırrı” (Dink), 103n21 Sabsay, Leticia, 20n3, 22n19, 170nn21–22, 476n9 Safe Sex (Fierstein), 398n1 ߸ahinyan, Maryam, 90–92, 91, 97, 296, 302n32 INDEX

߸ahinyan, Maryam (Women’s Museum Istanbul), 102nn11–12 Sala, Milagro, 188n12, 190n34 Salcedo, Doris, 7, 10, 57–60 SALT Galata (Istanbul), 91, 300–301n16. See also A Century of Centuries Samast, Ogün, 275n20 Sami, ߸emsettin, 290–91 “Sâmiha Ayverdi” (Göze), 458nn56–57 ߸an, Ayߞe, 89–90 Sánchez, Marta, 127–28, 132n35 San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, 127 Santiago, Chile, 7, 86, 152–71, 419n2, 462; Aquí, 16; Estadio Nacional, 27–29, 31–43; Museum of Memory and Human Rights, 5; Villa Grimaldi, 10. See also Chile Santos, Juan Manuel, 362n19 Sanyal, Debarati, 298, 302nn40–41 “Saturday Mothers of Turkey, The” (Arifcan), 274nn15–16 Saturday Mothers/People (Istanbul), 60, 90, 92, 92, 96–97, 116, 123, 133–47, 147nn2–3, 261–67, 274n10, 445, 454n5 Scenes of Subjection (Hartman), 256n3 Schechner, Richard, 130n8, 356, 361n15, 366, 379n4 Schindel, Estela, 148n17, 151n60 Schnock, Frieder, 10 Schoettes, Scott A., 399n5 Schöpflin, George, 454n4 Schulman, Sarah, 400n18 Schultz, David, 203n1 Sebilciyan, Hatun, 95. See also Gökçen, Sabiha Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 15, 22n23, 383–84, 399n7 Segal, Naomi, 439n2 Segato, Rita Laura, 176, 177, 188nn17–18, 189nn22–23 INDEX

Selfish Gene, The (Dawkins), 130n3, 130nn5–8 Semiotica e Memoria. Analisi del PostConflito (Demaria), 422n16 Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path; Peru), 347 Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, The (Seremetakis), 147 September 11 Memorial and Museum (New York), 5, 8, 48–49, 53, 63n1 Seremetakis, Nadia, 147n4, 150n50 Ser política en Chile. Las feministas y los partidos (Kirkwood), 421n15 Serttaߞ, Tayfun, 91, 102n12, 302n32 Severe Maternal Morbidity in New York City, 2008–2012 (Wilcox), 234n4 “Sevginin Ölüm Dünyası: Aile, Arkadaߞlık ve Trans Kadın Cenazeleri” (Zengin), 217n20 Seyfettin, Ömer, 448, 456n25 Seyreyle Dünyayı (Misailidis), 290 Shalem, Avinoam, 302n38 Sharpe, Christina, 82n3, 82n19, 82n21, 82nn13–17, 256n3 Shaw, Peggy, 402n39 “She Barely Even Looks Like Paul Robeson” (Calhoun), 400n19 Sheffield, England: Hillsborough Stadium, 45n10 Shepard, Scott, 395 Sheridan, Alan, 440n41 Sheringham, Michael, 380n13 Shibboleth (Salcedo), 59, 63 Shirt of Flame, The (Edib). See Ateߞten Gömlek “Silencing Sexual Violence and Vulnerability: Women’s Narratives of Incarceration during the 1980–1983 Military Junta in Turkey” (Abiral), 102n15 [ 517 ]

