October 22-23, 2009: Symposium: After Truth: Justice, TRCs and Related Aftermaths

Thursday and Friday, October 22-23, 2009

After Truth: Justice, TRCs and Related Aftermaths

after-truth

King Juan Carlos Center
53 Washington Square South
New York, NY (get map)
(co-organized by the Hemispheric Institute)

A generation after the first Commissions in Latin America, this symposium asks: what kinds of futures were inaugurated through these enactments? What kinds of political projects have they legitimized? What is the status of the truth sought and produced through these processes? What other strategies of truth production have TRCs set in motion through their framings and circumscriptions? Finally, what are the afterlives of the vast evidentiary archives that they generated? The event also provides an opportunity to reflect on current debates in the United States surrounding practices of torture in the so‐called “War on Terror.” While focused primarily on Latin America, we hope to engage similar processes that have unfolded in South Africa, Rwanda, Canada, and beyond.

The symposium is offered in conjunction with two related photographic exhibits: "Yuyanapaq: Para recordar,"(a Quechua/Spanish hybrid that means “To Remember”), the photo exhibit created as part of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2003. The second is the more recent exhibit “Si no vuelvo, búsquenme en Putis” (If I don't return, look for me in Putis), featuring photos by Domingo Giribaldi of the May 2008 exhumation of a mass grave in Putis, Peru. The two exhibits offer contrasting modes of understanding photographic documentation and exhibition in the context of “official” projects that seek to establish and legitimate the truth of atrocities committed by the state.

Invited speakers include Jose Pablo Baraybar, Kamari Clarke, Catherine Cole, Diamela Eltit, Jean Franco, Domingo Giribaldi del Mar, Greg Grandin, Sally Merry, Diane Nelson, Deborah Poole, Mary Louise Pratt, Isaias Rojas-Perez, Leo Spitzer, Diana Taylor, and Kimberly Theidon.

The symposium is organized by Marcial Godoy-Anativia (Hemispheric Institute, NYU) and Jill Lane (Spanish and Portuguese, NYU) and co-sponsored by the NYU Visual Arts Initiative, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University (ILAS), and the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center.