On Grammars of Listening as Grammars of the Unheard-Of (Inaudito): The Resistance of Testimony

Doing Gender Lecture with María del Rosario Acosta López (University of California, Riverside)

The event is organised by the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG) in collaboration with the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies, the Memory and Heritage Network and the UU Graduate Gender Programme (GGeP).
Chairs: Ana Miranda Mora and Susanne Knittel

María del Rosario Acosta López’s talk will be devoted to her most recent book, Gramáticas de la escucha: hacer audible lo inaudito (published with Herder in the spring of 2026 and forthcoming with Fordham, exp 2028). As a result of her work with survivors of paramilitary violence in Colombia and police torture in Chicago, in trauma-informed contexts, the book is guided by one question: how to approach the epistemic and aesthetic effects of “traumatic violence” from a philosophical perspective? More specifically, she asks what it would mean to listen to testimonies of these forms of violence without translating them into existing frameworks of meaning that risk reducing, silencing, and erasing their singularity. She describes this as a “radical form of listening,” and the book is fundamentally an investigation into the conditions of possibility for this form of listening from a decolonial perspective.

The book begins by exploring the kind and quality of “hermeneutic damage” we face when violence affects not only the bodies, lives, and worlds it aims to colonize, control, and destroy but also our ability to make sense of its devastating effects. I propose approaching this question through “grammars of listening,” defined as the criteria and rules that determine (and can also destabilize) what becomes audible when colonizing traumatic violence is the grammar that organizes our listening. The book then explores what kinds of experiences, forms of narration, and practices of sense—understood broadly—might disrupt, interrupt, question, and subvert those criteria to render the unheard and unheard-of aspects of traumatic violence audible. This includes making them communicable, memorable, and believable, if and when possible.

María del Rosario Acosta López is Professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies and a Cooperating Faculty member in the departments of Comparative Literature and Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. She teaches and conducts research in aesthetics, critical theory, political philosophy, and decolonial studies, with an emphasis on issues of memory and trauma in the Americas. Her recent publications focus on aesthetics of resistance in Latin American art, decolonial perspectives on memory and history, and epistemic injustice and epistemic violence.

She has recently co-edited volumes on transitional justice in Colombia (Planeta 2023) and politics of memory in Colombia (World Humanities Report, 2023), and special issues on Memory and Art in Colombia (H-Art 2025) and Latin America and the Caribbean (Palabra y razón, 2024).
Her most recent book is titled Gramáticas de la escucha: hacer audible lo inaudito (Herder, 2026, and in preparation in English for Fordham).

Registration: registration is appreciated. Please send an email to nog@uu.nl with your name and affiliation.