2013 Monday June 24 / you are welcome at 19:30 in the DAI's auditorium for a public lecture by Nikita Dhawan / Violence, Critique, Representation

Violence or use of force has been a consistent feature of human condition. But even as violence is omnipresent and widespread, it is also historical and specific, insofar as every era produces not only its own modes of violence but also its own discourse on the phenomenon. Some propose a more narrow definition of violence as physical injury, whereas others offer a broader approach emphasizing socio-cultural, political and economic aspects. There has also been increasing focus on discursive, epistemic and normative violence with attention being drawn to forms of violence that are not always manifest or visible. Drawing on these multiple reflections on the typology of violence, Nikita Dhawan's talk will address the (im)possibility of representing violence without reproducing it.

Prof. Dr. Nikita Dhawan, Junior Professor of Political Science for Gender/Postcolonial Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt. She has held visiting fellowships at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities, The University of Melbourne; Program of Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley; University of La Laguna, Tenerife; Pusan National University, South Korea; Columbia University, New York and from 2006-2007, she was Maria- Goeppert-Mayer Guest Professor at Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Germany. Her publications include Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and Violence (2007) and Decolonizing Enlightenment: Transnational Justice, Human Rights and Democracy in a Postcolonial World (ed., 2013).

This lecture is curated by Doreen Mende in the context of Reading for Writing or How to do Things with Theory.