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- Convenors:
-
Mihir Sharma
(Universität Bayreuth)
Damani Partridge (University of Michigan)
Esra Ozyurek (University of Cambridge)
Jasmijn Rana (Leiden University)
Duane Jethro (University of Cape Town)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Damani Partridge
(University of Michigan)
- Discussant:
-
Mihir Sharma
(Universität Bayreuth)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
What happens to race when the empire crumbles? This panel will explore and engage anthropological investigations of race and racisms amidst the appearance of a crumbling empire, as statues are torn down and museums get reconceptualized.
Long Abstract:
What happens to race when the empire crumbles? Are we in the midst of a major social transformation, or is something else at work? What are the implications for the study of and the everyday experience of race and racism?
Is the empire crumbling? If so, what is the significance for anthropology and anthropological investigation, particularly from the perspectives of Black, Indigenous and researchers of Color? If the empire is not crumbling, how might we understand the implications for those who have been trying to undo its colonial persistence? What are the implications for their research and activism? As the more public-facing venues of anthropological production, linked directly to the discipline's imperial legacies, are the current efforts to decolonize museums evidence of a crumbling or a reification of long-standing arrangements of power? Can these institutions ever be effectively put to other uses? Can the empire's other monumental forms be repurposed or undone, particularly in relation to race and racism?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Ezgi Guner (University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
In the shadow of crumbling empires, vanguards of the Turkish foreign policy collect the crumbs of another empire long gone in the African Sahel. This presentation analyses how the origin myth of the Agadez Sultanate is co-opted and its genealogical claims become evidence of Ottoman heritage.
Paper long abstract:
In the shadow of crumbling empires, the vanguards of Turkish foreign policy in Africa south of the Sahara collect the crumbs of another empire long gone to blow new life into it. This presentation analyses how the origin myth of the Agadez Sultanate is co-opted by the Turkish foreign-policy making and its genealogical claims become evidence of Ottoman heritage in the region. The oral tradition traces the genealogy of the Tuareg Sultanate in today’s Republic of Niger to the 15th century Ottoman dynasty. This myth of origin is being invoked and reworked today to signal the imagined racial kinship between the Tuaregs and Turks, the forgotten Ottoman legacy in the Sahel, and the latent potential for economic cooperation between the two countries. As the Sultanate’s origin myth becomes an object of fascination in Turkey, its political, racial and genealogical meanings were coopted. From an outdated justification of the Tuareg Sultan’s political and religious authority through patrilineal lineage to the Ottoman Sultan, the myth has been recycled to serve as evidence of contemporary Nigeriens’ loyalty to the Turkish nation, justifying therefore diverse forms of intervention in the continent. In this presentation, I discuss the new meanings the genealogical myth has acquired in the context of the neo-Ottomanism, the connections between the current racial ideology of Islamic egalitarianism and the scientific racism of the early twentieth century, and the ways in which they reinforce the government’s neoliberal agenda.
Umut Yildirim (Geneva Graduate Institute)
Paper short abstract:
How does ecology make Empires crumble? How to register genocidal violence while recording the resurgence of multispecies life in occupied geographies in the context of genocide denialism? This paper considers the Armenian genocide through its ecological remnants and resistant roots on Tigris shores.
Paper long abstract:
How does ecology make Empires crumble? This paper considers the Armenian genocide through its ecological remnants and resistant roots on Tigris shores in Upper Mesopotamia.
"Resistant roots" is a way to theorize ecology as an outcome and archive of genocidal devastation. I propose an ecological perspective that makes human and nonhuman life-and-death politics visible and concrete where forms of research that relegate ecological life to a derivative cannot. Against the narrative arc of the sovereign archive of the Turkish state that still denies the genocide ever occurred, the centenarian mulberry trees on shores of Tigris River today are better be conceptualized as un-settling ecological roots. These centenarian trees are entrenched in the memory of diasporic Armenians as commemorative sites of homeliness as well as destruction. Trees, rivers, mountains, and gardens: They all do commemorate.
