Geocorpographies of Commemoration, Repression and Resistance


GUEST EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

Geocorpographies of Commemoration,
Repression and Resistance

Mahdis Azarmandi, Elaine Laforteza and
Maud Ceuterick

The contributions in this special issue expose the connections between
somatechnics and geocorpographies: the ongoing permutations of
geopolitical and geographical influences on conceptions of
personhood and bodies, whether on the level of the individual, the
community, the nation-state and/or the transnational. This issue aims
to link the geocorpographies of violence and resistance to the
somatechnics processes through which bodies become calibrated as
social subjects.

In his essay ‘Geocorpographies of Torture’, Joseph Pugliese
coined the term geocorpographies to express ‘that the body, in any of its
manifestations, is always geopolitically situated and graphically
inscribed by signs, discourses, regimes of visuality and so on. Its
geopolitical markings can only be abstracted to the process of symbolic
and political violence’ (2007: 12). Through his rigorous approach in
examining the intimate borders of the body within racialised zones of
war and terror, Pugliese demonstrates that within particular spaces
‘bodies become coextensive with space as such: they are the ground
upon which military operations of occupation are performed through
which control of the colonized country is secured’ (2007: 12). Drawing
on examples of the acts of torture by American soldiers inflicted upon
inmates of the Abu Ghraib prison complex in Iraq, Pugliese stages a
critical examination of how ‘conquered Arab men’ (2007: 5) become
coextensive with the spaces of the prison complex, as well as the

Somatechnics 6.1 (2016): 1–8
DOI: 10.3366/soma.2016.0170
# Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/journal/soma



broader spaces etched out by the ‘war on terror’. Here, Pugliese uses
the example of a palimpsest to dissect the ways in which the layering
effect of colonial history ensures that traces of former colonial
violences continue to remain palpable in the present moment. This
notion of the palimpsest girds how geocorpographies builds a network
of power that dissolves the border between the colonial past and the
supposed ‘post-colonial’ present.

As Sten Pultz Moslund states, coloniality ‘involves a biopolitical
transformation of the human body into an object of subjugation,
control’ (2015: 27). Once the hierarchisation of human bodies is
established, problematic and unproblematic bodies can be identified
and classified into different categories: either as intrusive bodies that
need to be disciplined and controlled, or as bodies that assimilate to
dominant social orders, and therefore can be validated as ‘safe’ citizens
of particular nation-states. The former not only face restrictions upon
entering national territory, but are not permitted to occupying any
space in the production of and management of how a nation
remembers and celebrates its history, enacts its laws and protects its
citizens.

The papers in this special issue track the tensions that derive from
the hierarchisation and categorisation of human bodies through a
variety of contexts. In part, this was a main concern of the 8th Annual
Somatechnics Conference Space, Race, Bodies: Geocorpographies of City, Nation
and Empire held at the University of Otago, New Zealand on 8–10
December, 2014. The conference brought together scholars such as
Joseph Pugliese, Susan Stryker, Jacinta Ruru, Jasbir Puar and Rebecca
Stringer in order to share and discuss ideas about space, race and
bodies under the rubric of somatechnics, linking embodiment and
technology as per Nikki Sullivan and Samantha Murray’s use of the
term (2009). Such an approach does not view the body simply as a
vehicle that can be altered by the values and discourses of its
surrounding culture or potentially modified by biotechnology.
Rather, the body is always-already marked by culture and the
historical and political processes through which one comes to
embody sets of knowledge about gender, sexuality, race and ability
that constrain or enable the body’s actions in certain ways.

The papers in this special issue of Somatechnics are derived from
this conference. Drawing on Pugliese’s notion of geocorpographies,
the conference hosted a range of theoretical, political and cultural
perspectives that derived inspiration from Pugliese’s work. In the same
vein, this special issue recalls on Pugliese’s investment in exposing
the underbelly to conspicuous acts of benevolence, protection and

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peace-keeping, in order to locate the technologies of media,
governance, culture and law within the geocorpographies of space,
memory, religion and race. Taking as their case study such diverse
material as literary works, post-colonial critiques, governmental
agendas, commemoration sites, Indigenous sovereignty or drone
technologies, the papers of this issue address the localised
production of various spaces, such as the nation-state, the space of
public discourse, and transnational relations of power. In doing so,
each paper highlights the racialised and nationalist practices ascribed
to bodies.

