Key Terms
Banality
In Hannah Arendt’s report, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, “banality” is embodied by Adolf Eichmann. Banality is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “of or belonging to feudal service.” This is closest to how Arendt refers to banality in the Report, as Eichmann is a representative of the Nazi party, not a particularly high-ranking or influential member– rather, a willful servant of the regime. This becomes fuel for one of his main defenses— that he was a “law abiding citizen,” merely following orders, carrying out banal acts of horrific atrocity (24). The “banality of evil” that Arendt is focused on originates from this logic— how do we come to terms with the abhorrent actions of an entire regime, while focusing on the actions of a single man? What justice is there to be had, given the banality of evil?
Banality is reflected in the people of Omelas, from Ursula Le Guin’s short story, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. A child, doomed to suffer in “fear, malnutrition, and neglect,” is the only way through which Omelas, an idyllic society, can remain (3). Young people must encounter the child, reckon with it, but their “tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it” (4). Most of them stay in the beautiful city with the knowledge of the child’s suffering. “They know that they, like the child, are not free” (4). They are mere citizens, trapped with the burden of the full knowledge of the suffering which begets their collective happiness. Still, they are unwilling to leave. They live their lives in “the banality of evil,” playing just a small part in a larger societal injustice which will continue, no matter what (1).
Categorical Imperative
In the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant states that “a categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself apart from its relation to a further end” (530). He explains that “the categorical imperative alone purports to be a practical law, while all the rest may be called principles of the will but not laws; for an action necessary merely in order to achieve an arbitrary purpose can be considered as in itself contingent” (533). Kant argues that the categorical imperative is one that is demanded of people not merely because of the outcome it leads to, but because it would be morally impossible not to uphold (i.e. making a promise you can’t keep) (534).
In Antigone, Antigone is compelled by a categorical imperative to bury her disgraced brother, Polynices. When she states, “no one will ever convict me for a traitor,” she means that she will never be a traitor to her duty to the gods (57). Her choice to break King Creon’s law and grant Polynices proper burial rights is not founded in a need to achieve an end (to prove herself a martyr or demonstrate love for her brother), but rather in her spiritual duty. The imperative is categorical, fueled not by love for her brother or hatred for the state, but by her own intrinsic duty.
Choreopolicing
In Choreopolice and Choreopolitics, Andre Lepecki defines choreopolitics as “any movement incapable of breaking the endless reproduction of an imposed circulation of consensual subjectivity, where to be is to fit a prechoreographed pattern of circulation, corporeality, and belonging” (20). He explains that the dancer’s task is in the “art of command,” where they take choreography into their own hands to act in disruption to or conformity with choreopoliced movement. In this way, their movement becomes a political response to the choreopolitics of the “control societies” under which we live (15).
In Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, she describes the choreopolicing of the Beth Ha’am courtroom, which had been built as a theater– “not a bad place for the show trial David Ben-Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel, had in mind” after kidnapping Eichmann in Argentina (4). She describes Ben Gurion as the “invisible stage manager” of the trial– planning and orchestrating choreography in pursuance of political goals (5). The Israeli government’s control of the trial and it’s presentation to a mostly Israeli audience is showcased in Arendt’s description of the courtroom chosen, which happened to also be a theater– “one tier below the translators, facing each other and hence with their profiles turned to the audience, we see the glass booth of the accused and the witness box” (3). In a way turning Lepecki’s definition on its head, choreopolicing is evident in the planned movement (choreography) of the trial by the state, rather than the individual, in pursuance of a political (as well as pedagogical) goal– putting the whole of Nazi crimes on trial for the world to take in, at Israel’s behest.
Counterfactual
Ariel Nereson defines counterfactuals, or the act of counterfactual thinking, as a method by which “historians consider an antecedent action to an event…and pose an if–then statement wherein the antecedent event is altered in some critical way to change the outcome in the events that followed” (168). In her article, “Counterfactual Moving in Bill T. Jones’ Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land,” Nereson argues that Jones’s choreography offers a counterfactual in how it portrays four separate versions of Eliza. She proposes that “Jones is uninterested in a single interpretation of Eliza, particularly the yoked stereotypes of sacrificing mother and tragic mulatta that have come to immortalize her. Instead, his company represents a collective of alternatives that experience the world very differently through their movement vocabularies” (178).
