How art constitutes the human : aesthetics, empathy, and the interesting in autofiction

This chapter examines ‘graphic autofiction’ in Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons! (2002) and What It Is (2009) and Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life and Other Stories (2000) and The Diary of A Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures (2002), demonstrating how it allows feminist performances that visualize cartoonists’ authentic experiences of sexual and other forms of trauma. The chapter makes a valuable contribution to current debates on autofiction by moving beyond its literary expressions and investigating how the hybrid medium of comics accommodates the genre and how that, in its turn, complicates the representation of trauma. It also proposes that ‘graphic autofiction’ allows the formation of feminist counter-narratives to the silencing of female abuse victims and the latter’s representation beyond victimhood

On the Coloniality of Modern Law

The article investigates modern law in its colonial career as it consisted in two paradoxical itineraries. Colonial rule developed under the auspices of governing through modern positive law as it claimed independence from religion and the administration. But the colonies also surfaced as zones of lawlessness, administrative measures, arbitrariness and excessive exceptions. Rather than posit the second itinerary as exceptional to the general first one, notwithstanding how constitutive the exception may be of the rule, this article examines a number of legalities that exemplified these two itineraries in colonial Egypt and theorizes them as co-existing modalities of juridical power that shared similar objectives and fields of intervention. In particular, under historical investigation are legalities that managed agricultural labor through penal/administrative measures. It is argued that these legalities co-existed with positive and liberal legal institutions. Agricultural legalities were “pervasive legalities,” enhancing modern positive law’s production of a gapless legal order that aspired to capture limitless terrains of social life. This legal history reveals that the hallmark of modern colonial law did not consist in substituting a regime of separation of powers and codification for that of pre-colonial fusion or administrative legalities. Rather, the historical achievement of modern law consisted in its “elastic positivism,” that is to say, in wedding positive law to pervasive legalities as both served to dominate the social: the first from the independent terrain of codified law and the second from the material domains of social life. This hallmark of gaplessness and pervasiveness is what made modern law fit for colonial rule

Nakba : Palestina, 1948, y los reclamos de la memoria

Una mujer. Palestina. Un cuerpo sufriente ante el horror. Una mujer tapando su boca. Una mujer en un campo de refugiados bombardeado. Una mujer en un lugar: en el campo Baq´a, Jordania. Una mujer y una fecha. Un color, sepia. Una palabra: NAKBA. Una ausencia: la tierra. Un trabajo colectivo: la memoria palestina. Mentado cuando Ahmad H Saadi y Lilia Abu-Lughod se encontraron en el funeral de Ibrahim, su padre, en Jaffa, quien en el fin de su vida ejerció el derecho de retorno. "El retornó, dijo el poeta Mahmoud Darwish en el funeral, para plantar en ella el árbol del conocimiento y el él era ese árbol. El nació en Jaffa y a Jaffa retornó, para permanecer allí por la eternidad, cerca del árbol del paraíso". No todos los libros merecen el mismo lugar en la historia de la humanidad. En particular, Nakba. Palestina, 1948 y los reclamos de la memoria posee el valor testimonial de una fecha, igualmente traumática para Palestina y para la humanidad: el 15 de mayo de 1948. Ahmad H Saadi y Lilia Abu-Lughod nos recuerdan que la Nakba es el punto al que retornan los palestinos a cierta edad, que la Nakba no está finalizada todavía. Ella es la piedra de toque de la esperanza de cada palestina y palestino que ansía retornar a su hogar

'Burqa avenger': law and religious practices in secular space

The current debate over the hijab is often understood through the lens of a ‘clash of civilizations’ between a tolerant ‘secular’ ‘West’ and a chauvinist ‘religious’ ‘East’. The article argues that this polarization is the result of a specific secular semiotic understanding of religion and religious practices which is nowadays embedded in western law. In my analysis, secular’s normative assumptions, played around the control of women’s bodies and the definition of religious symbols in the public sphere, work as a marker of ‘citizenship’ and ‘racialized religious belonging’. Through women’s bodies, western/secular law creates a link between gender, religion, ethnicity and belonging which forms a specific law and religious subject. Thus, secularism emerges not as the separation between private and public, state and religion, but as the reconfiguration of religious practices and sensitivities in the public secular space through the control of the visible