Thor Kerr and Shaphan Cox’s paper, for example, examines the
Western Australian context and the production of Aboriginal
‘protection’. By analysing the production of localised spaces within
Western Australia, as envisioned and instantiated by governmental and
media imperatives, Kerr and Cox focus on the capillaries of racialised
power that circumscribe Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal bodies. In this
manner, Kerr and Cox track the hierarchisation of bodies founded on
denuding Indigenous sovereignty. Verita Sriratana and Mahdis
Azarmandi also look at how the hierarchisation of bodies forms
understandings and experiences of and in the nation-state. They do
this by focusing on how the processes of memorialisation of war and
violence engender the dissection and re-assemblage of certain bodies,
to the point that they can be overlooked, silenced and/or erased.
Caitlin Overington and Thao Phan explore the strategy of the
Singapore Kindness Movement (SKM) to bring visibility to the
invisible ‘guest workers’ population of the city, without recognising
them as full citizen. Rather than institutional or governmental reforms,
the SKM initiative opted for a highly visible Coke campaign advertising
the presence of migrant workers, yet maintaining them voiceless and
outside the everyday urban space. Elaine Laforteza’s paper in this issue
examines how two different nation-states (the Philippines and
Australia) connect through their shared investment in maintaining a
‘secular’ mode of governmentality within their borders as well as
through their cultivation of bilateral relationships. Here, Laforteza
examines how the maintenance of national spaces are imbricated
through relationships with other nation-states. With this, Laforteza
names the racialised and geopolitical measures through which secular
governmentality operates in the name of bilateral interests focused on
peace-keeping in the post-9/11 context. Khalid Alhathlool’s paper,
focus on the conception of hybridised identities in post-colonial
scholarship, thus exploring the identity politics that emerge through
reinscriptions of dominant modes of being and becoming.

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These various productions of racialised spaces are informed
by different colonising, imperial and political operations. However,
simultaneously, there are also racialised, ideological and socio-cultural
commonalities that form a web of transnational geocorpographies. By
attending to the local specificities of racialised and ethnic identities, as
well as theoretical concerns, in connection with their broader
geopolitical ramifications, this special issue seeks to draw attention to
the ongoing mutations, contestations and reaffirmations of space, race
and bodies.

Verita Sriratana’s paper, ‘From “God Builders” to “Devil Workers”:
The Somatechnics of Embalming and the Geocorpographies of
Central and Eastern Europe’s Holocaust Tourism in Jáchym Topol’s
The Devil’s Workshop’ introduces the term ‘hypercorposurreality’ as an
interrogative tool for examining Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop
(2013). Sritatana specifies that ‘hypercorposurreality’ refers to the
‘body which transcends the body, the sign of which signified
transcends its authentic signification and evokes in readers what
Merleau-Ponty calls “hyper-reflection”, the kind of reflection which
criticises the kind of reflection which overlooks the limitations of
idealisation’. With this, Sriratana contributes to the literature around
the crisis of identity and memory in post-WWII Eastern & Central
Europe, and demonstrates how this memory and identity is
geographically located. Her rigorous and elegiac analysis of Topol’s
novel signals the horrors of WWII and how this impacted on the
constitution of space, place and bodies within Eastern Europe. She also
draws out Topol’s writing on the haunting memories of war, as well as
the commodification of war and death for touristic and capitalist
purposes.

Also with a focus on literary textual analysis, Khalid Alhathlool’s
paper, ‘Hybridity: A Privilege of a few or the Necessity for All in Amin
Maalouf’s In the Name of Identity’ stages an in-depth analysis of
Malouf’s book, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong
(2008). Alhathlool situates his exploration hybridised identities in the
context of other post-colonial scholarship, such as that of Homi K.
Bhabha, Stuart Hall and Ulf Hannerz on hybridity. With this,
Alhathlool exposes the tensions between conceptualisations and
critiques of identity premised on notions of ‘purity’ and pre-fixed
notions of ‘migrancy’. Here, Alhathlool provides a critique of In the
Name of Identity whilst assessing diverse perspectives on post-colonial
identity. In particular, Alhathlool interrogates claims of neutrality in
In the Name of Identity. This is a key strategy for highlighting the ways in
which identities are calibrated as ‘universal, and therefore denuded

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from any particular political, religious and cultural allegiance.
However, this supposed absence of allegiance speaks of a connection
to a particularised social order. Alhathlool states: ‘Again, the
assumption on which this notion relies is that the public sphere
is intrinsically secular and neutral. What follows is the need to
‘neutralise’ individuals; to create individuals who are void of any
allegiance to a particular culture [. . .]’.

