"The human becomes a vicious circle: objects of belief, displaced units of responsibility, and the tensions of diversity in homicide regulations in Sudan"

Open Lectures Spring 2015

  • Date: Jun 10, 2015
  • Time: 02:15 PM - 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Manuel Schwab (Makerere Institute of Social Research, Kampala, Uganda)
  • Manuel Schwab is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR). He is preoccupied with questions of the nexus political economy (particularly the value of life), multigenerational political violence, and affect-based mobilizations of liberal political subjects.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 11, Göttingen
  • Room: Library Hall
"The human becomes a vicious circle: objects of belief, displaced units of responsibility, and the tensions of diversity in homicide regulations in Sudan"

For more details please contact buethe(at)mmg.mpg.de.

Describing a place where, in his words, “the crust between earth and hell is not thick enough for humans;” a certain K.H.J.O. Hayes of the colonial High Court in Sudan grapples with a spate of live burials in 1947. A few years later, a colleague adjudicates the killing of a Sudanese man by a native healer in a state of possession with the claim “we believe despite our disbelief.” Drawing from an archive of homicide cases in which either victim or perpetrator (or both) are considered somehow less (or more) than human, this paper will pose a series of questions about the consequences of an ethical and political commitment to the human both as an ideal-to-be-aspired-to and as a given of any social encounter. By revisiting these cases in which core objects of our contemporary political imaginary (violence, crime, and the human itself) are exposed and unstable, the paper argues that our contemporary endeavors to encounter others on their own terms are still troubled by moments when crime is not a crime, violence is not violence, and a human is not fully human.


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