Disappearance

How to visualise those who vanish without a trace? How to understand the void left by enforced disappearance? In a fascinating, original and insightful blend of philosophy, art, politics and ethics, Brad Evans and Chantal Meza take us from the Holocaust to Pinochet’s Chile and from contemporary Mexico to Gaza. Along the way they ask important questions and resist the temptation of easy answers. -- Roland Bleiker, Professor of International Relations, University of Queensland
An ambitious, unsettling and innovative book that places disappearance at the heart of a far-reaching contemporary shift. Evans and Meza turn disappearance into a global lens through which to interpret contemporary forms of violence, power and erasure. It is no longer merely a crime, but an underlying structure of the present. Although rooted in contexts as intense as that of Mexico, the book transcends any national framework to chart a truly global map of disappearance, linking enforced disappearances, ecologies of violence, surveillance regimes and contemporary forms of war and control. Through dense and evocative writing, and a radical intersection of art and theory, the book proposes new ways of seeing that which ‘tends to disappear’. The result is an original and demanding work that compels us to think—and to see—in a different way that which, increasingly, defines our world. -- Gabriel Gatti, The University of the Basque Country