Mediations of Security, Race, and Violence in the Pulse Nightclub Shooting

This article examines news and political mediations of security, race, and violence in the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting in an attempt to isolate how dominant institutions reaffirm and preserve the North American state's monopoly on violence and cultural preservation through the calculated balance of security in relation to tolerance of diversity. The event was predominantly mediated through security discourses of the “war on terror,” and this martial framing enabled the production of homonationalist rhetoric (drawing on Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages) that aimed to include previously excluded queer Latino/a populations within the American body politic. Focusing on news media reporting and political as well as activist responses to the shooting during the months of June–August 2016, the article shows how this process of homonationalist inclusion was not smooth. Memorialization and advocacy for the Pulse victims by dominant institutions is striated by colliding phobias (Islamo-, xeno-, and homo-) that interrupt a clear mode of nationalist address or point of identification in mediations of the shooting. Drawing on a knowledge base attentive to queer-of-color and Indigenous concerns, the article demonstrates how biopolitical and necropolitical value is extracted from communities exposed to intersecting violences with differential dividends distributed to queer Latino/a and Afro-Latino/a communities.

A Constitution for the Anthropocene Body Politic Environment, Culture, and the Humanities in the Twenty-First Century

The following article is a slightly revised version of Serenella Iovino’s Keynote Address at the 2021 European Conference for the Humanities, jointly organised in Lisbon (5-7 May) by the UNESCO Social and Human Sciences Programme, the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences (CIPSH), and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). The theme of the Conference Section inaugurated by this lecture was “The Humanities in the Twenty-First Century”. By acknowledging the official approval of the BRIDGES Project on education for sustainability as a partner of the UNESCO Management of Social Transformation Program, Iovino evaluated the role of the Environmental Humanities in the agenda of the so-called ‘New Humanities’, paying special attention to their relevance during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this framework, Venice emerged both as a symbol and as a very concrete object of care, proving to be “a thinking machine” for contemporary natural-cultural dynamics, as Salvatore Settis has defined it. The lecture ended with the invitation to turn the current crisis into a constitutive moment for the ‘Anthropocene body politic’, namely, the earthly collective of agents and of processes, both human and nonhuman, natural and technological.

Review of Andreas Musolff. 2021. National conceptions of the body politic. Cultural experience and political imagination. Cham, Springer. ISBN 978-981-15-8739-9 ISBN 978-981-15-8740-5 (eBook)

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