Torture and
the Future
Research Focus Group
Conveners
Elisabeth Weber (Comparative Literature/Germanic, Slavic
and Semitic Studies) weber@gss.ucsb.edu
Lisa Hajjar (Law and Society) lhajjar@lawso.ucsb.edu
Statement of Purpose
The RFG “Torture and the future” is intended
to be a continuation of the efforts of the group of
faculty who organized the “Critical Issues in
America” series in 2006-2007 under the same title.
The goal of this proposal is to extend and intensify
the conversations we have started with this series dedicated
to exploring how the humanities, literature and the
arts engage with the complex issues surrounding human
rights and their violation in today’s world. With
the ongoing public debate on the efficacy and legitimacy
of torture, it is our responsibility not only to educate
about the issues involved, but to take strong and well-informed
stances of active opposition. The following four points
summarize the areas of investigation and discussion
we propose to pursue:
1) “Democracy”. It is now a widely accepted
fact that the democratically elected government of the
United States engages in torture around the world, including
in so-called “black sites”, into which dozens,
if not hundreds of suspected terrorists are being “disappeared”
without a trace. It is therefore necessary to question
the consequences these practices have on the concept
and practice of “democracy” in the United
States, as well as on states whose human rights violations
are routinely denounced by Western democratic governments,
including the US. There is substantial evidence that
other “democracies” do and have relied on
torture, even after its absolute prohibition in the
aftermath of World War II, starting with the French
in Algeria and Indochina, the British in Northern Ireland,
and the Israelis in the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon.
This subject of “democratic torture” will
be one of the foci of this program.
2) Academia. It is necessary to question the consequences
of the use of torture on the principles and practices
of scholarship and education. By either openly or passively
condoning torture, for example through our silence,
we send a devastating message not only to our students,
but also to the community at large: that the prohibition
against torture is negotiable or even dispensable. Especially
in the humanities, where cutting edge thinking explores
concepts and experiences such as “responsibility”,
“otherness”, “difference”, “memory”,
“trauma”, our work and research become entirely
irrelevant if, today, we ignore the implications of
a re-legitimization of torture. Furthermore, in Richard
Falk’s words, the perspectives of social science
alone cannot adequately comprehend what is at stake.
The humanities might offer more productive methods towards
an ethics and politics of response and resistance. We
plan to include speakers and programming that address
the issue and debates about torture in the arts, literature
and critical theory.
3) Media. Representations of torture in popular media
inform and influence people's consciousness and understanding
of its underpinnings. State-sponsored torture and its
transformation into a media spectacle must be examined
as a rhetorical and iconographic structure of meaning,
a structure that infiltrates our everyday lives. Thus,
has the media spectacle of torture become integrated
into the American social body? Are the codes of racial
and religious profiling provoking a crisis on the nature
of American identity? Further, the visual display of
torture does not only evoke revulsion, but has been
transformed into a form of visual pleasure that obscures
the coordinates of democratic citizenship. We then need
to consider representations of torture in the media
as a psychological instrument of social coercion, and
the effects such coercion has on the state of human
rights and citizenship.
4) Heritage. We need to reflect on a heritage that may
resonate in today’s practices of torture and is
mirrored in the lack of public outcry. We need to ask
how what seems to be a massive public indifference can
be understood beyond the influence of mainstream media.
Can this indifference be understood as embedded in a
specifically American tradition, for example in a concept
like “American exceptionalism” that, in
the past, has allowed the US to routinely make “a
mockery of the principles enshrined in international
law, while officials opportunistically utilized its
moral-legal rhetoric to castigate enemies”? Are
there unspoken links between the acceptability of torture,
on the one hand, and, for example, what Dennis Childs
has termed the “slavery of the 20th and 21st centuries”,
American prisons, and the death penalty? Mark Dow’s
research on the “American Gulag” of US Immigration
Prisons describes the horrifying conditions of torture,
abuse, civil death in US immigration prisons. Avery
Gordon’s most recent work uncovers the links between
military and civilian prisons, and shows that Abu Ghraib
needs to be reflected on in this context. The human
rights violations on American soil and their deeply
rooted causes have to be scrutinized if our investigation
into human rights abuses abroad is to be productive.
Participants
Participating Faculty: Roman Baratiak (Arts and Lectures),
Peter Bloom (Film and Media), Julie Carlson (English)
Susan Derwin (CL and GSS), Richard Falk (Global and
International Studies), Giles Gunn (Global and International
Studies; English), Nancy Kawalek (Film and Media), George
Lipsitz (Black Studies and Sociology)
Participating Graduate Students:
Allison Schifani (Comparative Literature), Karen Bishop
(Comparative Literature), Noah Zweig (Film and Media)