Silent Spring (Carson), 344n12 Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Haraway), 104n35 Singer, Amy, 456n24 Sinyangwe, Sam, 234n1 Sirmans, Franklin, 279, 284, 284n4 Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Lorde), 149n28, 234n10, 454–55n5 “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” (Haraway), 104n35, 104n39 Situationist International, 100 Skriker, The (Churchill), 330, 336–42, 344n10, 344n13, 344n16, 345n21 Slave Coast (Weems), 269, 275n30 Sliwinski, Sharon, 256n3 Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Nixon), 21n11, 22n15, 253, 257n19, 329, 343n1 Smith, Barbara, 236n37 Smith, Michael, 387, 400n17 Smith, Valerie, 20n2 Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington, D.C.), 9 Snakes (NDiaye), 363, 369–73, 378, 379n7 Snorton, C. Riley, 208–9, 217nn7–8 Snyder, Timothy, 12 Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa (Beinin & Vairel), 150n53 Sokol, Edward Dennis, 456n18 Solnit, Rebecca, 393, 401n32 Solomon, Alisa, 19, 23n26, 218, 484 Soluages, François, 170n18 Somel, Selçuk A., 456n24 Sontag, Susan, 133, 255n3, 266, 275n25, 295–96, 301nn29–30 [ 518 ]

Sotero, Michelle, 234n15, 235nn12–13 South Korea: War and Women’s Human Rights Museum, 9 Southwick, Steven, 235n14 “Sovereignty as Erasure: Rethinking Enforced Disappearances” (Bargu), 273n6, 274n10, 275n27 Space and the Memories of Violence: Landscapes of Erasure, Disappearance and Exception (Schindel & Colombo), 148n17, 151n60 Spade, Dean, 208, 209, 216n4, 217n5, 217n10 “Spectacle of Mourning, The” (Crimp), 400n28 Spectral Evidence:The Photography of Trauma (Baer), 269, 274n9, 275n36, 276n39 Spiegelman, Art, 264 Spillers, Hortense, 68, 82n3 Spink, Ian, 340 “Spirit of Off-Off Broadway: Underground Legend Surfaces, The” (Wetzsteon), 399n9, 400n14 Spitzer, Leo, 22n19, 64n17 Sport and Architecture (Flowers), 45n9 Springsteen, Bruce, 46n29 “Stadium, An Architecture that Concentrates and Controls Bodies: 2015 Kos, 2005, New Orleans, 1942 Paris, The” (Lambert), 44n7 “Stadium Architecture, Visual Iconography, and the Shaping of Urban and Sporting Identities” (Flowers), 45n9 Stadium of Kos (Greece), 30 Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between, The (Young), 21n9 Stagestruck: Theatre, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (Schulman), 400n18 INDEX

Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, The (Freud), 440n37 State and Business in Modern Turkey: A Comparative Study (BuОra), 300n14 Stern, Steve J., 44n1, 424, 438n1 Steuernagel, Marcos, 171n25 Stih, Renata, 10 Sting, 46n29 Stoler, Ann Laura, 150n55 Stoller, Jennie, 335 Stolpersteine project, 11 Strachey, James, 440n37 Straight Mind and Other Essays, The (Wittig), 187n9 Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (Ahmed), 217n13 Strother, Bernard, 335 Stryker, Susan, 217n7 Stuart Sherman: Nothing Up My Sleeve, 400n26 Stüdyo Osep (Serttaߞ), 302n32 Sturken, Marita, 5, 20n6, 215, 218n24, 484 Suárez Marihuan, Jorge Antonio, 474n2 Subject of Documentary, The (Renov), 421n9 Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, A (Walker), 10, 65–83, 80–81 Suciyan, Talin, 96, 102n8, 103n26 Sun, Rivera, 132n29 SuperDome (New Orleans), 30 Süreyya, ߸evket, 452 “Surname Narratives and State-Society Boundary: Memories of Turkey’s Family Name Law of 1934” (Türköz), 458n58 Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery (Istanbul), 95, 98 INDEX

Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Mintz), 67, 82n2, 82nn5–8 Swope, Martha, 332, 335 “Symposium on the Recent ‘Mammy’ Sculpture of Kara Walker” (Harrison, et al.), 82n20 Sznaider, Natan, 21n13 Szwaja, Lynn, 64n6, 64n11 Taaߞߞuk-ı Talat ve Fitnat (Sami), 290–91 Tabbush, Constanza, 186n2 “Taboo within the Taboo: The Fate of the ‘Armenian Capital’ at the End of the Ottoman Empire, The” (Der Matossian), 299nn6–7 Tachjian, Vahé, 456n24 Tahrir Square (Cairo), 18 Taksim Square (Istanbul), 86, 207, 440n46 Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide (Kieser), 455n13 Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk Explosion (Kacandes), 22n17 Talpade Mohanty, Chandra, 187n7 Tambar, Kabir, 96, 103n28 Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Sturken), 218n24 Tarlovsky de Roisinblit, Rosa, 140–41, 149n35 Tarrow, Sidney, 170n19 TaߞçıoОlu, Esen Ezgi, 208, 217n6 Tasfıye Komisyonu (Turkey), 287 Tataryan, Nora, 103n23 Taylor, Diana, 13, 17, 18, 23n26, 98, 103nn32–33, 130n15, 137, 140, 149n33, 170n18, 171n25, 191n38, 218n26, 256n10, 275n24, 343n2, 351, 361nn3–5, 444–45, 455n5, 476n10, 484 [ 519 ]

Teatro La Candelaria (Colombia), 346, 354–60, 361n16, 361nn12–14 “Tecnopolítica: La Potencia de las Multitudes Conectadas. El Sistema Red 15M, un Nuevo Paradigma de la Política Distribuida” (Toret et al.), 189n31 Tek, Ahmet Ferit, 445, 454n1 Tek, Müfide Ferit. See Ferit (Tek), Müfide Tekiner, Aylin, 7, 13, 258–73, 273n1, 273n4, 274n12, 274nn18–19, 275nn21–22, 275nn37–38, 276n41 Tekiner, Mehmet Zeki, 263 Tell Me a Riddle (Olsen), 257n18 Temelkuran, Ece, 148n13 Tendencies (Sedgwick), 399n7 Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Cooper & Stoler), 150n55 Teoría y Práctica del Teatro (García), 360n1 “Territories, Identities, and Thresholds: The Saturday Mothers Phenomenon in Istanbul” (Baydar & ԭvegen), 150nn51–52, 273n5, 274n10, 274n14 Terrorismo del Estadio: Prisioneros de Guerra en un Campo de Deportes (Bonnefoy Miralles), 44nn2–5, 45–46nn17–19, 45n14 Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas (Fregoso & Bejarano), 188n16 TerzioОlu, Ayߞecan, 455n12 Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (Felman & Laub), 104n34 “Textualized Memories of Politics: Turkish Coup d’état Novels” (Irzık), 438–39n2 [ 520 ]

“Theater Journal: Pushover” (Smith), 400n17 Theater of the Mothers, 363–79 “Theatre: A Funny Walk Home” (Wetzsteon), 400n12 Théâtre des Quartiers D’Ivry, 371 Théâtre Kléber–Méleau (Renens, Switzerland), 368 “There’s a Kind of Hush (All Over the World)” (Herman’s Hermits), 391 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Benjamin), 22n25 This Bridge Called My Back, 4th edition (Moraga & Anzaldua), 234n6 This Violent Land (Matar), 269, 275n30 Threadcraft, Shatema, 224, 235nn17–18 Three First Turkish Novels (Winchester), 290–92, 291 Tiananmen Mothers (China), 123 Tlateloco Square (Mexico City), 118–19 Tol (Uyurkulak), 426–30, 438, 439n7, 439n14, 439nn9–12, 439nn16–21 “Tol: Bir ԭntikam Romanı” (Halavut), 439n10 Tomasyan, Yetvart, 91 Tomei, Concetta, 332 Tometi, Opal, 236n29 Top Girls (Churchill), 330, 343n6 Toret, Javier, 181, 189n31 Torkomyan, Bayzer, 449 Torre, Susana, 143, 150n49 Torres Ávila, Victor, 45n17 Torres Millán, Miriam, 465 Tosun, Fehmi, 263, 264, 275nn21–22 Tosun, Hanım, 264 Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Sedgwick), 22n23 Tower of London, 8 Townes, Emilie M., 234n6 “Tragedy Giving Hope to Syria’s Women, The” (Lang), 362n21 INDEX