Elaine Laforteza’s paper, ‘Separation of Church from State?
Secular Somatechnologies of Governmentality and Pedagogy’ names
what is invisibilised in creating spaces of ‘neutrality’, that is, the power
of secular governmentality to act in accordance to Christianity, so
much so that secularism becomes imbued with the ethos of
Christianity. Drawing on Gil Anidjar’s work on secularism, Laforteza
argues for the reconsideration of secular governmentality as divorced
from Christian agendas. Laforteza draws on the Philippines-Australia
nexus, namely in the production of bilateral and pedagogical
techniques, as a means through which secularism becomes
operational as Christianity in the post 9/11 context. In focus are two
‘developmental’ programs: (1) the Basic Education Assistance for
Mindanao project, which Australia and the Philippines have
established as a pedagogical tool for including Muslim-Filipinos
within ‘secular’ society and (2) Gawad Kalinga, a not-for-profit
organisation that strives to create solidarity between Christian and
Muslim Filipinos. Laforteza uses the term ‘secular somatechnologies’
to investigate how somatechnologies of the state collude to create
secular frameworks that shape bilateral and national identities. In
addition she highlights the Castilian Spanish colonial context as the
means through which secular somatechnologies operate through
Christianity.

Mahdis Azarmandi also considers the context of Spanish
colonialism and the ways it forms particular ideas of a nation-state.
In ‘Commemorating No-Bodies: Christopher Columbus and the
Violence of Social-Forgetting’, Azarmandi focuses on white ignorance
and memorialisation in Spain. She questions and problematises the
imagination of the Spanish national body as an inherently white body
and how the commemoration of conquest as discovery renders
invisible the indigenous and bodies of color that were exploited,
tortured and killed as part of the Spanish colonial expansion. Turning
her attention to the Columbus monument in Barcelona in particular,
Azarmandi reframes the public narratives of discovery, adventure and
voyage that accompany the memorialisation of the Spanish colonial
past as master narrative of colonialism, a narrative that actively silences

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counter narratives. Azarmandi draws links here with the racism
described by Fanon, and on which Pugliese bases his notion of
geocorpographies, as a global hierarchy of superiority and inferiority
that is organised along this very line of the human and non-human.
This is a line that has politically, economically and culturally produced
what Peruvian sociologist Quijano describes as the coloniality of power
that has remained in place long after formal colonialism has ended.
According to Azarmandi, this is an ongoing coloniality that hides the
violence that enables colonial celebrations. Consequently, she argues,
colonial monuments are one manifestation of the on-going coloniality
and violence against racialised damné (Fanon 1963) and must be re-
presented as memorials ‘to war and genocide’.

In ‘Happiness from the Skies or a New Death from above?
†cokedrones in the City’, Overington and Phan point out that the
basis of interaction enabled through the use of drone technologies is
never simply between drones and humans. Instead, interactions
between drones and humans appear as a complex web integrating
the technologies themselves, those who control them, and persons
who are already deemed subhuman. Through the use of drone
technologies, the hierarchisation of human bodies occurs, not only in
its traditional military usage but also and more tacitly in their renewal
as commercial and civilian material. Overington and Phan perform a
critical examination of the burgeoning use of drone technologies
within Singaporean city environments through the †CokeDrone
advertisement. The drone itself appears in a ‘friendlier’ body asking
for redemption from its military weaponry counterparts, allowing them
to be presented as detached from their military origin and negating
thus their relation to violence. By reshaping its military body, negating
their relation to violence, and portraying them as eyes that ‘see’ rather
than ‘watch’, drones are resignified as ‘innocent’ and ‘banal’ objects of
the everyday. Stressing their capability of producing content from above,
the authors focus on drones as vehicles of ideologies which processes
and data are neither innocent nor banal but, on the contrary, render
invisible the intense history of drone violence and its victims, and
‘desubjectify’ certain socio-spheres of the Singaporean population.

