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On Irreconciliation
No full textOn Irreconciliation focuses on the less examined but frequent ethnographic instances when survivors refuse to forgive in response to persistent impunity of past injustices, particularly, in the face of absence-presence of the rule of law and staged processes of justice which serve the powerful.- An ethnographically-informed, interdisciplinary theorisation which makes irreconciliation visible in the contexts of Northern Ireland, Papua New Guinea, Mozambique, Bangladesh, Canada, Argentina, Sri Lanka, Colombia, USA and UK- Triangulates a discussion of the rule of law within processes of unresolved genocidal injustices, debates relating to statues of slave owners, racial prejudice and institutional responses - Contributors demonstrate the relationship of irreconciliation with law, aesthetics, temporality, resistance and the limits of the concept- Makes a theoretical and ethnographic case for irreconciliation as both a social and political phenomenon- Proposes an understanding of the past based on a positive commitment to ‘irreconciliation’ which might interest anthropologists, historians, philosophers, critical legal and political theorists, peace, conflict resolution and transitional justice scholar
Aurality of images in graphic ethnographies: Sexual violence during wars and memories of the feelings of fear
Get PDFThis article examines the role of graphic ethnography in mapping the objects and feelings of fear through the silence of images, through the aurality of this silence. By aurality, I refer to the sounds and feelings felt by the reader when seeing these images in their colours, visuality and contexts which are not brought out by words and texts alone. The article explores the new sociographies that emerge from this intercitationality of visceral fear, from the aurality of this dread, that survivors of sexual violence during the Bangladesh war of 1971 feel till today. It suggests that we need to go beyond the search for the ‘unsayable and unseeable’ to understand how survivors and their quotidian existence are intertwined with these objects of fear. Nothing is unseeable or unsayable for survivors here as they live through fear ‘as an environment’. The article explores the intertextual, intercitational registers between my book The Spectral Wound and my co-authored graphic novel, Birangona, in order to bring out the reparative aspects of graphic ethnography and the new forms of knowledge production
In pursuit of the ‘authentic’ Bengali: Impressions and observations of a Contested Diaspora
Get PDFThis article examines the commonalities and differences constructed among different Bengali diasporic communities in London that purport to determine the authenticity of an ethnic Bengali identity. I argue that the ‘dominant’, homogenous discourse of multiculturalism fails to take into account the contestations of Bengali identity based on religion and class. Overall I seek to focus on the processes of objectification whereby various aspects of the Bengali identity are evoked situationally. The role of history, memory, fantasy, narrative and myth is also explored in an attempt to show that difference and commonality is relational
Moments of Lightheartedness: Graphic Ethnography Unsettling the Weightiness of Fieldwork
No full text‘Occupying’ the womb: Disrupted kinship futures and sovereign logics in sexual violence during wars
Get PDFThis article seeks to ethnographically highlight the multiple uses of gene/alogy (as explored by Franklin and McKinnon in the 2000s) in the context of the Bangladesh war of 1971, and hence maps out the range of violence and ambivalences at the heart of kinship. It aims to do so by exploring the process through which disrupted kinship futures are seen as a cornerstone for discourses of war and sovereign practices to justify sexual violence during wars. The formation of Bangladesh in 1971 coincided with the rape of 200,000 (contested and official numbers) Bengali women perpetrated by the Pakistani army and its local collaborators. The article explores the occupation of the womb, that is, the connotation of genetic or ethnic fixing through sexual violence by the Pakistani army, which is apparently an attempt to disrupt the kinship futures of East Pakistan (that later became independent Bangladesh). The sovereign logic of disrupting kinship futures of those that one feels the need to attack, weaken and annihilate (in this case East Pakistanis) is, however, based on a process of naturalisation of inequalities drawn from historical and racialised accounts. The article argues that the sovereign belief in being able to genetically and behaviourally ‘fix’ East Pakistanis through wartime sexual violence, and to instil fear, is possible through the sovereign inhabitation of the inhumanity of sexual violence. Therein lies the vulnerability of sovereign power, the paradox of kinship and its processes of inclusions and ruptures in the future. In seeking to develop a wider theoretical contribution about kinship as the cornerstone of statecraft and wars, the article also seeks to show how military rape alters the grounds of the nation itself, the experiences and imaginations over a period of half a century, and instils various forms of ambiguities about the history of wartime sexual violence
Muktir Gaan (songs of freedom), the raped women and the migrant identities of the Bangladesh war.
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