ABSTRACT
In his book American Holocaust, David Stannard argues that we should not ask ourselves whether an American holocaust “can happen again,” but rather whether it “can be stopped.” Stannard’s provocation orients my reflection on genocide and agency. My intervention seeks to offer two methodological considerations. First, I develop the notion of exemplarity as a methodological orientation for thinking about genocide. Drawing from T.W. Adorno’s negative dialectics, exemplarity allows critical assessment of the singularity of genocide in terms of the logic particular to a historical experience as well as the general/universal logic that exceeds that experience, thereby beginning to develop what this volume offers as a distinction between “genocide” and “the genocidal.” Second, I elaborate the notion of institutional agency in order to more precisely articulate the relation between a historical experience and its transposable logic—between genocide and the genocidal. Agency, I argue, is a feature of institutional distinctions that have a material and logical history. I articulate the notion of institutional agency by developing Aníbal Quijano’s concept of coloniality of power in light of discussions of genocide in America. In this context, I consider Elga Martínez-Salazar and Jodi Byrd’s work.
