SOMA | Rose Partiff
Updated: Jul 27, 2020
Rose Partiff
Thursday, 16 July
12:00 Mex – 13:00 EST – 10:00 PST— [19:00 South Africa]
‘Covid as Multiplane: Liberty, History and the Pandemic.’
As the death toll rises, the monuments to imperialism are coming down. This is no
coincidence. However, the powerful demands for social justice that Covid-19’s
manifestly unequal impact has triggered are coming up against a very 21st Century
problem. This is the problem that the language of freedom and equality used to
express them funnel them directly into the trenches of the same endless, brutally
superficial war of conceptual attrition. The assertion that Black Lives Matter is
reprimanded on the grounds that ‘all lives matter’; lock-down measures aimed at
protecting the community are undermined in defence of individual freedom;
Indigenous rights are accused of encroaching on Catholic rights, and so on, and so
on...until the material reality of structural injustice has been all but buried under an
avalanche of formal equivalences.
Rose Parfitt is a Senior Lecturer at Kent Law School in the UK. Her research responds to the role of law in creating sustaining astonishing inequalities of wealth, power and pleasure. She has published widely on topics including Fascist colonial architecture in Libya; Futurism, the First World War and contemporary fashion; The Eurocentrism of international law’s inbuilt historiography; among others.