Redemption Contests

This article investigates the role theology plays in generating political action inlas Américasthrough research on the School of the Americas Watch. It commends theopolitics as a lens for analyzing the competing projects of US military training and protests against that training, both of which work under the sign of redemption. The materiality of these signs can be apprehended by asking who is saving whom from what, by what means, and for what end. Anthropological analysis of these redemption narratives reveals the regimes of the invisible that animate opposing political projects—redemption for one through imperial formations enabled by the messianic figure of the white, male, heterosexual warrior, and redemption for the other through the agential presence of the dead who haunt empire’s wake.