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In recent years, exhumation campaigns of mass graves resulting from the armed conflict (1980–2000) between the Maoist guerrillas of PCP-Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) and the States armed forces have increased in Peru. People in rural Andes, the most marginalised sectors of national society, which were also particularly affected by the war, are the main group concerned with exhumations. This article examines the handling, flow and re-appropriation of exhumed human remains in public space to inform sociopolitical issues underlying the reparation policies implemented by the State, sometimes with the support of human rights NGOs. How do the families of victims become involved in this unusual return of their dead? Have the exhumations become a new repertoire of collective action for Andean people seeking to access their fundamental rights and for recognition of their status as citizens? Finally, what do these devices that dignify the dead reveal about the internal workings of Peruvian society – its structural inequities and racism – which permeate the social fabric?
The article will present the findings of ethnographic research into the Colombian and Mexican forensic systems, introducing the first citizen-led exhumation project made possible through the cooperation of scholars, forensic specialists and interested citizens in Mexico. The coupling evolution and mutual re-constitution of forensic science will be explored, including new forms of citizenship and nation building projects – all approached as lived experience – in two of Latin America‘s most complex contexts: organised crime and mass death.
Using political and critical theory, this article identifies in James Baldwin a model for citizenship unique to the Black artist who assumed the dual responsibilities of art practice and political activism. I engage with Baldwin’s fiction and his writing about other Black artists working in theater, film, dance, and music during the period of the civil rights movement. Across his career, Baldwin’s prevailing view was that, because of their history, Black artists have the singular, and indeed superlative, capacity to make art as praxis. Baldwin explains that the craft of the Black artist depends upon representing truths, rather than fantasies, about their experience, so that they are at once artists pursuing freedom and citizens pursuing justice. This article pays particular attention to the tension between living a public, political life and the need for privacy to create art, and ultimately the toll this takes on the citizen artist. Baldwin demonstrates how the community of mutual support he finds among Black artists aids in their survival. In his writings on Sidney Poitier and Lorraine Hansberry, his friendships with Beauford Delaney and Josephine Baker, as well as his reviews of music and literature, Baldwin assembles a collective he refers to as “I and my tribe.”
“Interventions” was the organizing term for the presentations of three Baldwin scholars at the Modern Language Association Convention in Chicago in January of 2019. Baldwin’s travels and activities in spaces not traditionally associated with him, including the U.S. South and West, represent interventions of a quite literal type, while his aesthetic and critical encounters with these and other cultures, including twenty-first-century contexts of racial, and racist, affect—as in the case of Raoul Peck’s 2016 film I Am Not Your Negro—provide opportunities to reconsider his work as it contributes to new thinking about race, space, property, citizenship, and aesthetics.
political agenda to promote individual entitlements that transcend national citizenship ( Moyn, 2010 ). In his inaugural address, in January 1977, President Jimmy Carter declared that ‘Our commitment to human rights must be absolute’ (quoted in Moyn, 2014: 69 ). Under the guardianship of the UN, following the UDHR in 1948, the concept of human rights had lacked prescriptive force; only once adopted by the US as an instrument of order and hegemony did it become the basis for a global movement. For many liberal commentators at the turn of the 1990s
moral obligation to take a political stance that citizenship imposes. 5 No such ‘opt out’ is available with regard to the boat people at sea or the migrants in Calais and other French port cities, camped as they endeavour to find a way to get to Britain. The fact that where one stands with regard to the migrants has become the defining political and moral issue in the EU makes even a semblance of humanitarian ‘neutrality’ an impossibility. And rightly so. At present, however, European relief NGOs seem to want to maintain the fiction that their
practicality prevents it). This is the same foundational commitment that animates human rights work. The humanist core to both of these forms of social practice is a similar kind of belief in the ultimate priority of moral claims made by human beings as human beings rather than as possessors of any markers of identity or citizenship. What differences exist between humanitarianism and human rights are largely sociological – the contextual specifics of the evolution of two different forms of social activism. I have argued elsewhere, for example, that
, cosmopolitan citizens and themes relevant to their everyday lives and perceptions of citizenship. Thus, the distinction commonly drawn between ‘data rich’ governments, institutions and commercial enterprises, which collect, store and mine data, and ‘data poor’ individual citizens targeted by such efforts has been criticised for obscuring global inequities ( Ruckenstein and Schüll, 2017 ). This insight is highly relevant to humanitarian wearables, because it
Tiessen , R. and Huish , R. (eds), Globetrotting or Global Citizenship? Perils and Potential of International Experiential Learning ( Toronto : University of Toronto Press ), pp. 230 – 57 . Glassford , S. ( 2018 ), Mobilizing Mercy: A History of the Canadian Red Cross ( Montreal and Kingston : McGill-Queen’s University Press ). Herriman , M. ( 2021 ), ‘ Social Media and Charities in Canada ’, in Phillips , S. D. and Wyatt , B. (eds), Innovations: Change for Canada’s Voluntary and Nonprofit Sector
and place. In recent years, a growing number of studies have paid critical attention to spatial imaginaries and conceptions around refugee connectivity ( Cogo et al. , 2015 ; Leurs and Smets, 2018 ). The use of digital connectivity among refugees has been associated with social inclusion and opportunities to access and meaningfully participate in social, economic, educational and citizenship activities ( Alam and Imran, 2015 ). However, scholars argue that there are