Rocío Zambrana

Rocío Zambrana will join us in the Mediatheque on March 19th, 2019 from 6:00-7:30pm

In this talk, Zambrana will explore Guillermo Rebollo-Gil’s notion "pasarse políticamente" as an interruption of the violence of austerity in fiscally distressed Puerto Rico. "Pasarse políticamente" (roughly, "crossing the line") is an interruption of the violence of quotidian life that offends because “the objective violence to which it points is extremely offensive.” Such acts of protest are precarious not only because they index the race/gender/class hierarchies on display when protesters are deemed unruly, vulgar, violent. Rather, they are precarious because they fail to appear as acts of protest at all, pointing to key aesthetic and epistemic challenges. Rebollo-Gil nevertheless calls these acts “hopeful,” since they require the transformation of the very framework of sense to be grasped as forms of protest. Because Rebollo-Gil argues that the uncertainty of such acts makes them hopeful, Zambrana reads his conception in light of Walter Benjamin’s notion of interruption (Entsetzung). Crucial here is interrupting the effectivity of what Zambrana calls neoliberal coloniality.