REPRODUCING REGIMES OF IMPUNITY

In India, the phrase ‘fake encounter’ refers to the extrajudicial killing of a civilian followed by the official claim that the victim was a Pakistani infiltrator killed in a legitimate military encounter with police or army forces. This article explores the widespread pattern of fake encounters in Kashmir Valley in order to shed light on the processes through which violence and terror become fictionalized and fantastic, with Kashmiri bodies gaining a heightened visibility in a falsified form within a cultural imaginary of national security interests and public safety concerns. Identifying Kashmir Valley as a state of exception, I examine how the suspension of the rule of law gives rise to new agents and hierarchies of power and authority and new patterns of criminalization and paramilitarization throughout Kashmiri society. I also consider how the informalized practices of forced disappearance, fictionalized terror, and impunity for violence are produced and reproduced through the strategic manufacturing of public consent for violence against Kashmiris throughout Indian society at large.     

Doing research in a ‘conflict zone’: history writing and archival (im) possibilities in Jammu and Kashmir

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that in conflict zones like Jammu and Kashmir, the embodied stories of Kashmiris punctuate the past, often silenced by dominant Indian narratives. Narratives about certain key political events in the region's past co-exist with other forms of memory. Kashmiris weave these stories to make sense of the present, build connections to the past, and stake claims for the future. They build and nourish an archive based on lived experience, keeping a record of past wrongs. Novels, anecdotes and underground literature form part of this embodied archive, and provide a resource for recovering stories that remain silent in institutional archives which serve the interests of power. These interests are visible through restrictions on access to institutional archives, and demonstrate the effects of power and the overall politics of archives.     

Counter-maps of the ordinary: occupation,subjectivity, and walking under curfew in Kashmir

ABSTRACT

This article examines practices of resistance that thwart Indian state’s control over everyday life in Kashmir. The state frequently uses ‘curfew’ to dominate public space, shut down ordinary mobility, and suppress pro-independence politics. Curfews are enforced through punitive prohibitions and by activating the militarised infrastructure built to reinforce Indian rule over the region since 1947. Yet, Kashmiris are not passive objects of this control. Through overt and hidden practices of resistance and disobedience, like sangbāzi and, what I call, counter-mapping, they keep their aspirations for independence alive, while rebuilding a semblance of everydayness under the occupation. Desire to walk freely becomes the key metaphor for freedom from military control. Based on ethnographic and theoretical material, the article makes a case that in spaces under long-term military occupations political subjectivity is primarily expressed and enacted as a bodily demand to become visible in public space.     

“Their wounds are our wounds”: a case for affective solidarity between Palestine and Kashmir

ABSTRACT

Both Palestine and the Indian held Kashmir have become hallmarks of a postcolonial siege manifest in heavy militarisation, illegal occupation, human rights violations, and an excruciating love born from and for people’s resistance and solidarity. While different, strong overlaps exist between the two conflicts in having been?midwifed?by the waning British Empire in 1947; subsequent internationalisation and fighting against a type of contemporary international politics that subsumes them under so-called ‘Islamic terrorism.’ Also noticeable is the motif of ‘suffering’ that makes the tragedy of Kashmir resonate with the pathos of Palestine. This paper focuses on the vantage from Kashmir, where people herald the Palestinian struggle as pioneering and a beacon of just struggle. I illustrate how Kashmiris, have come to?harbour?for the Palestinians an ‘affective solidarity’ which is evident in their modes of resistance to lend support for the liberation of Palestine and credibility to the Kashmir’s own resistance movement.     

Looking at discipline,looking at labour: photographic representations of Indian boarding schools

Native American children were subjected to a rigidly enforced regime of acculturation in a federally funded system of Indian boarding schools. This paper explores the peculiar iconography of photographs of these Indian schools, hundreds of which can now be found in Internet archives. The advent of searchable photograph archives on the Internet makes possible new forms of visual ethnography analogous to a kind of archeology. Photographs can be examined and meanings imputed based on documentary evidence and theoretical understandings. First, a brief introduction to Indian schools will be provided. Then I will examine four documentary projects, each of which had its own representational agenda: first, Richard Pratt's use of photographs as a propaganda-of-the-image to garner support for Carlisle and other Indian schools; second, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) documentation efforts that included panorama photographs and a collection of shots from the Pacific Northwest by Ferdinand Brady that emphasize labour; third, Frances Benjamin Johnston's photographs representing Indian schooling as progressive education; and finally a recently discovered album of vernacular photographs from the Sacaton school in Arizona. The goal will be to describe the ‘circumstances and milieus' in which the photographs were made. In the conclusion I will turn to issues of sociological theory and meaning.     

