Seventy-six years after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Shoah remains a crucial caesura in modern thought. In its wake, questions of ethics and aesthetics converge, demanding continuous engagement: What are the limits of representation in the face of catastrophe? How is it possible to give voice to the experience of suffering without exploitation? And in how far can art do justice to historical realities?

This project examines the history of the San Francisco 8, a collection of eight former members of the Black Panther Party (BPP) arrested in January 2007 for the 1971 homicide of San Francisco Police Sergeant John Young. Authorities jailed the men and held them on bonds ranging from three to five million dollars. Austin will examine the reasons behind the arrests, the history of the men’s involvement in the BPP and the years of legal battles they faced before a California court dismissed the charges in 2011.

This book project contextualizes the current drug violence within a longer 20th-century history of failed state formation, persistent social inequality and political violence. Using declassified Mexican and U.S. military and intelligence documents and oral histories, Aviña locates the immediate origins of the current bloodletting in the early 1970s when state drug interdiction campaigns became for the first time fully and permanently militarized.