Description

The northern Mexican border city Ciudad Juárez has been allotted an extraordinary position in a panorama of informal war against vulnerable populations throughout the Americas under the necropolitical order of contemporary globalized neoliberalism. Over the past 25 years, the city has emerged as a hypervisible vanguard for emergent forms of sovereignty that announce their presence through spectacularized displays of patriarchal cruelty (Segato). Both the infamous femicides that surfaced in the early 1990s and, more recently, the state-sanctioned terrors of the militarized drug war became emblematic for historical trends throughout the rest of Mexico and beyond, while generating prolific responses by a transnational coalition of activists, analysts, and artists. In their brutality and complexity these atrocities spell a crisis of representation that poses tremendous ethical, epistemological, and reflective demands for critical inquiries and creative engagements. To which extent is it possible and even imperative to represent such horrors while doing justice to their social, historical, and political dimensions? How can cultural and literary texts engage and move an audience while maneuvering risks of exploitation, sensationalism, misappropriation, and re-victimization?

Project Details

Project Type

Dissertation

Subject Group

Humanities

Subject Classification

Literary Science

Start

2014

Funding

Graduate School of North American Studies

Organization

Faculty/Central Institute

John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies

Field/Work Area

Graduate School of North American Studies

Project Team

Director

Dr. Tobias Jochum

Researchers

• Dr. Tobias Jochum

  Former