Ieva Jusionyte on American Guns in Mexico: Exit Wounds (EF, JP)

John and Elizabeth had the chance to talk with Ieva Jusionyte, anthropologist, journalist, emergency medical technician. Her award-winning books include Exit Wounds, which uses anthropological and journalistic methods to follow guns purchased in the United States through organized crime scenes in Mexico, and their legal, social and personal repercussions.

Ieva described researching the topic, balancing structural understandings of how guns become entangled with people on both sides of the border with an emphasis on individual stories. The three also talked about how language captures and fails to capture violence, the ways violence and the fear of violence organize space, and the importance of a humble, responsive, and empathetic approach to speaking with people touched by gun violence.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power (1985)
• Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence (1991)
• Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (2004)
• Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World (2009) tr. by Lisa Dillman, see RTB episode 48 "Transform, not Transfer: Lisa Dillman on Translation
• Deborah Thomas, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, 2019
• Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985)
• Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (1998) and the "state of exception"
• Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and the "zone"
• Nathan Thrall, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama (2023)

Recallable Books/Films

Ieva suggested E.P Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: the Origin of the Black Act (1975) for its thoughtful framing of state violence and its incredible detail, and also Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (2000), for the ways in which the book's structure enacts its argument.

Elizabeth went with the documentary by Raul Paz Pastrana, Border South (2019), which also weaves together the stories of those affected, including the anthropologist Jason De León, in ways that account for the multidimensionality of human experience.

John prasied the contested Northern Irish spaces of Anna Burns' novel Milkman (2018)

Listen and Read Here.

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