LE3 .A278 2011

2011

Whitehall, Geoffrey

Acadia University

Bachelor of Arts

Honours

Political Science

Politics

Employing the methodology of immanent critique, I suggest that the discourse of genocide studies can and should be different. I argue that fighting genocide—the „ultimate crime‟—does not require modernist prescriptions for the Global South. Rather, following the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, while attending to local discursivities of genocide in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, I argue that greater attentiveness to quotidian practices and everyday violences, as well as the effects of our own knowledge practices, are important means through which to challenge the invisible genocides that all too often operate in our midst. Most important, however, is recognizing that genocide is an expression of anti-politics to the extent that such destructiveness attempts to eliminate other stories—that is, ways of being and knowing the world differently. Confronting genocide, therefore, demands the enactment of an affirmative political ethic that celebrates the endless potentialities of human interaction. Thus, the artistic expression of stories can also serve as an affirmative political means by which to counter the anti-political tendencies of this „age of genocide.‟

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https://scholar.acadiau.ca/islandora/object/theses:802