The Problem with Innocence: Mercy, Clemency, and Liberal False Promises

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

On the first day of his second presidency, Donald Trump, a convicted felon, made headlines by pardoning 1500 people who were involved with the January 6 uprisings. Days earlier, outgoing president Joe Biden issued a series of pardons of his own. Some of those pardons were celebrated by those on the left, like the long-overdue pardon of Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier. Others were scoffed at, like Biden’s pardons of members of his own family, or seen as a regrettably useful safeguard against the administration to come, like the pardons of Anthony Fauci and other critics of the Trump administration.

But underlying both these pardons and the public outcry around them lies a set of fundamental questions of the unreliable yet durable notions of innocence, pastoral powers of mercy and meaning making. This panel will interrogate the liberal fantasy that underlies these determinations of innocence and mercy: the fantasy that a would-be-colorblind system that ultimately serves to pathologize, capture, punish or free people based on “truth,” all the while, weaponizing regimes of identity to mobilize the same notions of innocence and mercy against itself.

In this roundtable discussion, we will consider the current geopolitical problems of law and empire as mobilized by both liberals and the right, allowing for a glimpse into the possibility of something other than. We raise questions about political regimes mobilizing problems of innocence by passing anti-trans, anti-migrant, anti-resistance and genocidal laws that claim to protect the “innocence” of white – patriots, cis-women and the quintessential innocent subject, a (white) child (Ticktin 2017 Meiners 2016). Additionally, this panel highlights the entanglements of legal structures with faith driven sovereign powers of mercy, redemption and determinations of innocence, as drivers of othered lives that are impossible, removable and disposable (Wang 2014). Ultimately, how do notions of innocence and pastoral powers of determination stay unperturbed despite the moral, political and legal chaos that arise from our inability to question these as pillars of our legal and social consciousness? And what possibilities exist to facilitate the fall of the empire by re-centering and de-stabilizing the notions of innocence and mercy?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Amrah Salomón J., University of California-Santa Barbara

Panelists

• Ilā Ravichandran, University of Washington Tacoma

• Erica Meiners, Northeastern Illinois University

• Hannah Manshel, University of Hawaii At Manoa

• Cameron W Rasmussen

Biographical Information

Writer, educator and organizer, Erica R. Meiners’ current books include For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State (University of Minnesota 2016); the co-authored Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence (Verso 2020); and with Haymarket Press a 2018 co-edited anthology The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Towards Freedom; and the co-authored 2022 Abolition. Feminism. Now. A Visiting Scholar at a range of universities and centers - Humbolt University, Trent University, CUNY Graduate Center, the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, and Chicago’s Leather Archives and Museum, Erica has published articles in a wide range of publications including In These Times, Social Text, Radical Teacher, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Advocate, Boston Review. The Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor at Northeastern Illinois University, Erica is a member of her labor union, University Professionals of Illinois, and teaches classes in education, gender and sexuality studies, and justice studies. Most importantly, Erica has collaboratively started and works alongside others in a range of ongoing mobilizations for liberation, particularly movements that involve access to free public education for all, and other queer abolitionist struggles. A member of Critical Resistance, the Illinois Death in Custody Project, and the Prison+Neighborhood Arts / Education Project, Erica is a sci-fi fan, an avid runner, and a lover of bees and cats.


Ilā Ravichandran is an Assistant Professor of Legal Studies at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on the intersections of science and law to engage with the global policing apparatus and US-Israeli Empire. To this end, her current research on the Post-Genomic Prison, is a multi-method inquiry that analyzes the expanded use of genetics and genomics as a tool of racialized policing, with particular attention to the assemblages that converge to promote such an apparatus. She is also a co-author of the collectively authored book Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago (University of Minnesota Press 2024). Her writing, organizing, teaching and art are all oriented towards liberatory and emancipatory futures in the making.


Hannah Manshel is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Hawai’i Mānoa. Her book manuscript, Spirits Before the Law: Faith, Race, and Freedom Beyond Property, pairs early- and nineteenth-century American texts with contemporary media to trace the enduring legacy of how people have turned to faith, broadly defined, to undermine a US legal system founded upon slavery and settler colonialism. Her work has been published in American Literature, Early American Literature, and American Literary History, Criticism, and Women & Performance.


Cameron W. Rasmussen is an educator, researcher, social worker, and facilitator, and an Assistant Professor in the Thompson School of Social Work & Public Health at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. His research is focused on issues of accountability, restorative and transformative justice, and the intersections of social work and abolition. Previously he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Social Intervention Group at Columbia School of Social Work and was an Associate Director at the Center for Justice at Columbia University. Cameron is a Co-Editor of Abolition and Social Work: Possibilities, Paradoxes and the Practice of Community Care and is a Collaborator with the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work (NAASW). He completed his PhD in the Social Welfare program at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Respondent
Amrah Salomón J
Amrah Salomón J. is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California Santa Barbara specializing in transnational Indigenous Studies, Borders, Latinx/Latin American Studies, Environmental Justice, Media and Pop Culture, Research Justice, and Women of Color and Indigenous Feminism. She is a current UC Hellman fellow and a former University of California President's Postdoctoral, Ford Foundation, and Davis-Putter fellow. Her work has received awards from the University of California, San Diego, University of California Humanities Research Institute, the Alliance4Empowerment, and the National Association of Ethnic Studies. Her forthcoming manuscript, Confluences: Indigenous Fugitivity on the Border examines the history of non-federally recognized O’odham and Yo’eme peoples at the confluence of the Colorado and Gila Rivers.