22 July 2024. Beehive Seminar: "We are proud to apologize for genocide”: The racial investment in humanitarian capital, with Vasuki Nesiah (Recording Available)
22 July 2024. 2 - 3 pm
Melbourne Law School
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
Beehive Seminar. “We are proud to apologize for genocide”: The racial investment in humanitarian capital.
The title of this talk is a nod to Jackie Sibblies Drury’s play, “We are proud to present a presentation…”; it is structured as a rehearsal of a play about the German genocide against the Herero people of Namibia. This structure echoes the familiar discussion of the genocide against the Herero and Nama peoples as a rehearsal for the holocaust. From Aime Cesair to Hannah Arendt, there is a long history of preoccupation with this relationship and the boomerang effect of genocide in the colonies and genocide in Europe. Questions of precedents and rehearsals have their own genealogy in international law and treatment of events in Europe to define the meaning of events in the colonial theater is neither unprecedented or unrehearsed. Preoccupied by these questions, this talk analyzes the law and policy debate over reparations for the genocides against the Herero and Nama communities, and for the distributive legacies of settler colonialism in Namibia. The vexed history of recognition of colonial Germany’s crimes, opens a window into the dominant framework of genocide in international law, including its relationship to the structures of accumulation and dispossession that were central to the colonization of indigenous peoples. Is international law’s framing of the crime of genocide evidence of international law’s repudiation of racism, or of the racial logics built into that framing?