This panel brings together ethnographic, historical, and legal engagements with the protracted afterlives of genocide, colonialism, and racialised and gendered regimes of classification to examine how worlds targeted for erasure persist, and what forms of plurality remain possible. The contributions approach genocide and colonial violence not solely as events of physical destruction, but as ongoing processes of relational unmaking: the systematic fragmentation of social, ecological, sensorial, and more-than-human relations through legal, political, epistemic, and classificatory regimes. Across distinct temporal and geographical settings, the panel explores how racialised, gendered, and ethno-national forms of ordering produce hierarchies of legibility, rendering some forms of life politically recognisable while consigning others to erasure, ruination, or managed (in)visibility. Particular attention is given to the ways exclusionary political formations, including those articulated through democratic institutions and liberal projects of governance, sustain themselves through the counterfeit reconstitution of belonging. The panel further considers how memory work in contexts of racialised and gendered violence, often expressed through contemporary nationalisms and projects of communal purity, contests the very terms through which democracy presents itself as inclusion, progress, and totalising coherence. Through return, ritual, oral worlding practices, more-than-human forms of memory, and gender-diverse and nonconforming modes of life and kinship, the contributions explore anti-genocidal and anti-colonial forms of relationality that exceed archival, legal, and institutional containment. The panel asks what alternative forms of political being and collective life emerge amid the enduring afterlives of violence, and how such practices challenge the logics through which exclusionary orders organise belonging and political possibility.
Vanja Hamzić, "The Afterlives of Species-Making: Memory, Genocidal Erasure, and Griot Worldings in Proto-Colonial Senegambia" This paper situates the genealogies of international legal thought within the targeted destruction of relational worlds in eighteenth-century proto-colonial Senegambia, where emergent legal and natural sciences produced hierarchical, racialised, and gendered conceptions of the human and more-than-human. Through critical historical analysis, I examine how species-making functioned as a mode of relational erasure, fragmenting ecological, social, and sensorial ties while establishing classificatory regimes whose logics prefigured enduring extractive, epistemic, and genocidal violence. Rather than treating colonial violence as a completed historical process, the paper attends to its afterlives in the production of political and epistemic hierarchies that continue to diminish or erase the relations sustaining human, non-human, and more-than-human life. In this sense, genocidal violence appears not solely as an event of physical destruction, but also as an ongoing process of erasing relations, through which once-plural worlds get fragmented, reordered, or rendered invisible. Foregrounding the lifeworlds and worlding practices of griots (Mande: jeliw), whose gender nonconformity and wordsmithery formed integral dimensions of Senegambian social and cosmological life, the paper turns to forms of memory that resist disappearance and exceed archival containment. Griot worldings can thus be seen as anti-genocidal labour: reiterative practices of remembering and relationally through which social and more-than-human worlds are sustained against legal and colonial regimes of classification and control. Far from preserving static traditions, such practices continually sustain and re-centre relations targeted by systems of erasure. In dialogue with the panel's concern with memory, erasure, and the endurance of plurality amid divisive political orders, I argue that these practices challenge the legal and political logics through which exclusionary democracies organise belonging, recognition, and humanity itself. Rather than presuming law's capacity to repair the worlds it has helped fragment through classificatory and hierarchical regimes, the paper considers how embodied and situated practices of world-making articulate alternative forms of political relation amid the enduring afterlives of colonial and genocidal violence.
Safet HadžiMuhamedović, "The Counterfeit Subjectification of Genocidal Constituency in Bosnia" Drawing on long-term ethnographic research among returnees in the Dinaric highlands of Bosnia, this paper examines how the international democratic experiment in post-genocide Bosnia has prolonged the undoing of communal and more-than-human relations initiated through genocide. I argue that the afterlives of genocide have become sedimented within postwar political orders that rhetorically sustain democratic pluralism while reproducing erasure, ruination, and exclusionary forms of political subjectivity. More than three decades after the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement and the constitutional order it inaugurated, acquiescence to genocidal ethno-national belonging remains, with few exceptions, the primary means of becoming legible to the state. Returnees constitute an electorally insignificant minority, while democratic participation offers tightly circumscribed and exclusionary forms of belonging. Voting patterns, however, are repeatedly mobilised as evidence of social consent and the naturalisation of post-genocidal realities. I ask whether genocidal regimes can be democratic and, if so, what constitutes the demos in the protracted aftermath of genocide. Focusing both on postwar structures that reproduce fragmentation and inequality and on disruptive practices through which erased worlds persist in fragmentary yet insurgent ways, I trace the relationship between neocolonial dependent development and alliances with democratically elected ethno-national elites. The tightly managed subject-constituent, I argue, is a central mechanism through which post-genocidal governance reproduces itself.
20260730T110020260730T1230America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires5.2. Mass Violence and Exclusionary Democracy: Memory, Relationality, and ErasureSVE1MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
Remembering Resistance: Enslaved and Maroon Women in Jamaica’s Colonial Past and Contemporary Memory
Individual paperIntersectionality, Race, and Gender00:00 Midnight - 00:00 Midnight (America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires) 2026/07/30 03:00:00 UTC - 2026/07/30 03:00:00 UTC
This paper explores how gendered violence and female resistance are remembered and represented in Jamaican collective memory. Drawing on my doctoral research, it investigates the intersection of sexual violence, agency, and memory in Jamaica between 1655 and 1838, and how the experiences of enslaved and Maroon women are narrated in the present. While the history of slavery in the British Caribbean has been widely studied, the role of women as agents of resistance - particularly in Maroon societies - has remained underexamined. Using archival sources such as plantation records, colonial correspondence, and the diaries of Thomas Thistlewood alongside oral histories and cultural materials including songs, schoolbooks, and community narratives, this study examines how women navigated and resisted structural and sexualised violence and how their legacies are remembered or silenced today. Theoretically, the paper draws on intersectionality, postcolonial and subaltern studies, and memory studies. It also employs Liz Kelly’s and Cynthia Cockburn’s “continuum of violence” as sensitizing concepts to link intimate, structural, and collective dimensions of coercion. Preliminary findings suggest that while enslaved and Maroon women’s resistance was central to survival and community formation, contemporary narratives often mythologise or marginalise their contributions. By reading colonial sources “against the grain” and engaging with descendant communities, this paper highlights how memory practices in Jamaica reveal ongoing negotiations over history, identity, and belonging. In doing so, it contributes to debates on gendered memory, postcolonial heritage, and the politics of recognition in the Caribbean and the Atlantic world.