In section on February 13th, we discussed the utility of counterfactuals in historical analysis. Dr. Bowles brought up the point that, although it is compelling to think about what might have happened, but didn’t, in history, there is also much history that did happen which isn’t discussed. Would a focus on counterfactuals really serve the field of history (or society as a whole) as much as a discussion about real history that has been forgotten in the mainstream narrative? In his introduction, “Searching for California’s Hang Trees,” Ken Gonzalez-Day makes an interesting observation about the lost history of lynching in the American West– that lynching has “become conflated with white racism against blacks.” He argues that this is not to say that lynchings against Black people in the South were not significant, but to show that the ways in which history is imagined in the mainstream may lead to the erasure of important facts and contexts from common knowledge of history. Jones is interested in utilizing the counterfactual to understand alternatives in history, real or imagined, with the goal to break commonly held stereotypes. Gonzalez-Day’s work reveals the counterfactual embedded in the national narrative surrounding lynching in America. The telling of unacknowledged history, like the history of lynching in the West, attempts to find the limits of mainstream archives of history. In answer to Dr. Bowles’ point, I think the counter narrative can work in tandem with the telling of untold stories to broaden the scope and sharpen the accuracy of national narratives.
Double Consciousness
W.E.B DuBois introduces his concept of the double consciousness in his book The Souls of Black Folk, describing “this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feel’s his two-ness,– an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (38). DuBois describes a constant conflict between Black identity and American identity, implying that the two cannot exist without conflict, at least in the eyes of white people, whose perceptions dominated the culture. His wish, though, is for both identities to be able to exist together, without sacrificing the characteristics of either identity in the process.
Double consciousness is seen in the lives of Black performers, namely, in Krasner’s description of Aida Overton Walker’s “‘entree into elite and middle-class white circles” (78). She, a performer of the cakewalk, an Africanist dance form, was able to enter these circles “for three reasons: first, her cakewalking provided the ‘spectacles’ necessary for cultural definition by association; second, she provided whites with an alter-ego; and third, her cakewalking was tied to new concepts of modernism and authenticity” (78). In her passion of performance of a dance tied to Black culture, Walker only able to enter high society by “providing the spectacles,” to whites, rather than by merely existing in her art. This reflects a double consciousness in her identity as a Black performer, but only in service to the white upper class’ perception of authenticity, which attributed value to her dance.
Frontier Justice
Ken Gonzales-Day defines frontier justice in the introduction to his book Hang Trees, stating that, “‘frontier justice’’ has been applied to everything from racially motivated lynchings to urban vigilantes: dandies that dressed in finely tailored suits and vests and held mock trials that paralleled court proceedings in every manner—except for being legally constituted” (11). He argues that the broad application of the term, specifically in how it is invoked surrounding vigilante groups who committed lynchings in California, has “mask[ed] a history of racial violence in a region that was not only culturally diverse but still is” (10). As we discussed in plenary, frontier justice is an American cliché– coming out of the collision of two legal systems, the anglophone and hispanophone– in the American west (Boyer 2/27). The absence of formal state policing allows an unsanctioned group, like lynch mobs and vigilantes, to seize the power to enact justice on others.
The notion of frontier justice reminded me of the murder of Jordan Russell Davis, in which Michael Dunn shot Davis after demanding he and his friends to turn down their music (Cheng 178). Dunn defended his actions along the lines of self defense, saying that seventeen-year-old Davis had “threatened [his] life like a man,” and thus became deserving of being killed. This overestimation of Davis’ age is a manifestation of Dunn’s “formidability bias” toward Davis– which “can expectedly “[promote] participants’ justifications of hypothetical use of force against Black suspects of crime” (174). On the basis of a racially motivated bias, Dunn took it upon himself, as a non-state actor, to justifiably attack Davis as a threat. His action is an exercise of “frontier justice”– Dunn is an illegal actor committed an illegal action, under Dunn’s presumption of his own power to bring justice in a way that he sees fit.
Jurisgenesis
Robert Cover defines jurisgenesis as “the creation of legal meaning… [which] takes place always through an essentially cultural medium” (11). This generation happens either through strong, culture-specific forces (paideias) that “create the normative worlds in which law is predominantly a system of meaning rather than an imposition of force” (12), or weaker, institutional, imperial forces that “are universal and enforced by institutions” (13). It is through these forces that people give law meaning, through which law derives its power.
