Laurence Ralph’s talk “Global Reckonings with Torture” built on his book The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence to examine corporeal connections and theoretical divergences in the torture enacted in Chicago police departments and in Guantanamo Bay. His presentation attended to the physical and conceptual legacies of police violence in Chicago, his own approach to ethnographic research, and the interplay of dialogues around domestic and international torture.

Ralph traces his work to analyze and address police violence back to community meetings in which he participated in Chicago, where residents transformed individual experiences of violence into mechanisms of police accountability, particularly through invocations of Jon Burge’s legacy. Burge was a police captain for the Chicago police who frequently employed torture to force confessions, and while his practices were a widely known open secret, they were publicly named during a civil suit by Andrew Wilson. Closely associated with Burge’s regime of torture is a particular device known as the Black Box: a hand-cranked electric generator connected to alligator clips used to elicit confessions. The physical Black Box surfaces in survivors’ rememberings as an icon for potentially memorializing the individually distinct, but fundamentally shared, experiences of torture; as Andrew Holmes, an outspoken torture survivor, says, “the Black Box is everything.”[i] Additionally, Ralph outlines a conceptual Black Box to explain the pattern of Chicago police maintaining silence around the known practices of torture. This theorized Black Box captures their refusal to explore why or how the regime of torture persists, but rather signals their acceptance that fear of retribution and a presumed criminal culpability is adequate justification for violence. Burge figures infamously within the memory of the Chicago residents with whom Ralph dialogues throughout The Torture Letters, but he also serves as an apt example, Ralph argues, of how police torture is maintained as an open secret through inaction and silence/ing of police officers.

Practicing what he calls “ethnographic lettering,” Ralph centers his exchanges with interlocutors as the terms for analyzing and theorizing about torture. Ralph’s research develops as open letters, written to his interlocutors or those identified by his interlocutors. This research methodology shifts away from a descriptive, or extractive, model and effectively promotes relationships of solidarity with interlocutors (rather than “research subjects”), centers their concerns, and produces ethnographic work that centered constituents as the key audience. This framework identifies very specific audiences to whom Ralph writes and limits the need to tell a generalist history of violence or revert to writing pornography of torture. Rather, these open letters angle analyses towards engaged models of preventing torture, and his explicit audience and clear intention skirts the dangerous patterns of descriptive voyeurism. Ethnographic lettering as an anti-oppressive research methodology emphasizes the importance of having an embodied stake in the research and emphasizes opportunities of bringing interlocutors from diverse spaces and times into conversation with one another.

Following this call for conversation, Ralph incorporated his research in Chicago with conversations he has maintained with Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian man who was tortured and detained at Guantanamo Bay for 14 years. Building on personal correspondence with Slahi, Ralph explored the hypocrisy of Western nation-states that condemn international human rights violations while maintaining their own institutions of torture, the opportunities and limitations of centering his analysis on hierarchies of power organized along boundaries of social difference (especially race and religion), and potential space for global alliances between all those who have been “negatively affected by the use-of-force continuum.” Ralph uplifts Slahi’s own words as analysis and as evidence, and while he acknowledges that they come into conversations from different spaces, times, and positionalities, he offers this alliance: “We insist that no one ever deserves to be tortured.”[ii]

Ralph’s commitment to developing and living out alternative norms for ethnographic research deeply connects to the concerns we have raised with regard to anthropological research and the discipline, in abstract. We have wondered numerous times whether anthropology/-ists can engage effectively, if at all, with issues of social injustice and oppression given the discipline’s roots as a colonial study of the “savage” (see Trouillot 2003). While these questions are necessary to engage with its lineage, concluding that all anthropology is thus innately flawed erases the earnest work of scholars like Ralph who envision alternatives and pursue meaningful relationships with interlocutors. Refusing to idolize the work of intellectuals as the experts or the solution, Ralph frames his work as just one kind of contribution: “I’ve done, as an academic, what I know how to do best: research, and study, and write”.[iii] Undoubtably academic, his work transgresses expectations of fieldwork by bringing into being content produced by, with, and for the interlocutors with whom he works in solidarity. Their collaboration suggests a framework of doing anthropology that ties together the particular, the communal, and the global, and together they seek to heal legacies of injury by preventing futures of violence.

Works Cited:

Ralph, Laurence. “Global Reckonings with Torture.” Virtual, Tufts University, March 31, 2021.

———. The Torture Letters. The New York Times, 2020. https://vimeo.com/434846700.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness.” In Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World, 7–28. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2003. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04144-9_2.


Notes:

[i] Laurence Ralph, “Global Reckonings with Torture” (Virtual, Tufts University, March 31, 2021).

[ii] Ralph, “Global Reckonings with Torture.”

[iii] The Torture Letters.