“Tragedy Shakes Hands with Testimony: Uruguay’s Survivors Act in Antígona Oriental” (Fradinger), 360n2 Tramaluna Teatro, 361n13 Transfer Book of the Chilean Legal Medical Service, 157 Transgender Studies Reader, Vol. 2, The (Stryker & Aizura), 217n7 “Transgenerational Effects of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Babies of Mothers Exposed to World Trade Center Attacks During Pregnancy” (Yehuda et al.), 235n14 “Transnationale Verwertungen von Holocaust und Kolonialismus” (Huyssen), 21n13 “Transnational Feminist Crossings: On Neoliberalism and Radical Critique” (Talpade Mohanty), 187n7 Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulating, Scales (Rigney & de Chesari), 21n12 Transnational Protest and Global Activism (Della Porta & Tarrow), 170n19 “Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection on Violence, Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife” (Snorton & Haritaworn), 217nn7–8 “Trapped in Bad Scripts: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo” (Taylor), 191n38 “Trauma, Absence, Loss” (LaCapra), 276n43 “Trauma and Performance: Lessons from Latin America” (Taylor), 148n16, 148n18, 148n21 “Trauma as a Durational Performance” (Taylor), 130n15, 149n33 “Traumatic Memes” (Taylor), 18 INDEX

“Traumatic Pasts, Literary Afterlives: New Directs of Literary and Media Memory Studies” (Erll), 21n12 “Traveling Memory” (Erll), 170n20 Tres y Cuatro Alamos Detention Center, 154 Tribe, Keith, 22n25 “Tribute in Light” (New York), 11 Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (Hyde), 71, 82n11 Tricot, Tito, 477n24 “Trump Doesn’t Care about HIV. We’re Outta Here” (Schoettes), 399n5 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Peru), 347 Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (Chile), 154, 156–57, 422n22 Truth Justice Memory Center (Turkey), 142, 262. See also Hafıza Merkezi Tuil, Judith, 379n1 “Tuition Limit and the Coming Crisis of Higher Education, The” (Nemser & Whitener), 203n1 Tünel Geçidi (Tunnel Passage), Istanbul, 88 Tupac Amaru organization, 190n34 Türem, Z. Umut, 455n12 Turkey, 1, 4, 10, 18, 84–101, 133–47, 206–16, 258–73, 285–99, 425–38, 441–53. Turkey Faces West: A Turkish View of Recent Changes and their Origin (Edib), 449–50, 454n1, 454n3, 457nn38–41 “‘Turkification’ Policies in the Early Republication Era” (Aktar), 299n8 Turkish Literature and Cultural Memory: “Multiculturalism” as a Literary Theme after 1980 (Duft), 299n1, 299n8 Turkish Ordeal, The (Edib), 449, 454n1 [ 521 ]

Türkiye’nin Ermeni Meselesi (The Armenian Question in Turkey; Ayverdi/Demir), 441–44, 450–52, 458n52 Türkiye ve Ermeni Hayaleti: Soykırımın ԭzinde Adımlar (Marchand & Perrier), 300n14 Türk OcaОı (Turkish Hearth), 442, 457n33 Türköz, Meltem, 458n58 Türkyılmaz, Yektan, 456n24 Tutunamayanlar (Atay), 290, 301n18, 301n20 Tweets and Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (Gerbaudo), 187n6 Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (Huyssen), 63n3, 299n4 “Two Ghosts and an Angel: Memory and Forgetting in Hamlet, Beloved, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” (Poole), 149n37–38, 149n40

Unland (Salcedo), 57 “Unraveling Layers of Silencing: Converted Armenian Survivors of the 1915 Catastrophe” (Altınay & Türkyılmaz), 456n24 Unspoken Truth: Enforced Disappearances, The (Göral, Iߞık, & Kaya), 147n6 Untitled Furniture (Salcedo), 57, 62 Untold Histories of the Middle East: Recovering Voices from the 19th and 20th Centuries (Singer, Neumann, & Somel), 456n24 “Urgency of Tragedy Now, The” (Foley & Howard), 360n2 Urzua, Alejandro Rodríguez, 37 Utanç Duyuyorum! Hrant Dink Cinayetinin Yargısı (Çetin), 103n22 Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Dolan), 401n33, 402n41 Uyurkulak, Murat, 8, 426–30, 439n7, 439n14, 439nn9–12, 439nn16–21

