INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP

Violence, racialization and resistances in an anti-black world

July 1-3, Lisbon

Funding: projects COMBAT (FCT) and POLITICS (ERC)

Description:
This workshop aims to put in dialogue analytical perspectives coming from academia, legal professions and political activism for debating the relationship between violence and racialization in different contexts (e.g.: Brazil, Spain, France or Portugal). The link between violence and racialization should be understood as a genocide process (John Vargas 2008; Ana Luiza Flauzina 2014) producing forms of legitimacy based on the colonial/modern framing of "necessity" and the capitalist political economy, which are at the centre of the formation of sovereignty and the rule of law. Following Alexander Weheliye (2014), we consider necessary and urgent, in the current political moment, to rethink “politically motivated acts of aggression in relational terms rather than through the passages of comparison, deviation, exception, or peculiarity, since they fail to adequately describe how specific instances of the relations that compose political violence realize articulations of an ontological totality” (p. 32).
White and western(ized) men and women continue to over-represent the political-legal definitions of humanity (Sylvia Wynter 2003) and to regulate the universalization of onto-colonial gender-sex categories (Maria Lugones 2008). We continue to witness the prevalence of a political and cultural logic that condemns black existence to the zone of non-being (Frantz Fanon, 1952). All those processes take place in a context of consolidation of supposedly emancipatory hegemonic discursive fields referring to human rights and feminism. In the debate about violence, policing, justice and the prison system, it is imperative to re-centre the analytical category of race to decolonize the knowledge production on the complex system that makes possible and legitimizes daily violence perpetrated against racialized bodies.