"To Disembody: The Administration of Hunger and Dismemberment" (original) (raw)

A wide range of U.S. colonial strategies have deployed hunger as a weapon against Native peoples. Such practices have been so widespread as to defy summary. During the genocidal land-grabs called Indian removal or as a deliberate scorched-earth military tactic, the starvation of Native peoples has served as a frequent instrument in the service of U.S. colonization. Mass starvation has also often been a consequence of U.S. policies and programs or settler actions even when not explicitly articulated as an objective. Thinking with the video-performance work of the Mohawk/Blackfoot artist Merritt Johnson, this paper discusses her video/performance series "Exorcising America" as addressed to a politics of relationality and embodied survival. The series provides a way of thinking about practices of vulnerability in a context of protracted colonial, racial, and sexual violence. This paper asks how these “exercises” or “exorcisms”—as heuristics, exertions, procedures—might focus attention on the uncomfortable relation between, or bind of, violability and vulnerability, violence and capacity, knowing and unknowing. The videos parody a genre that trades on its claims to instill a confidence, self-possessed agency, and improvement untroubled by unconscious drives, ambivalence, and unevenly distributed premature death. However much the exercises perform a casting out, a conjured expulsion of “America,” of colonial possession, an undertaking of making unpossessed, the destructive forces that occupy and devour stolen lands and render life bare linger. Viewers are compelled to ask what sort of visceral or eviscerated trace lives on across the unsettled relations of aspiration and refusal, autonomy and subjection, intimacy and separation that these lessons enact.