Cultural Writing. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Brian Whitener, Daniel Borzutzky, and Fernando Fuentes. GENOCIDE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD (an English translation of Genocida en el Barrio: Mesa de Escrache Popular by Colectivo Situaciones) documents the autonomist practice of the "escrache," a system of public shaming that emerged in the late 1990s to vindicate the lives of those disappeared under the Argentinean dictatorship and to protest the amnesty granted to perpetrators of the killing. The book is an example of militant research, an investigative method that Colectivo Situaciones has pioneered. Through a series of hypotheses and two sets of interviews, GENOCIDE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD documents the theories, debates, successes, and failures of the escraches, investigates the nature of rebellion, discusses the value of historical and cultural memory to resistance, and suggests decentralized ways to agitate for justice. Think of it as a much needed model of political resistance.

Author Hometown: ANN ARBOR, MI USA



About the author: Brian Whitener's most recent works are Como hacemos lo que hacemos with the artistic collective La Lleca, and De gente común: Arte, política y rebeldía social from la Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México. He is an editor at Displaced Press and since 2005 has been investigating new political and artistic movements in Latin American and autonomist political theory.

Reviews:
Michael Cross @ The Disinhibitor Part 1
Michael Cross @ The Disinhibitor Part 2