Cooking up: Intestinal economies and the aesthetics of specular orality

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to make a psychoanalytical contribution to a cultural studies understanding of the logics — and fantasies — of commmodity consumption in the visual culture of late capitalism. Taking up the metaphor of the gut as a discriminating organ and of cooking as a textual production, we examine the relations between oral and ocular consumption, and between aliment and excrement, as expressed in two films from the 1980s which are centred around themes of food and money. Adrian Lynne's 9½ Weeks and Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and her Lover employ quite different aesthetics and display contrasting inflections of what we call ‘the edible complex’. The first fantasizes wealth as enabling an unstructured excess of consumption that can only end in exhaustion; the second reaffirms the structured distinctions associated with ‘quality’ in a class-divided society where wealth alone does not secure status or legitimacy. From a feminist perspective, the male characters in each text are interesting examples of masculinities not organized around the phallus, but around anal and oral eroticisms and a more primitive oral morality.     

The demobilization of diaspora: history,memory and ‘latent identity’

In the context of sustained interest in the mobilization of diasporic identities, I consider how and why diasporic identities might be demobilized over time. I use the case of an Indian Pakistani community in the UK and the USA (sometimes referred to as ‘Bihari’) to examine how historical memories of conflict are narrated in diaspora and the impact this has on the presence or absence of ‘diasporic consciousness'. The significance of memory in diasporic and transnational communities has been neglected, especially where the narration of historical events is concerned. The impact of forgetting has received particularly scant attention. I argue that, in the absence of this story, important lessons about the role of history in the formation of community are obscured. In this example, the ‘latent’ identities created on diaspora's demobilization help us to unpick the dyadic relations of ‘home’ and ‘away’ at the heart of essentialist conceptualizations of the concept.     

Decentering Power in Research with Criminalized Women: A Case for Photo-Elicitation Interviewing

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to the project of developing a visual criminology that reclaims social relationships and the humanity and visibility of criminalized people and strives to disrupt the ideological and political underpinnings of mass incarceration and the state’s reliance on punitive responses to social inequality. Using photo-elicitation interviewing (PEI), I draw on qualitative research with 36 formerly incarcerated women living in Chicago. I review PEI’s potential to disrupt the power differential between researchers and participants and to include research participants as collaborators in knowledge production. I examine how limitations imposed by an Institutional Review Board created ethical concerns about representing women’s images and constrained women’s role in the coproduction of knowledge. I argue that PEI based on participant-generated images can help to overcome some of the ethical and methodological tensions encountered in visual criminology.     

“Whose Side Are We On?” Revisited: Narrative Power,Narrative Inequality,and a Politics of Narrative Humanity

In 1967, Howard S. Becker gave a widely discussed and polemical presidential address entitled “Whose Side Are We On?” Here he introduced the idea of the hierarchy of credibility. Briefly reviewing the article, I suggest a little of how the world has moved on since then. The core of my analysis links symbolic interactionism to ideas of narrative power, narrative inequality, and narrative othering, sketching out a frame of generic forms of narrative power: domination, exclusion, negotiation, and resistance. I stress the dynamics of the subordinated standpoint and narrative othering. Drawing from a wide range of empirical examples where these processes are featured, I suggest many of us tacitly work with such ideas in our studies. I end by returning to Becker's question—Whose side are we on?—and answer: the side of humanity. Just what we mean by humanity raises contentious value claims, especially in these posthuman times. But understanding our humanities and the value challenge they pose provides the necessary prerequisite for answering Becker's question. From this, political action can flow, and a politics of humanity can be cultivated.     

Undercut

ABSTRACT

In this article I consider some representations of the figure of the indigene in contemporary Australia, and their implications for a range of issues and debates in cultural theory. In particular, I examine the positioning of the indigenous body within two related discourses that I term ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘hybridity’, or the discourses of happy hyphenation and happy hybridization, respectively. These discourses, I want to suggest, raise specific problems in an Australian historical context, where the effects of scientific racism are being confronted by indigenous peoples in relation to land rights claims and, more generally, the dominant culture's demands for an ‘authentic’, visible and unproblematic Aboriginality that can be both clearly marked and contained. The figure of Truganini has particular significance in these debates, precisely because her body has figured as the site of geneticist practices and discourses. Simultaneously I locate these representations in the context(s) of the monument year of 1993, contexts that encompass a mesh of interrelated cultural concerns sometimes simplified under the heading of ‘Australian national identity’.     

Seeing through transparency: Performativity,vision and intent 1

Abstract

This paper engages with debates around transformations in the production and circulation of images and the changes in modes of perception that these offer. Paul Virilio (1991, 1994) has argued that technological developments have produced a shift in the site of meaning‐production from the material reference space of the image (print or celluloid) to the time of visual contact by the viewer. I consider what significance these temporalities have in relation to social difference, and I develop debates around the performative to consider how the viewer is constituted in visual performativity. This focus on time and performativity opens up questions of how vision may constitute the agency, intention and responsibility of the viewer. Drawing on an example of visual irony in advertising, I explore how the temporal suspension of meanings allows for a suspension of the terms of intent and responsibility. This visual performative accesses and reworks the terms of social difference and privilege in what I have called ‘retroactive intentionality’.     

