The Society of Fellows hosts the Thursday Lecture Series (TLS), which runs regularly throughout the academic year. The Fall Semester TLS, our Fellows present their own work, chaired by Columbia faculty.

“In the belly of this war machine there is a kind of peace"

Lecture by Emma Shaw Crane
Chaired by Brian Larkin

Borrowing its title from a poem by Jennifer Rahim, this talk reflects on the relationship between care and counterinsurgency, and explores how injuries to both soldiers and the U.S. imperial project are incompletely remediated in suburban Miami. Southern Command (the Department of Defense regional command for Latin America) once focused on fighting Communist insurgencies. It now wages the War on Drugs, manages the War on Terror prison at Guantánamo Bay, and runs military medical humanitarian missions. This talk argues that Southern Command is a site of palliative practices directed not only at target populations but at aging, injured U.S. combatants. At this quiet “sunset command,” U.S. soldiers and soldiers-turned-contractors manage the chronic psychic and bodily injuries of war—and reproduce the imperial project.

This event also will be recorded. By being electronically present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.

Please email [email protected] to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.