UAW, 195–96, 199–203, 204n5 Uchida, Takaya, 204n7 Ugly Feelings (Ngai), 439nn3–4 Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Caruth), 131nn16–17, 439n12, 440n36, 440n38, 440n40, 440nn42–43 Unión Patriótica (UP; Columbia), 362n20 United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers. See UAW United Photo Industries (Brooklyn, New York), 256n12 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, D.C.), 48

Vaccaro, John, 386 Vairel, Frédéric, 150n53 Valencia, Luís, 41, 46n30 Valencia Villa, Alejandro, 131n24 Valk, Kate, 381, 389 Vallejo, Marta Ana, 162 Vallejos, Soledad, 172, 186n3 Van Dijck, José, 189n29 van Winkel, Camiel, 31, 45n11 Varlık Vergisi: Hatıralar-Tanıklıklar (Bali), 299n9 Varlık Vergisi ve ‘Türkleߞtirme’ Politikaları (Aktar), 299n10 Vawter, Ron, 389, 397–98 Velodrome D’Hiver (Paris), 30 Vergara, Constanza, 421n9

[ 522 ]

INDEX

Versos Sencillos (Martí), 475n8 Verwertungen von Vergangenheit (Wagner & Wolf), 21n13 Vierira, Fatima, 345n20 Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial (Washington, D.C.), 10, 48 Village Voice, 385 Villa Grimaldi (Chile), 5, 10, 32, 154, 409 Villarosa, Linda, 399n4 Vinegar Tom (Churchill), 330 Violence Against Women’s Watch (Argentina). See Observatorio de la Violencia contra las Mujeres (Argentina) “Violent Intimacies: Tactile State Power, Sex/Gender Transgression, and the Politics of Touch in Contemporary Turkey” (Zengin), 218n25 Violi, Patrizia, 154–55, 169nn4–5 “Vital Signs: HIV Diagnosis, Care, and Treatment Among Persons Living with HIV—United States, 2011” (CDC), 399n6 Vogel, Paula, 398n1 Voice from the South, A (Cooper), 284, 284n2 von Bieberstein, Alice, 103n23 von Bülow, Eduard, 104n43 “#VouloirNepasVoir ou la Possibilité de Présentifier la Présence Encore Absente de Détenus Disparus au Chili” (Contreras), 170n18 Vulnerability and Resistance (Butler, Gambetti, & Sabsay), 170nn21–22, 217nn15–16, 476n9 Vulnerability and the Human Condition (Fineman), 22n19 Vulnerability in Resistance (Butler, Gambetti, & Sabsay), 15, 20n3, 22n19 INDEX

“Vulnerable Lives: Secrets, Noise and Dust” (Hirsch & Spitzer), 22n19 “Vulnerable Times” (Hirsch), 22n19 Vuscovic, Ruth, 34, 39, 45n17, 46nn21–22 Wagner, Elisabeth, 21n13 Walker, Kara, 7, 10, 65–83 Walker, Larry, 75, 82n18 Walk on Istiklal Street: Dissident Sexual Geographies, Politics, and Citizenship in Istanbul, A (Biricik), 103n25 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 300n15 Wall of Remembrance Memorial (Chile), 154 “War and Photography” (Sontag), 275n25 War and State Formation in Syria: Cemal Pasha’s Governorate During World War I (Çiçek), 455n13 War and Women’s Human Rights Museum (South Korea), 9 Warner, Michael, 104n45 “Wars Inside: Black Women and Deadly Intimate Partner Violence, The” (Hutchison), 235n23 War Story (Levin), 269 Watanabe, José, 348, 350, 361n3, 361n6 Weaving in Memory project. See Hilando en la Memoria project Weems, Carrie Mae, 4, 7, 269, 275n30, 277–84, 284n1 Weiss, Jeff, 8, 381–83, 385–98, 388, 396, 400n22, 401n34 Weiwei, Ai, 45n8, 102n16 Welch, Edward, 273n2 Wells, Ida B., 277 Wenzel, Jennifer, 23n25 [ 523 ]

