Sylvanna M. Falcón - Böcker

In 2003, PerÚ’s ComisiÓn de la Verdad y ReconciliaciÓn (CVR) issued its groundbreaking final report on the human rights abuses perpetuated by two revolutionary groups and the country’s armed forces and police from 1980 to 2000. Sylvanna M. FalcÓn examines how local communities in Lima have formed oppositional spaces, movements, and communities to challenge a status quo that erases PerÚ’s history of internal violence. These counterpublics focus on human rights-oriented memory that acknowledges the legacies of racism and misogyny underlying the violence. FalcÓn’s decolonial feminist analysis challenges the rise of authoritarianism in democratic societies while exploring the limits of liberalism to counteract it. As she shows, projects shaped by counterpublic memory best equip PerÚvians to enact real, liberatory, and transformative justice for human rights violations both past and present. Engaging and intimate, Human Rights Counterpublics in PerÚ illuminates the power of human rights and memory work.

In 2003, PerÚ’s ComisiÓn de la Verdad y ReconciliaciÓn (CVR) issued its groundbreaking final report on the human rights abuses perpetuated by two revolutionary groups and the country’s armed forces and police from 1980 to 2000. Sylvanna M. FalcÓn examines how local communities in Lima have formed oppositional spaces, movements, and communities to challenge a status quo that erases PerÚ’s history of internal violence. These counterpublics focus on human rights-oriented memory that acknowledges the legacies of racism and misogyny underlying the violence. FalcÓn’s decolonial feminist analysis challenges the rise of authoritarianism in democratic societies while exploring the limits of liberalism to counteract it. As she shows, projects shaped by counterpublic memory best equip PerÚvians to enact real, liberatory, and transformative justice for human rights violations both past and present. Engaging and intimate, Human Rights Counterpublics in PerÚ illuminates the power of human rights and memory work.

Winner of the 2016 Gloria E. Anzaldua Book Prize, sponsored by the National Women's Studies AssociationIn Power Interrupted, Sylvanna M. Falcón redirects the conversation about UN-based feminist activism toward UN forums on racism. Her analysis of UN antiracism spaces, in particular the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa, considers how a race and gender intersectionality approach broadened opportunities for feminist organizing at the global level. The Durban conference gave feminist activists a pivotal opportunity to expand the debate about the ongoing challenges of global racism, which had largely privileged men's experiences with racial injustice. When including the activist engagements and experiential knowledge of these antiracist feminist communities, the political significance of human rights becomes evident. Using a combination of interviews, participant observation, and extensive archival data, Sylvanna M. Falcón situates contemporary antiracist feminist organizing from the Americas—specifically the activism of feminists of color from the United States and Canada, and feminists from Mexico and Peru—alongside a critical historical reading of the UN and its agenda against racism.

Winner of the 2016 Gloria E. Anzaldua Book Prize, sponsored by the National Women's Studies AssociationIn Power Interrupted, Sylvanna M. Falcón redirects the conversation about UN-based feminist activism toward UN forums on racism. Her analysis of UN antiracism spaces, in particular the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa, considers how a race and gender intersectionality approach broadened opportunities for feminist organizing at the global level. The Durban conference gave feminist activists a pivotal opportunity to expand the debate about the ongoing challenges of global racism, which had largely privileged men’s experiences with racial injustice. When including the activist engagements and experiential knowledge of these antiracist feminist communities, the political significance of human rights becomes evident. Using a combination of interviews, participant observation, and extensive archival data, Sylvanna M. Falcón situates contemporary antiracist feminist organizing from the Americas—specifically the activism of feminists of color from the United States and Canada, and feminists from Mexico and Peru—alongside a critical historical reading of the UN and its agenda against racism.

Precarity and Belonging examines how the movement of people and their incorporation, marginalization, and exclusion, under epochal conditions of labor and social precarity affecting both citizens and noncitizens, have challenged older notions of citizenship and alienage. This collection brings mobility, precarity, and citizenship together in order to explore the points of contact and friction, and, thus, the spaces for a possible politics of commonality between citizens and noncitizens.The editors ask: What does modern citizenship mean in a world of citizens, denizens, and noncitizens, such as undocumented migrants, guest workers, permanent residents, refugees, detainees, and stateless people? How is the concept of citizenship, based on assumptions of deservingness, legality, and productivity, challenged when people of various and competing statuses and differential citizenship practices interact with each other, revealing their co-constitutive connections? How is citizenship valued or revalued when labor and social precarity impact those who seemingly have formal rights and those who seemingly or effectively do not? This book interrogates such binaries as citizen/noncitizen, insider/outsider, entitled/unentitled, “legal”/“illegal,” and deserving/undeserving in order to explore the fluidity--that is, the dynamism and malleability--of the spectra of belonging.