Prof. Swati Parashar: “Rethinking the coloniality & violence of famines in the Global South”
Public Lecture at the University of Freiburg, 20 November 2023
Postcolonial scholars contend that we are still doing body counts of colonialism’s violence, hence, epistemic and discursive categories may not account for the materiality of violence and the magnitude of physical and psychological injuries it causes. As Hannah Arendt would say, “what a risky business to tell the truth on a factual level without theoretical and scholarly embroidery.”
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? How can bodily injuries beyond sudden and spectacular deaths be accounted for on a temporal scale?
In this lecture, Prof. Swati Parashar (University of Gothenburg) 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.
Host & moderator: Dr. Amya Agarwal, ABI Freiburg
Co-host: Dr. Fabricio Rodríguez, ABI Freiburg / Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace & Conflict
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To learn more:
Camilla Orjuela & Swati Parashar (2023): Memory and justice after famines: an introduction, Third World Quarterly, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2023…
Swati Parashar & Michael Schulz (2021): Colonial legacies, postcolonial ‘selfhood’ and the (un)doing of Africa, Third World Quarterly, 42:5, 867-881, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2021…
Swati Parashar (2013): What wars and ‘war bodies’ know about international relations, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 26:4, 615-630, https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2013…
E-INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: Swati Parashar – Interview – 14 July 2023. https://www.e-ir.info/2023/07/14/inte…
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The ALMA Lecture Series 2023 is organised by the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute (ABI) in cooperation with the BMBF network Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace & Conflict, the Global Studies Programme (GSP) and the Colloquium Politicum of the University of Freiburg.
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The project Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace & Conflict (Hierarchies) is a collaborative network of the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute (ABI) Freiburg, the Center for Conflict Studies at the Philipps University Marburg, the University of Bayreuth & the University of Erfurt.Hierarchies is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) over a period of four years (2022-2026).