By all appearances: thoughts on colonialism,visuality and racial neoliberalism

ABSTRACT

In a Montreal neighbourhood in the fall of 2013, a community mural celebrating ‘diversity, adversity and solidarity’ was vandalized: the image of a Black woman was spray-painted white. In this paper, I take the events and discourses surrounding this incident and my personal responses to them as a starting point for examining the racialized politics of visual representation. Using critical race-class analysis informed by contemporary theories of Black visuality, I consider dynamics of Black invisibility and visibility in Canada and consider the role visual texts play in reinforcing, reproducing, and resisting racialized social relations. I argue for caution regarding politics of representation, and consider Black and Indigenous art practices for the creative forms of resistance to colonial-capitalist ideology and visual logics they offer.     

Beyond Home: Forging the Domestic in Shared Housing

ABSTRACT

This article examines how connections between intimacy and the realm of the domestic are propelled by conditions of shared residence. Informed by research among low-income families in Buenos Aires who organize to attain collectively owned housing, I depict how the propinquity provided by common social activism and co-residence creates both a political and an affective community. The groups in question organize their cohabitation and everyday life according to a set of explicit and collectively sanctioned rules and regulations concerning distribution and uses of space, maintenance, etc. However, living together also implies embracing a myriad of norms regarding aspects of intimacy and the body—particularly those related to sexuality—which, although alluded to by written rules, can only gain voice in the more nuanced, semi-public idioms of gossip and rumor. The article explores these assertions by considering several instances where rules and gossip intersected in deliberations about (im)proper attire in common areas, and the making of decisions about kinship and care. I describe the emotional undertones that emerge around these issues—such as jealousy, modesty, or suspicion—in order to examine how they articulate a domestic domain.

These reflections are based on extended interviews. In order to preserve my informants' anonymity I used pseudonyms in all cases.     

Imagined mosque communities in Russia: Central Asian migrants in Moscow

ABSTRACT

The article aims to shed light on mosque communities in Russia through the example of mosques frequented by Moscovites and by Central Asian migrants. I will make use of Anderson’s theoretical framework of ‘imagined community’ in analysing the material presented in the article. The main argument is that there are no real mosque communities and rather that the sense of community formed around mosques is imagined. There are nevertheless a variety of networks, groups and institutions within and around mosques. The article is based on fieldwork conducted in 2016 and 2017.     

‘Think imperially’: Indian journalists’ goodwill visits to White Australia, 1927 and 1947

ABSTRACT

Academic research on the White Australia Policy has spanned the history of Asian migration and policy-making initiatives in Australia. However, the role of popular transnational media images and stories of the past that inform the socio-cultural understanding of Australia–India cross-cultural relations has been under evaluated. In this paper, using unexplored archival material from popular newspaper reports and columns, I will examine the ‘goodwill visits’ of two Indian journalists, K. K. Lalkaka and Sir R. Srinivasa Sarma, to Australia in 1927 and 1947. By assessing the role of these two journalists, this paper will highlight transnational issues such as migration, ethnicity, race, class and trade between the two countries. Borrowing from Vineet Thakur’s research highlighting the role of first diplomats in the pre-independence era India, this article will contribute to the field of history in Indian diplomatic studies and historiography of Australian–Indian cross-cultural relations.     

The Dangerous Real: Queer Solo Performance in/as Active Disruption

Abstract

Like all radical community endeavours, queer performance in the United States has been shaped through resistance to restrictive ideologies. National insecurity over ‘indecent’ (read: queer) artistic expression in the US has been aimed at artists working in a variety of genres, and here I focus specifically on queer solo performance artists. This essay explores the dangerous realities that queer artists present to an imagined unified US national identity. I argue that queer solo performers operate as artistic activists, challenging homogenous fantasies about US culture through the queering of experience. Aesthetically disparate, their work is connected by common threads of vulnerability and precarity. The article asks how their work disrupts U.S. insecurities concerning intersections of sexuality, gender identity, race and religion.     

Reflections on conducting research on the ‘war on terror’: religious identity,subjectivity and emotions

In recent years there has been an increase in literature which has explored the insider/outsider position through ethnic identities. However, there remains a neglect of religious identities, even though it could be argued that religious identities have become increasingly important through being prominent in international issues such as the ‘war on terror’ and the Middle East conflict. Through drawing on the concept of subjectivity, I reflect on research I conducted on the impact of the ‘war on terror’ on British Muslims. I explore the space between the insider/outsider position demonstrating how my various subjectivities – the ‘non-Islamic appearance I’, the ‘Muslim I’, the ‘personal I’, the ‘exploring I’, the ‘Kashmiri I’ or the ‘Pakistani I’, the ‘status I’ and the ‘outsider I’ – assisted in establishing trust, openness and commonality. I conclude by demonstrating how the ‘emotional I’ allowed me to manage my own emotions and participants emotions.