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- Convenors:
-
Rik Adriaans
(University College London)
Kübra Zeynep Sarıaslan (University of Bern)
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- Stream:
- Displacements of Power
- Location:
- Julian Study Centre 1.02
- Sessions:
- Friday 6 September, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Diasporas, exiles and other migrant groups often seek justice for experiences of displacement and marginalization by engaging in recognition struggles. This panel examines how quests for voice and visibility are reconfigured through transnational media connectivity and populist distrust of elites.
Long Abstract:
Demands for the public acknowledgement of historical injustices and quests for affirmative self-images of marginalised groups remain a persistent feature of global cultural politics. This politics of recognition is especially pertinent for diasporas, exiles, refugees and other migrant groups. Separated from their homelands as a result of violent ruptures or economic meltdowns, they inherit traumatic pasts and suffer stigmatisation in their new sites of residence. While there is a sizeable literature of critical social theory on recognition (Taylor 1992; Fraser & Honneth 2004), the abstract and normative character of these debates makes them negligent of the unexpected lived consequences that recognition struggles have for those in whose name they are waged. A small anthropological literature does look critically at recognition (Fabian 1999; Povinelli 2002; Shneiderman 2014), but the concept has received little attention in the anthropology of diasporas and transnationalism.
This panel aims to discuss struggles of diasporas, migrants, and exiles to make themselves matter across localities through a politics of recognition that promises an emancipation from harm caused by inaccurate, demeaning or untruthful representations. We call for contributions that answer the following questions through the empirics of ethnography: how do diasporas negotiate conflicts over voice and visibility in an age of transnational media connectivity and viral reality (Postill 2014)? How are identity entrepreneurs in migrant groups held accountable when their pursuit of recognition becomes oppressive rather than emancipatory? What is the role of populist suspicions of representation by experts and elites in transforming today's affective geographies of recognition?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 6 September, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses diasporic UK Ahmadiyya Muslims through the lens of performance and practice. It conceptualizes recognition as a means by which the group produces internal identity and performs this identity with external state authorities to assist persecuted Ahmadi in the subcontinent.
Paper long abstract:
Ahmadiyya Muslims comprise a small but active proselytizing community which has its origins in colonial India. Ahmadiyya migrants and refugees have now established transnational lives in the diaspora because discrimination and persecution in Pakistan and elsewhere makes it impossible for them to remain in their countries of origin. Drawing on the work of Schneiderman, Povinelli and others, my fieldwork in the UK considers how members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community have produced a shared identity through prayer, charity and education which instill ethical practice and a distinctive Ahmadiyya history and mission in its members. The recognition of Ahmadiyya identity can be understood though the terms performance and practice as theorised by Schneiderman. The practices which result in group-internal identity production are performed for non-Ahmadiyya audiences when the Ahmadiyya engage with political and other external authorities. While recognition of the Ahmadiyya is in Pakistan constituted as negative, the outcome of decades of religio-political conflicts in the subcontinent, in the UK, where the Ahmadiyya have established themselves as a moderate, community-focused minority, recognition is more positive. In this paper I consider how the Ahmadiyya seek visibility and gain recognition from British members of Parliament and others, through formal and informal interactions to ameliorate the conditions of the silenced, disenfranchised and persecuted members of the Ahmadiyya community living in Pakistan. In this way the visibility and recognition the Ahmadiyya can harness in the diaspora is strategically employed to promote support for the Ahmadiyya in the subcontinent who are denied the recognition they seek.
Paper short abstract:
The 2015 centennial of the Armenian Genocide gave birth to an unprecedented traffic in commemorative cultural forms between Yerevan and the Los Angeles diaspora. This paper analyzes the event as a shift in recognition politics from legal declaration to image circulation.
Paper long abstract:
The 2015 centennial of the Armenian Genocide gave birth to an unprecedented commemorative culture, both in the post-Soviet country and in the nation's global diaspora. This paper traces the transnational circulation during the 2015 events to explore the dialectical interplay between two contradictory forces in the Armenian world: a struggle for justice, most visibly articulated by the Los Angeles diaspora, and an aspiration towards unity, rooted in the publicity campaign from the post-Soviet government in Yerevan. The mostly grassroots cultural production in the diaspora gave a new spin on the exilic institutions' treatment of genocide recognition as a 'thing-like' good to be obtained, counted, accumulated and exhibited to propel further recognition, while drawing inspiration on horizontal ties in the LA cityscape. The post-Soviet government's forget-me-not campaign, by contrast, reworked resonances of the Soviet semicentennial of 1965, at the time proclaimed to win the sympathies of the 'reactionary bourgeois' forces of the diaspora, into new forms that make Armenia appear as the center of the global struggle for genocide recognition. The interplay between the two campaigns reveals a shift in the moral epistemology and affective geography of genocide recognition. As legal declarations and statements by politicians are increasingly seen as instrumentally driven, recognition is today produced as popular awareness afforded by circulating objects, hashtags and digital images.
Paper short abstract:
Journalists, academics, intellectuals, and artists in Turkey have increasingly faced persecution and imprisonment for criticising state practices. How the global audience hears their critique is the question I aim to answer in this paper.
Paper long abstract:
With the statutory decrees released by the government since the declaration of a state of emergency after the failed coup attempt of 15 July 2016, the vast majority of alternative/oppositional online news channels in Turkey was closed down - together with print media. Nowadays, the financial support of international organisations enables a limited number of online news portals to survive. After independent journalism has become almost wholly extinguished in Turkey, we can observe an 'epidemic of' 'brain drain' of journalists who until then had shaped Turkish public discourse significantly. Journalists, academics and artists have emigrated to Europe, particularly Germany, which has become the new centre for critical news production on Turkey. They established new networks and communities by mobilising social and historical ties with Europe. In this paper, I provide preliminary findings of my research on this group of cultural producers - particularly journalists - and discuss the ways in which their criticism directed towards the government at home circulated and received in Europe.
Paper short abstract:
This paper shows how flows of material/digital content between socialist Havana and the capitalist Miami diaspora point to emerging contested yet co-constituted formations of Cuban identity on and off the island through networks that simultaneously democratise and individualise media consumption
Paper long abstract:
For several years Cuba's 'el paquete' has attracted international attention for its ability to procure and circulate foreign digital content across an island with limited internet connectivity, with many supposing this content is imported to Havana from the nearby diasporic centre of Miami. This paper explores how the island's domestic networks of digital media sharing are in fact exported from Havana to Miami as objects both for public exhibition and personal consumption. Cubans in the diaspora import el paquete as a means of connecting with their homeland and media that invoke nostalgia for them, but also as a way of maintaining a variety of consumerist choice they once enjoyed in socialist Cuba, which, due to copyright restrictions in the U.S.A, remains prohibitively expensive for them to access in the diaspora. Meanwhile others in the diaspora are now seeking ways of inserting targeted advertising for Miami businesses into Cuba's el paquete as it centralises around increasingly individualised brand and 'reputation', in the hope of drumming up further business via relatives back on the island and remittances. This paper shows how, quite apart from being an isolated island, Cuba is in fact highly interconnected with multiple transnational communities, and by tracking el paquete and flows of digital media, we see the island as central in connecting these otherwise disparate digital communities. A focus on these digital flows also reveals co-constituted processes of identity formation which in some ways resist hegemonic or 'capitalist' conceptions in the U.S.A.