Benjamin Nienass

Memory | Materiality | Sensuality

In a 1993 essay, literary theorist Peter Stallybrass movingly described how his recently deceased friend Allon White had finally returned to his memory after countless futile attempts to bring him back. While in the process of mourning, Stallybrass’ tireless efforts to actively invoke memories of Allon paradoxically created more distance rather than less. If anything was made present through the stories that Stallybrass told to remember his friend, it was his absence. The moment in which Allon finally “returned” to him was a much less deliberate affair: while wearing a hand-sewn jacket the two had both worn throughout their friendship, Stallybrass finally felt he had reunited with his friend through the physicality of the object they shared. Much more than a mere representation of Allon, the jacket, for a brief moment, became Allon,

Invisible Victims: Undocumented Migrants and the Aftermath of September 11*

This article examines the processes of investigation and gathering evidence about victims of the September 11 attacks to better understand the inability of state and nonstate institutions to effectively deal with the invisibility of undocumented migrants in terms of providing assistance and recognition at a moment of tragedy. The failure to make the invisible visible or to address the very question of visibility publicly is explained by three major reasons: 1) A general fear of coming forward on the part of undocumented migrants or their families, partly as a result of their legal status and their lack of trust in government agencies, which was compounded by ineffective communication about available relief services; 2) different procedural requirements and logics of evidence used by government and nongovernmental relief agencies, which, in some cases, made it impossible for undocumented migrants or their families to provide proof of their presence at the site or employment in the businesses affected; 3) the context of 9/11 as a disruptive event that influenced the overall climate in which issues of victimhood and immigration status could be addressed.

Performing the Global

Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s (hereafter JNP) attempt to sketch an intellectual profile of global studies is a welcome and successful effort to offer an explicit and contained programmatic statement about the raison d’être of this emerging field without losing sight of the heterogeneity of projects that have been subsumed under its name. He starts by claiming that global studies addresses a particular social demand, namely to integrate global data and globalization studies, the latter defined mostly by studies of globalization within the social sciences and humanities. In a more programmatic defense of global studies, JNP then lays out several of the main features of the field, such as its interdisciplinarity, its multi-centric ‘angle of vision’, and its comprehensiveness (Nederveen Pieterse, 2013). JNP’s heuristic choice to juxtapose global studies and studies of globalization is particularly productive. This distinction is drawn not to polemically and eternally delineate the two from each other, but rather to understand the ‘added value’ of global studies, at least partly, through some of the shortcomings of existing studies of globalization. More importantly, approaches within global studies do not so much solve the problems and aporias of former and current studies of globalization (at least not yet), but rather start by revealing and problematizing them. In this sense, global studies is indeed ‘critical’ (see Juergensmeyer, 2012). It is also reactive, not just with regard to genuinely new phenomena that require a new analytical lens— ‘a problem-centered’ lens, ‘driven by social demand for addressing pressing global issues and risks’ (Nederveen Pieterse, 2012)—but also with regard to academic trends and disciplinary safeguards that are in serious need of unwrapping. How then can we make sense of global studies’ added value, particularly through this reaction to studies of globalization? On the one hand, global studies, like studies of globalization, are a reaction to ‘methodological nationalism’ (see also Beck, 2005; Beck and Grande, 2007). In some cases this happens because specific frameworks are clearly transnational (Nederveen Pieterse

Book review: The Ashgate Research Companion to Memory StudiesKattagoSiobhan (ed.) The Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2015. 274 pp. £90

As all scholars of memory – traditional, alternative or postmodern – know, even in our putatively ‘post-colonial’ cognitive psychology era of memory studies, the dominant illustration of memory in psychology textbooks and handbooks continues to be of stages (sensory, shortand long-term memory) and mechanisms (encoding, storing, (re)consolidation, retrieval). This rendering exhorts the internal over the external, the neurocognitive over the environmental and cultural, memory stability over fluidity and, in short, contracted over expanded views of remembering. After reading the book, we see even clearer the problems of these traditional views. Any efforts to advance alternatives are to be applauded.

Deaths, Visibility, and the Politics of Dissensus at the US-Mexico Border

This paper addresses the intended and unintended politicization of bodies of undocumented migrants beyond their death. Border activists in Arizona, California, and Texas have engaged in marches, projections, and collective acts of mourning to publicize the issue of undocumented migrants dying in their attempt to cross the desert. Nienass and Delano argue that these politics of mourning are stagings of dissensus in Jacques Ranciere’s sense, as they place these border deaths in the context of state violence and constitute a challenge to existing frames within which we sense someone as publically grievable.