Can we consider erasures and silences as violence when we are still looking at injured, violated, exterminated, disappearing, mourning, lifeless, dead, rotting and suffering bodies? Are bodily injuries only about blood and war, sudden and spectacular deaths on a temporal scale?
In this lecture, Swati Parashar sheds light on the slow and silent deaths, displacement and gendered suffering that occur in geographies of starvation produced through colonial encounters. The lecture engages with the existing dilemmas of studying the violence of famines and the coloniality of discourses around starving bodies in the Global South. This reflection considers the need to break away from the theoretical impulses of locating famines within the existing frameworks of disaster and crisis, and yet argues that justice and accountability for mass hunger crimes can only be enabled through particular discursive framings of injured bodies and the violence of colonial continuities.
This event is part of the ALMA lecture series “Postcolonial Hierarchies and their Contestation from the Global South” organized by the Arnold Bergstraesser Institut (ABI) and its partners of the BMBF-Network "Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict".
For online participation please register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMof-qurzkpEtPAQREh8yVCoEGrK44WX5ys