Wetzsteon, Ross, 385–86, 399n9, 400nn14–15 Wexler, Laura, 484 What Does It Mean to Be Human in the Aftermath of Historical Trauma?: Re-envisioning the Sunflower and Why Hannah Arendt Was Wrong (GodoboMadikizela), 21n11 “What do we mean when we say ‘Islamic Art’? An Urgent Plea for a Critical Re-Writing of the History of the Arts of the Islamic Lands” (Shalem), 302n38 “What is a Meme?” (Jordan), 130n13 “What of Occupation: ‘You Took Our Cemetery, You Won’t Have Our Park!, The” (von Bieberstein & Tataryan), 103n23 When and Where I Enter (Weems), 278, 281 Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (Gómez-Barris), 44n1, 169n9 White, Gillian B., 225, 235nn20–21 Whitener, Brian, 203n1 Whitman, Walt, 475n8 “Who Knows Where or When” (Rodgers & Hart), 391, 394–95 Wilcox, Wendy C., 234n4 Willeman, Sister Valdette, 129, 132n34, 132n40 Williams, D. R., 235n14 Williams, Kei, 229 Williams, Raymond, 439n6 Williams, Seth, 343n5, 344n18 Willis, Deborah, 4, 275n30, 484 Wilson, Fred, 73 Wilson, Valerie, 235n19 Winchester, Dilek, 7, 19, 285–86, 289–99, 301–2n31, 301n19, 301nn22–23 [ 524 ]

Winter, Jay, 299n1 “Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive” (Arondekar), 218n27 “Witnessing, Femicide, and a Politics of the Familiar” (Wright), 275n24 Wittig, Monique, 187n9 Wodiszcko, Kristof, 11 Wolf, Burkhardt, 21n13 Wolfe, George C., 344n19 Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (Townes), 234n6 Women, Race, and Class (Davis), 236n34 Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (Japan), 9 Women’s Museum Istanbul, 9, 10, 84, 88, 102n7, 102n11 “Women’s Time” (Kristeva), 257n18 “Women Strike in Argentina After the Brutal Rape and Murder of a 16-Year-Old Girl” (Lawson), 189n24 Woodly, Deva, 17, 236n32, 484–85 Woods, Fronza, 104n40 Wooster Group, 389 “World of Her Own: Carrie Mae Weems and Performance, A” (Sirmans), 284, 284n4 Worth, Libby, 344n15 Woywood, Claudia, 37 Wright, Elizabeth, 150n54 Wright, Melissa W., 275n24 Wright, Nicholas, 345n21 Yanukyan, Kurken, 451 Ybarra-Frausto, Tomás, 64n6, 64n11 Yedigöl, Muzaffer, 268 Yedigöl, Nurettin, 268 INDEX

Yehuda, Rachel, 235n11 Yellow Horse Brave Heart, Maria, 235n11 Yesayan, Zabel, 8, 84, 88–89, 101n, 102n7 Yıldız, Armanc, 5, 485 Young, Iris Marion, 222, 234nn8–9 Young, James, 20n7, 21n9 Yurtsever, Leman, 93–94, 102n17 Yuyachkani. See Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani (Peru) Yuyanapac (Peru), 116, 130n14

INDEX

“Yüzyıllık alfabe meselesi” (Erciyes), 301n24 Zapata, Miguel Rubio, 360n1 Zapatos Rojos (Red Shoes; Chauvet), 186n4 Zengin, Aslı, 214, 217n20, 218n25 Zero Positive (Kondoleon), 398n1 Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska, 22n19 Zimina, Youlia, 371, 379n8 Zohn, Harry, 22n25 Zuccotti Park (New York), 18

[ 525 ]