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AAG Annual Meeting, 10-14 April 2018, New Orleans



Call for Papers: The body, political violence and the colonial present



Mikko Joronen (Tampere University)

Mark Griffiths (Northumbria University)



The last two decades have brought increasing interest in the manifold ways that affects, emotions and attunements shape sites of political violence and struggle. In the context of contemporary colonialism (Gregory 2004), the body’s affective and emotional capacities are increasingly targeted as a means of subjecting populations to ‘political and human asphyxiation’ (Falah 2004, 599). An array of embodiments, both negative and affirmative, have thus been mobilised at principal sites of the colonial present: in Palestinian oppression and resistance (Griffiths 2017; Joronen 2017) and in Iraq and Afghanistan towards military domination and legitimation (Anderson 2011; Belcher 2014). In addition to these contexts, focus has fallen also on the ways that indigenous populations experience settler colonial ways of (mis)recognition on the level of the body, but also on the broader anxieties experienced over the practices of the postcolonial state (Comaroff & Comaroff 2005; Daigle 2016). Ways of governing colonial bodies vary greatly, ranging from extreme physical violence and humiliation to a prolonged waiting in the precarious conditions of colonial subjugation. And yet, even extreme forms of political violence and colonial ‘hyperprecarisation’ (Hammami 2016) have engendered new forms of solidarity, countervisibility, and anticolonial activism that resists embodied colonial techniques of targeting, framing and othering (Fattah & Fierke 2009).



In the context of the body, political violence and the colonial present, we invite authors to propose presentations on the following topics (this is not an exhaustive list):



Anxious geographies of political violence

Affective anticolonial resistance

Palestinian experience of humiliation/stress/anxiety

Israel and the body as object-target

Colonial vulnerabilities/colonial recognitions

Indigenous geographies of the body and oppression

The body as a site of colonial politics

(Un)grievable lives of the subaltern

Vulnerability, solidarity and resistance

Colonial appropriation of spaces

Settler colonialism and the everyday

Haunted and targeted bodies

Necropolitics of the colonial body



Within these broad themes we encourage contributions from a variety of perspectives and disciplines, from theory, methodology and/or empirical research. We intend the session to work towards an eventual special or themed journal issue in the field of geography, though involvement in this is not a pre-requisite for participation in the session.



Please send your abstract of 200 words or fewer to: [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask] by 15 October 2017



References

Anderson B (2011). Population and affective perception: Biopolitics and anticipatory action in UScounterinsurgency doctrine. Antipode, 43(2), 205-236


Belcher O (2014). Staging the Orient: Counterinsurgency training sites and the US military imagination. Annals of theAssociation of American Geographers, 104(5), 1012-1029



Comaroff J & Comaroff JL (2005). Naturing the Nation: Aliens, Apocalypse, and the Postcolonial State. In: HansenTB & Stepputat H (eds) Sovereign Bodies Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World. Princeton: Princeton University Press 120-147



Daigle M (2016) Awawanenitakik: The spatial politics of recognition and relational geographies of indigenous self-determination. The Canadian Geographer 60 259–269



Falah G W (2004) Truth at war and naming the intolerable in Palestine. Antipode 36(4) 596–600



Fattah, K., & Fierke, K. M. (2009). A clash of emotions: The politics of humiliation and politicalviolence in the Middle East. European journal of international relations, 15(1), 67-93



Griffiths M (2017) Hope in Hebron: the political affects of activism in a strangled city Antipode 49(3) 617-635



Hammami R (2016) Precarious politics: The activism of ‘bodies that count’ (aligning with those that don’t) in

Palestine’s colonial frontier. In: Butler J, Gambetti Z and Sabsay L (eds) Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham: Duke University Press 167–190



Joronen M (2017) Spaces of waiting: Politics of precarious recognition in the occupied West Bank. Environment andPlanning D: Society and Space, DOI: 10.1177/0263775817708789











Mark Griffiths<https://oulu.academia.edu/MarkGriffiths>
Northumbria University
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