The Site of Rights and the Concentrationary Imaginary: Towards a Politics of Voice - Bauman Memorial Conversation 3

The third event in the Bauman Memorial Conversations series, Thinking Displacement, brings together David Herd ( 'brings together David Herd, author of Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-War World (OUP),  and Griselda Pollock for a dialogue on voice, rights, displacement, and the ‘concentrationary universe’.

Reserve a place here. 

Drawing on work from his forthcoming book, David Herd will reflect on contemporary asylum and detention regimes, examining how the voices of refugees and rights claimants are routinely marginalised or excluded. Beginning from the experience of detention, his intervention asks what it means when the very discourse of human rights becomes displaced from those whose lives most urgently call upon it. Engaging thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Adriana Cavarero and Behrouz Boochani, Herd explores the voice as a fundamental site of political presence and rights-bearing.

Responding, Griselda Pollock will bring these concerns into dialogue with her long-standing work on the concentrationary imaginary. Developed through the influential Concentrationary Memories series, this body of work examines the enduring afterlives of spaces in which people are denied not only rights but the very conditions of personhood. Drawing on the concepts of the concentrationary universe and concentrationary art, Pollock considers how such spaces work through the annihilation of the speaking subject, and how artistic and cultural practices might help us resist these processes.

Together, Herd and Pollock will explore the relationship between displacement, voice, memory and political belonging. In doing so, they return us to questions that animated the life and work of Janina Bauman, whose memoirs bore witness to the struggle to remain human in inhuman conditions, and whose writings called attention to those historical experiences that remain unheard, marginalised or denied recognition.

This event will take place on Zoom - after you have registered, you will be sent an invitation to the meeting.