In dialogue with Azarmandi’s aligning of privileged zones of white
spectatorship/sight with the invisibilisation of ‘non-white’ experiences
of history, Thor Kerr and Shaphan Cox’s paper, ‘Media, Machines and
Might: Reproducing Western Australia’s Violent State of Aboriginal
Protection’, considers state violence against Aboriginal bodies as
explored through the reports in the Western Australian media.
In accord with Overington and Phan’s analysis of how drone

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technologies re-imagine human bodies, Kerr and Cox address a
different technology-media communications in order to investigate
how media discourse and financial interest mutually-reinforce state
violence against Indigenous communities. Further, they examine how
such violence is tied to the perpetuation of settler colonialism in
contemporary contexts. As in to Overington and Phan’s paper, Kerr
and Cox emphasise the inextricable link between sôma and techné,
wherein ‘hard’ technologies (such as drones and newspaper reports)
are enmeshed with ‘soft’ technologies (such as norms and values) to
cultivate different ways of bodily being and becoming. Kerr and Cox’
paper also makes visible the link between media outlets, which are part
of a conglomerate that makes most of its profit from extraction
machines, and the reproduction of public discourse of ‘Aboriginal
protection’. By highlighting the links between media, machines
and might, the article reveals how private capital accumulation
functions ‘within the reproduction of state violence against sovereign
Aboriginal people’. Disguised as protective measures, the extraction
of Aboriginal lands and exploitation, as well as the criminalisation of
Aboriginal activists continues within the Australian settler colonial
logic.

In these various contexts, this merging of the corporeal body with
geographical space is deemed a necessary critical intervention – on
institutional, cultural and legal levels – to influence the transnational
movement of people, capital and technology. Recent debates over
government surveillance and security, the partial recognition of the
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in
(post)colonial states, and the ongoing plight of refugees illuminate the
fractures and connections between identity and the geographical
placement of bodies across cities, nations and the globe.

The papers in this issue traverse the complexities of ongoing local,
national and transnational (dis)connections. They represent a timely
contribution to the growing body of scholarship on somatechnics,
given that each paper proposes nuanced understandings of the
corpographies of state-sanctioned violence, ongoing resistance,
literary critique and representation, and/or reconceptualisations of
how bodies become calibrated as certain social subjects.

This special issue further contributes to scholarship that explore
how various technologies of power emerge through formations
of personhood. Khalid Alhathlool’s paper, for instance, maps out
post-colonial scholarship onto experiences and negotiations of
hybridity and identity. Overington and Phan, in particular, stresses
that the integration of drones in the city transforms practices

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of the everyday space by bringing new technologies of control
and surveillance from above. Other scholars, such as Azarmandi
and Laforteza, trace the cultivation of colonial empires, such as
the one staged by Castilian Spaniards: Azarmandi investigates the
memorialisation of the Spanish nation-state as informed by dominant
colonial history, Laforteza names the 400 years of Spanish colonial
governance as the template through which the Philippines-Australia
nexus and its focus on ‘secular’ governmentality becomes normalised.

With each paper, the supposed borders between the colonial
‘past’ and the contemporary present are fused through ongoing
geocorpographies of commemoration, repression and resistance. The
contributions gesture towards the Spivakian concerns: in whose
interest is this for? For whose body? For whose nation-state? For what
purpose? This special issue seeks to explore these questions, and in
doing so, expose the limits to justice that inscribe the mechanisms and
somatechnics of governmentality, power and solidarity.

References

Fanon, Frantz (1963), The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove.
Moslund, Sten Pultz (2015), Literature’s Sensuous Geographies: Postcolonial Matters of Place,
Palgrave Macmillan: New York.

Murray, Samantha and Nikki Sullivan (2009), ‘Introduction’, Somatechnics: Queering the
Technologisation of Bodies, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 1–10.

Pugliese, Joseph (2007), Geocorpographies of Torture. Critical Race and Whiteness
Studies, 3:1, 1–18.

Quijano, Anı́bal (2000), ‘Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America’,
International Sociology, 15:2, pp. 215–232.

Topol, Jáchym (2013), The Devil’s Workshop, Trans. Alex Zucker, London: Portobello
Books.

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