Jurisgenesis, in its most ultimate form, can be seen in the Book of Job. In his Fourth speech, Elihu exalts, “Shaddai: We cannot find Him out–/sublime in power and judgement/great master of justice” (37:20). In Job’s final answer to Yahweh, he states “I know you are all-powerful,/ and that no plan is beyond You…I see that I spoke with no Wisdom/of things beyond me I did not know” (42:1). God, to both Job and Elihu, spoke the world into existence, thus speaking the law into existence (Boyer 9.24). In The Book of Job, jurisgenesis is committed by the utmost power– God must be followed, meaning the law must be as well. The law is the world created by god.
Kinship
Savannah Shange talks about black, queer kinship’s power to teach “each other how to be with and for ourselves” (50). She doubles down on the “intellectual and interpersonal practice” of kinship among black queer people and its capacity to nourish those who identify across generations (47). Kinship, to Shange, centers around shared identity, not genetic ties. It serves a capacity to bring together those identifying with a certain community, allowing members of such communities (young and old) to develop common sense and imagine alternative futures, especially when these kinship groups most often center around identities that broader cultural and political norms are not accepting of.
In Andreas Roberts’ “Performance as Place Preservation: The Role of Storytelling in the Formation of Shankleville Community’s Black Counterpublic,” Shanklesville, Texas is examined as an example of a freedom colony– a community of formerly enslaved people formed after abolition– which has survived into the modern age on the basis of a strong community attachment derived from the narrative of Shanklesville’s founding story. The practice of telling and retelling this story, and the rituals associated with it, invoke the idea of kinship. According to Roberts, “Though the story is accessible to all, and performed by non-family members at community homecomings, attendance at the spring ritual is reserved for family reunions, where those with an almost autochthonous claim to space by way of biological kinship are present” (15). Roberts taps into the biological facet of kinship in a way that Shange does not– viewing the genetic attachment to space as core to a person’s ability to experience the ritual of the storytelling which defines and reifies the borders of a space originally defined and created for the descendants of those previously enslaved in this area. While kinship might be contingent on genealogy, it is also rooted in shared identity more generally, enhancing a group’s power to create space for those who continue to face marginalization.
Marronage
In “Performance as Place Preservation,” Andrea Roberts uses a definition of marronage by Neil Roberts, stating that “the act of escaping enslavement, as part of a never-ending ‘process of becoming free’”(8). Roberts focuses on the role of descendants of maroon peoples, arguing that “descendants make legible ‘the many ways in which Afro-descendant communities seek to create their own sense of place and establish their own spatial praxes’ through their commemorative acts, including storytelling and re-enactment of marronage” (Roberts 8). Maroonage is thus a dynamic process, not merely held in the act of escaping enslavement to find some version of sovereignty elsewhere, but in the continued presence and storytelling of multiple generations of descendants.
In “Battling in the Bronx,” Imani Kai Johnson examines the cypher, as it was used as “the ritualized training ground for tactical maneuvering and improvising through societal structures, and perhaps too rehearsal sites for new social possibilities. Just as the state moves people, street dancers innovated strategies that allowed them to move themselves in outlaw ways” (Kai Johnson 78). In their creation of cyphers, the B-girls and B-boys of the Bronx created “self-made families,” and claimed abandoned property to make an outlaw space of their own, beyond the white gaze (Kai Johnson 78). This notion of creating space outside the law grafts onto historical precedent of the runaway enslaved peoples’ creation of maroon communities during slavery and the creation of freedom colonies in the decades afterward.
Memory
In his article “Monuments to the Unthinkable,” Clint Smith defines public memory as specifically how people, communities, and nations should account for the crimes of their past” (24). Smith discusses the attempts to memorialize the Holocaust in Germany, with stolpersteine, engravings, and monuments built into the train tracks which carried thousands upon thousands of Jewish people to their deaths during the Holocaust. He compares these examples, upheld as “responsible public memory” in Germany to the state of public memory surrounding enslavement in the United States. In the end, Smith finds that projects of memorialization and commemoration play a hugely complex role in the nation’s construction of public memory. They satisfy “‘a government’s need to explain a nation’s past to itself,’… to educate the next generation and forge a sense of collective experience,” to alleviate guilt, or to attract tourists (31). In the end, Smith showcases public memory as a narrative constructed by the state in the hopes of coming to terms with the wrongs of the past through diverse methods and for complex reasons.
As nations confront history, they themselves create narratives about history through the process of memorialization and education. In the case of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., Amy Lonetree expresses her disappointment with the fact that the museum failed to “challenge the American Master Narrative — a narrative that has silenced and even erased the memory of the genocidal policies of America’s past and present” (310-311). In the museum, we see the role museums play in the fomentation of national memory. In not centering the true genocidal history of America, that fact becomes erased from the national memory. Museums have a responsibility, thus, to showcase truthful and accurate representations of history, especially when it comes to historically marginalized identity groups. Otherwise, the chance of cultural history becoming lost in the “Master Narrative” of national memory is more likely. Memory extends, thus, from the commemorative aspects of a monument to the educational aspects of a museum exhibit.
