Politics of Suffering and Resistance: Understanding and Responding to Trauma

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel seeks to explore diverse manifestations of suffering in politics and elucidate how resistance emerges as a response to trauma. With panelists across diverse academic stages, the panel delves into fugitivity, entanglement, lustration, victimhood, and martyrdom to illuminate the political significance and implications of suffering and resistance.

In “Frederick Douglass, The Underground Railroad and Alternate Forms of Fugitivity,” Lucy Britt analyzes fugitivity on the Underground Railroad as escape from the trauma of slavery. Drawing on the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and historical research to trace the ways the myth of total escape on the Underground Railroad have contributed to the American political imagination, Britt shows how this hegemonic narrative of complete escape is a powerful myth created in the 19th-20th centuries to emphasize individual heroism, masculinity, a promised land of freedom, and the sacrifices of white abolitionists. Frederick Douglass’ autobiographies reveal the incompleteness of escape and continued precarity of fugitives even while emphasizing individualism and masculinity. By critically analyzing the dominant narrative of the Underground Railroad, Britt shows how it underestimated the relationality (vs. masculinism, individualism, and bootstrapism) of the Underground Railroad.

Kai Yui Samuel Chan argues in “Entanglement and Domination,” that the suffering of indigenous, colonized, and exiled peoples cannot be aptly interpreted within a Westphalian framework of territorial sovereign states. Chan contends that, with reference to Puerto Rico’s Citizen Public Debt Audit campaign, Australia’s Indigenous Voice referendum, and Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition movement, that the suffering of these peoples does not arise simply out of their entanglement with other states but because these entanglements have taken a dominating form, within which these peoples lack a non-trivial say in their institutions and hence are deprived of the capacity to shape their relations of political cooperation.

Yi-Hsuan Huang examines the political justification for lustration in “Dealing with a Tainted Past: Understanding Lustration as Democratic Exclusion.” Huang notes that there has been a debate about whether vetting, known as lustration law, is undemocratic, as it seems to violate personal freedom and unfairly penalize decisions made under coercion. Instead of understanding lustration as only a form of retributive justice, this article argues that lustration can be regarded as a kind of “democratic exclusion” as it ensures the representativeness of democratic institutions and promotes political equality.

Jihyun Jeong argues in “Reimagining Communication: Uncivil Resistance as Conveying Affective Knowledge,” that the communicative aspect of political resistance goes beyond persuading citizens to support a cause. Instead, it encompasses conveying affective knowledge, wherein victims of injustice use their sense of victimhood to convey to non-victims a glimpse of their emotional experience, including anger and frustration. As non-victims may be motivated to be unaware of victims’ suffering (Hayward 2020), Jeong contends that communicating affective knowledge often requires uncivil resistance, disrupting the daily lives of non-victims and inducing a sense of vulnerability. Analyzing a recent case in South Korea involving activists with disabilities who deliberately disrupted the subway system, Jeong illustrates how this expanded view of political communication elucidates the democratic value of uncivil resistance, even when the resistance fails to achieve intended political changes and provokes anger from fellow citizens.

In “Beyond Individual Actors: Political Martyrdom and the Depersonalization of Death,” Andrew R. Murphy applies a theoretical framework of martyrdom to political and politicized deaths in broader contexts, including police shootings of Black Americans as well as opioid and AIDS epidemics. Murphy aims to complicate the classic accounts of martyrdom built upon a dramatic, personal confrontation between a principled dissenter and an agent of state authority. Political martyrdom offers martyrs a life beyond the grave, not by promising salvation or entry into paradise, but by consecrating deaths and ensuring the deceased individuals a venerated role in their community’s collective memory. At each step of the way – death, consecration, commemoration – martyrdom is a political process, and Murphy’s notion of political martyrdom aims to make that fact explicit and to center it in understanding political and politicized deaths across a range of times and contexts.

In conclusion, this panel explores a rich tapestry of suffering and resistance, delving into diverse contexts and perspectives. Together, the discussions hope to contribute to a deeper understanding of the intricate dynamics between suffering, trauma, and political resistance.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Frederick Douglass, the Underground Railroad and Alternate Forms of Fugitivity - Lucy Britt, Bates College

• Entanglement and Domination - Kai Yui Samuel Chan, University of California, Berkeley

• Dealing with a Tainted Past: Understanding Lustration as Democratic Exclusion - Yi-Hsuan Huang, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

• Reimagining Communication: Uncivil Resistance as Conveying Affective Knowledge - Jihyun Jeong, Duke University

Chair

• Jennet Kirkpatrick Arizona State University

Discussant

• Andrew R. Murphy University of Michigan