‘Demonstrative Evidence’: A Genealogy of the Racial Iconography of Forensic Art and Illustration

This essay stages a critique of the unacknowledged racialising visual regimes that inform forensic pathologys typical body charts. In order to disclose these unacknowledged regimes, I stage a genealogy of the racialising iconography that continues to shape forensic pathologys visual texts. In drawing attention to the racialising visual conventions that constitute the contemporary production of caucacentric forensic body charts, I attempt to disrupt the scientifico-objective status of these visual artefacts in order to underscore their ideological effects. By focusing on the ontological/epistemological split between the corporeality of native informants and white knowledge workers, I underscore the white medico-legal professions historical transmuting of other bodies into objects of knowledge. I conclude by outlining the discursive effects of presenting forensic pathologys caucacentric body charts as demonstrative evidence within the court of law.This is an extended version of an essay first presented at the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities Conference, Cardozo Law School, New York University, New York, USA, March 2003. My thanks to Peter Goodrich and Penelope Pether for their generous enthusiasm and support.     

Between self-promotion and cultural politics: Murakami Haruki's travelogues

Through a close reading of contemporary Japanese novelist Murakami Haruki's accounts of his travels in Southern Europe, the United States, and Australia, this article analyses the ways in which this author uses travel writing to promote his self-image as a cosmopolitan and culturally sensitive writer. At the same time, examining the complex dynamics of identification and differentiation at play in the narratives, it highlights the texts’ potential to generate critical reflections on both Japanese and global cultural and social formations. By looking at Murakami's distinctive combination of self-promotion and cultural critique, the article's overarching goal is to complicate the current understanding of the genre travel writing and its colonial legacy.     

Resisting ‘progressive’ carceral expansion: lessons for abolitionists from anti-colonial resistance

This article documents a government-led strategy to more closely integrate policing with community-based ‘crime prevention’ programming in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. These initiatives have targeted neighborhoods with large Indigenous populations. In this article I illustrate how community-level conflicts over responses to ‘crime’ are also sites of settler colonial conflict, and how settler colonial governance is reproduced and resisted through the governance of crime. Interviews with politicians, policy-makers, bureaucrats in the crime prevention branch of the provincial government, and directors and employees at community-based organizations suggest that the pursuit of the government strategy of integrated crime prevention and suppression has been more a project of attempting to ‘manage’ urban Indigenous people than serve their interests. As a contribution to abolitionist thought and theory, this article profiles sites of conflict between community police and community-based organizations over definitions of the ‘crime’ problem in city-center Winnipeg. These examples highlight a kinship between carceral abolitionist and decolonial politics.     

Bernard Magubane’s critique of anthropology in southern Africa: an introductory essay

ABSTRACT

This essay is an attempt to piece together the fundamentals of Bernard Magubane’s critique of anthropology in southern Africa. The point is not to berate the discipline of anthropology, but to discuss Magubane’s work in relation to it. The essay comprises three main parts. First, it examines Magubane’s critique of southern African anthropology in a colonial situation – particularly in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Second, it assesses the usefulness of anthropological notions of pluralism and ‘tribalism’ in explaining conflicts in Africa. The remainder of the essay contends with anthropological themes such as social change and ‘modernisation’ in southern Africa. Generally, anthropology had problems at two levels: political and epistemological. Politically, anthropology was a handmaiden of colonialism and imperialism; and its main flaw was to study southern African societies outside of history and context. Epistemologically, anthropology is a discipline founded on alterity, that is, on studying the cultural Other.