National Apology
In his article, “When nations apologize,” Edwin Battistella describes a ‘national apology’ as serving “ the same function as a personal apology, but on a different scale. A national apology asserts changed values, condemns past behaviour, and commits to different, better actions in the future. And it can bring about a reconciliation between those harmed and the nation that caused the harm.” This process can look different in different contexts, and comes under much scrutiny when undertaken. In the American apology for Japanese internment camps, apologies are given as a “recommitment to justice.” In other cases, such as in Germany after the Holocaust, national apology involved looking toward the future– “overcoming amnesia and acknowledging the past… facing and apologising for its past as a way to improve the lives of those to come.”
One of the ways apology is executed is through the memorialization of wrongs. Similarly to how a national apology can exhibit a nation’s re-commitment to justice, some argue that monuments and memorials can signal this commitment within a state. On the other side of the coin, there is a slippery slope that exists between memorialization and totalitarian tendencies, according to Dr. Lipsker’s March 20th plenary lecture. Clint Smith’s article, “Monuments to the Unthinkable,” also criticizes the place of memorialization in the realm of national apology– sometimes, a monument is not enough to represent the full scope of what is being apologized for, like in the case of American apology for/memorialization of the enslavement of African Americans. Smith says, “you cannot simply build some monuments, lay down some wreaths each year, and apologize for what happened without seeing the manifestation of those past actions in the inequality between Black and white people all around you” (30). National apology certainly serves a purpose in the acknowledgement and condemnation of past wrongs, and the work toward justice in the future, but it can also come under criticism for its’ inevitable failure to address the full scope of the injustice it apologizes for.
Nomos
In Nomos and Narrative, Robert Cover defines nomos as “a normative universe” (4). He conveys nomos as something to be “inhabited,” explaining that “we constantly create and maintain a world of right and wrong, of lawful and unlawful, of valid and void…no set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning” (4). I saw community is a key part of Cover’s definition of nomos, as nomos is something created by a community and entwined with community members’ valuations of right and wrong. Nomos is entwined with law, because law, along with nomos, is deeply embedded in the everyday lives of people within a community.
Nomos arises in the use of harmful racial tropes, to make horrific racial violence permissible, even moral, to white Americans. In the Marlon Riggs documentary, Ethnic Notions, Barbara Christian describes the core of the nomos– “‘these beings must be controlled,’ is what the mythology is telling us…the planters also wanted to soothe people, wanted to make sure that they believed that their society could continue. They harken back to the good ol’ days, and the good ol’ days when everybody’s happy” (20:50). In pop culture, a mythology was created of enslaved people living happily and peacefully on plantations– this narrative portrayed slavery as not only good, but morally just. This fed a framework of morals– a nomos– under which white Americans could justify slavery as a moral good for Black Americans.
Original Position
In A Theory of Justice, Rawls defines the original position as “a purely hypothetical situation characterized so as to lead to a certain conception of justice. Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does any one know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like” (pp. 720). The original position is the only stance from which just decisions for the whole of humanity can be made, since the decision-makers have no stake in the game.
The original position is implicated in criticism towards the Nuremberg Trials after the Holocaust. Marrus discusses the argument of defense at the Nuremberg Trials– “‘Tu quoque’ or ‘You did it too!’… planning and waging aggressive war? The obvious countercharge was the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 and the Soviet attack on Poland” (567). The Allies in charge of conducting the Trials had a moral decision to make– how does one prosecute an international crime resulting in the death of millions? In making the choice to try Nazi officials, the Allied powers knew the atrocities they themselves had committed, of course choosing not to address them– how could they have, in comparison to the greatest level of atrocity which faced them in the acts of the Nazi Party? If the choice for a trial had not been vested in the Allied powers, if, rather, the Allied leaders found themselves in the clouds of the Original Position, a Veil of Ignorance obstructing their knowledge of their or the Nazi’s crimes, maybe they would have placed themselves on the stand, as well. Tu quoque turns from a defense of Nazi crimes into a principle of justice.
