[csaa-forum] Reminder: Combat Breathing Bodies and State Violence Symposium

[Lara Palombo]

Dear Colleagues,

a quick reminder that the Combat Breathing Bodies and State Violence Symposium
will be held in Sydney on Saturday, 14 August.

I am attaching an update of the programme and of the abstracts.
Feel welcome to circulate them. We are looking forward to see you there.

Combat Breathing: Bodies and State Violence

One Day Symposium

"There is not occupation of territory, on the one hand, and
independence of persons on the other.
It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that
are contested, disfigured …
under these conditions, the individual’s breathing is an observed
breathing. It is a combat breathing".
Frantz Fanon

In Fanon’s meditation on the violence of the colonial state, the
subject who is on the receiving end
of state violence is positioned in the fraught, traumatic and
potentially fatal exercise of “combat breathing.”
Combat breathing names the mobilisation of the target subject’s life
energies merely in order to continue to live,
to breathe and to survive the exercise of state violence. If Weber
long ago drew attention to what he termed
the “intimate” relation between the state and violence, it was Fanon
who clearly embodied the intimate,
because lived, effects of this relation.

Why does state violence still remain largely unnamed and
invisibilised, even as its lived effects are only
too real for its target subjects? Is it because the relation between
violence and the state is so intimate
that it cannot be named? What are the multiple discourses and
rhetorics deployed by the state that ensure
both the occlusion and the displacement of its violence –including
discourses of “tolerance,” “social inclusion,”
“welfare interventions,” and so on?

Are, in fact, these types of discourses and practices actually
constitutive of the very violences that they
purportedly are meant to attack and eliminate?

The Symposium will examine state violence in the context of the
multiple sites, bodies and institutions that animate and enable it.


14 AUGUST 2010, 9.30 AM – 6 PM, MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY,
BLDG: THEATRE 1 (T1) Y3A, FREE ADMISSION


KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: KERRY CARRINGTON, GRACELYN SMALLWOOD

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS: KELLIE GREENE (UWS), RAY JACKSON (Indigenous Social

Justice), TAMAR HOPKINS (Flemington & Kensington Community Legal Centre) GOLDIE

OSURI (Macquarie), REBECCA SMITH & SHANE RESIDE

(authors of “Boys, you wanna give me some action,” Report into
racialised policing), OMEIMA SUKKARIEH

(Auburn Community Development Network), SAM THAMPAPILLAI (Sydney
Centre for International Law)



CONVENORS: SUVENDRINI PERERA AND JOSEPH PUGLIESE

Contact: S.Perera at curtn.edu.au; Joseph.Pugliese at mq.edu.au

Sponsored by: Somatechnics Research Centre, Macquarie University,
School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts,

Curtin University; Department of Media, Music and Cultural Studies,
Macquarie University
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Combat Breathing Abstracts (1).pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 528230 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.cdu.edu.au/pipermail/csaa-forum/attachments/20100731/efac219f/attachment-0002.pdf 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Combat Breathing Abstracts (1).pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 528230 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.cdu.edu.au/pipermail/csaa-forum/attachments/20100731/efac219f/attachment-0003.pdf