Lovecidal ─ Walking With the Disappeared

Lovecidal is a transformative work that cuts across genres, times and places, appealing intimately to our sense of justice and freedom with incisive provocations and evocations. It leads the reader through small and large wounds of our time as glimpsed through the claims to "victory" of twenty-first-century colonial wars, and focuses on a wide range of sustained, underground forms of resistance capable of changing today's landscape of activism. Featuring the role of the New Protester among netizens of the world, it discusses the voices of the online poster, including, for example, the deeds of the "geek who leaks" in the U.S; the inventive blogger and the human rights lawyer in China; or the nonconformist singing nun and Lhakar vigils participant in Tibet.

Capaciously conceived, Lovecidal offers wide-ranging vistas of war making, citing compelling examples of US involvements in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Lebanon, as well as of China's imperial quest of unity and harmony. In its focus on the self-destructive forces of systemic violence and state-sanctioned security, what emerges are multi-layered forms of erasure and disfranchisement and "an indefinite state of being-in-expulsion: exiled, expatriated, segregated, deported, displaced, discarded, repudiated, estranged, disappeared, unsettled, and unsettling."

At once an engaging treatise and a creative gesture, Lovecidal remains attentive to the affective and spiritual dimension of events while revealing modern society to be a profoundly heartsick society. At the core of the book's journey is a walk during twilight--a moment of the day linked with the postcolonial phase, the aftermath of victory and of revolution, when events of the world come to the walker in an unplanned, unexpected, albeit tightly interrelated way. As an activity for peace, "walking" is here also a mode of active, expansive receptivity. With every step forward, the world of the disappeared lives on.

Trinh T. Minh-ha is a filmmaker, writer, composer and Professor of Rhetoric and of Gender & Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work includes numerous books, such asD-Passage. The Digital Way (2013), Elsewhere, Within Here (2011),The Digital Film Event (2005), Cinema Interval (1999), Framer Framed (1992),When The Moon Waxes Red (1991), Woman, Native Other (1989); eight feature-length films (includingForgetting Vietnam 2015, Night Passage 2004, The Fourth Dimension 2001 andA Tale of Love 1996, Surname Viet Given Name Nam, 1989), which have been honored in numerous retrospectives around the world; several large-scale collaborative installations, including, Old Land New Waters, 2007-2008, (3rd Guangzhou Triennale, China 2008) L'Autre marche (Musee du Quai Branly, Paris 2006-2009), The Desert is Watching (Kyoto Biennial, 2003); and Nothing But Ways (Yerba Buena,1999). She was the recipient of many awards, including the Wild Dreamer Lifetime Achievement Award at the Subversive Festival, Zagreb, Croatia, 2014; the Lifetime Achievement Award from Women's Caucus for Art, 2012; the Critics Choice Book Award of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA) for the book Elsewhere Within Here, 2012; and theTrailblazers Award, MIPDOC, Cannes International Documentary Film Event, France, 2006.