(Rights-Bearing) Citizen
In the Supreme Court cases, Roe v. Wade and Dobbs v. Jackson, the question of who is identified as a “rights-bearing” citizen is confronted and implicitly answered through the law. In the Opinion of the Court of Roe, Justice Blackmun states that “This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” Roe decided that women retained their right to privacy, and that the rights of a fetus depended on the viability of that fetus– something Dobbs took issue with. Page 38 of the Opinion of the Court in Dobbs v Jackson, written by Justice Samuel Alito, discussed the notion of a “balance” between a “woman’s liberty interest and the state’s interest in prenatal life.” He expands, stating, “our opinion is not based on any view about if and when prenatal life is entitled to any of the rights enjoyed after birth. The dissent, by contrast, would impose on the people a particular theory about when the rights of personhood begin” (38). The debate surrounding what constitutes a rights-bearing subject defines both cases, with the court ultimately throwing out the viability test as a meaningful way to decide. Many questions are left unanswered by the viability test, though– does a rich person’s baby, with access to better medical care for a sick baby, and with a higher likelihood of surviving, get counted as a person earlier than a poorer person’s baby? Do the rights of the mother as a rights-bearing citizen supersede those of a fetus, who has not technically entered the world yet? If citizenship is based on a person’s location within a state, do the borderlines of a state extend through the flesh of a mother and into their uterus? To the Court, they do. A baby in utero is a citizen worthy of “state interest”– if states are interested in protecting its citizen’s rights, as the social contract deems, then the court has decided that the definition of the “rights-bearing citizen” extends to the uterus.
The definition of a “rights bearing” citizen is further complicated in Garage Olimpo. Citizens, just like any woman in the United States, were subjected to torture by their own governments, who are supposed to work in the interests of them. Maria, an 18 year-old activist teaching reading and writing to the poor in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, is kidnapped and tortured by the Argentine government. As we discussed in plenary on April 8th, Maria represents any citizen, working for the good of the community. Her own government’s torture of her demonstrates the power that governments exert in deciding who does and doesn’t ‘count’ as a rights bearing citizen. Maria was completely stripped of her rights, tortured, and murdered by her own government. Her story represents a case that could be true in many different settings and countries. Both examples entwine the idea of the rights-bearing citizen with the interests of the state.
Supererogatory
In Famine, Affluence, and Morality, Peter Singer defines a supererogatory act as something “it would be good to do, but not wrong not to do” (235). He takes issue with the fact that people “reserve their moral condemnation” for the most heinous breaches of moral norms, allowing them to see charitable acts as optional– even for those with the means to participate in them (236). He urges people to look beyond the immediate demands of their own society and consider how they could benefit the larger world as a whole.
The issue with the construct of supererogatory acts is demonstrated in the criticisms of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Mahmood Mamdani takes issue with the TRC, carried out by the South African government in an attempt to uncover the truth of crimes committed during apartheid by granting applicants “conditional amnesty” on the basis of their victims’ families’ wishes (16:00). Mamdani believed that by prosecuting only the individual crimes of apartheid, the systemic and social repression went unacknowledged and unhealed. In the mind of the South African government, according to Mamdani, “moral condemnation” (or maybe mere “reprehension,” in this case) was needed only for the crimes which implicated individual South Africans, most often resulting in death (Lipsker 10.29). The deep, systemic issues of apartheid carried a supererogatory nature, in the eyes of the TRC, needing to be addressed only insofar as they connected to the more dramatic or individualized crimes of individual people.
Torture
In the film Garage Olimpo, torture is defined through depiction– the use of electric shock on victim’s genitals, the starvation, drugging and hooding of detainees, all of whom are eventually murdered and dropped into the ocean. Torture is seen in both the physical and psychological pain suffered by the tortured, as well as in their families, and even in the torturers themselves. Taking a broad definition of torture from the examples shown in this film allows for a broad analysis of the ways torture manifests itself as a tool of the modern state.
In his essay, “Violence and the Word,” Robert Cover observes that torture “is designed to demonstrate the end of the normative world of the victim-the end of what the victim values, the end of the bonds that constitute the community in which the values are grounded” (1603). Torture thus becomes world-destroying and world-creating as the person subjected to torture. Dr. Boyer referenced this in Plenary on April 10th, when discussing how torture is depicted Death and The Maiden and Garage Olimpo. In the act of torture as depicted in both films, the state strips the rights– the world– from the formerly rights-bearing citizens of organizations they wish to destroy. They do this under the justification of “interrogation,” merely gathering intelligence to achieve state goals, but in reality only succeed to crush and dominate those formerly considered citizens.
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