After Christina Sharpe (2016), I move beyond the mainstream notion of archival factuality to center "roots" as a racial and decolonial resource of critical knowledge that pushes back against genocide denialism. The paper interrupts genocidal settler archives that work to institute a settled ethos through erasure, confiscation, and reappropriation of ecological sites and to determine what and who is recognizable as part of a shared world or denied from it. Through photoshopped images, the paper will amplify the ways in which ecology has been pushed out the order of a dignified life and reduced to a background effect despite its analytical power to evidence Armenian nativity to land and the magnitude of genocidal massacres sites.
Marta Roqueta-Fernàndez (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)
Paper short abstract:
The text proposes the metaphor of race as a technology that operates by adhering implants to bodies. Its aim is to design analyses of race representation in media that consider the situatedness of the racialization regime displayed and the materiality of the media that enables the representation.
Paper long abstract:
Metaphors that regard race as a technology are used not only to study the investment of social, political and cultural practices to maintain a malleable notion of race that adapts to the evolving needs of Western societies (Benjamin, 2016; Chun, 2009; Jones & Jones 2017; Joyrich, 2009); but also to envision emancipatory practices that subvert current racialization regimes (Coleman, 2009).
Drawing on theories about the ambivalent role of media in the underpinning and questioning of power hierarchies (De Lauretis, 1987; Halberstam, 2008; Preciado, 2008; Torrents, 2016), the author proposes expanding the metaphor of race as a technology by adding that it operates by adhering implants to bodies, which signify them as racialized according to the colonial history of each society. The aim of the metaphor is to create a conceptual framework for the analysis of race representation that considers the materiality of the media that enables the representation, which will influence how racialized bodies are depicted, as well as the situatedness of the racialization regime displayed.
The author reflects on her research on audiences’ perception of race in the cartoon show Steven Universe (2019), and on personal experience as part of a feminist group that monitors how many racialized people appear as experts in Catalan mass media, to argue that considering the affordances and limitations of the materiality of media constitutes an integral dimension in the analysis of the role of print and (audio)visual products in the perpetuation and subversion of racialization regimes.
Damiana Otoiu (SNSPA, Bucharest)
Paper short abstract:
From the case of the de-museification of certain human remains kept in French and South African museums and their transformation into buried and memorialized ancestors, I propose to analyze the vocabularies, taxonomies, and techniques of knowledge production in physical anthropology collections.
Paper long abstract:
Since the 1990s, museum and university collections of human remains have been the focus of a series of international requests for restitution, made by representatives of the South African state to French and Austrian museums (the cases of the human remains of Sarah Baartman or Klaas and Trooi Pienaar) or national ones, formulated by representatives of indigenous populations towards the South African laboratories of paleoanthropology and anatomy (the case of the remains of Cornelis Kok II). These demands for restitution also provoke tensions between different indigenous political movements, as demonstrated by the recent process of "reburial" of human remains from Kruisrivier, Sutherland and "discovered" in 2017 in the collections of the University of Cape Town.
It is often the experts in human genetics who are called upon to find an answer to seemingly intractable questions that are becoming increasingly politicized. For example, which indigenous groups might be considered "descendant communities" and therefore have the right to claim the return of human remains and decide on the future of the remains?
From the case of the de-museification of certain human remains kept in French and South African museums and their transformation into buried and memorialized ancestors, I propose to analyze the vocabularies, taxonomies and techniques of knowledge production on physical anthropology collections. What research using paleoanthropological specimens is accepted by museum ethics committees or, on the contrary, refused? What is considered "bad" or "good science"? How are old technical and conceptual tools perpetuated in projects that declaratively propose to "decolonize knowledge"?
Bart Vanspauwen (Instituto de Etnomusicologia - Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation aims to explore which cultural initiatives Portuguese flag carrier TAP Air Portugal has deployed over the last decade to eventually shift between white (continental) and mixed (Atlantic) representations of being or 'feeling' Portuguese in a postcolonial, global world.
Paper long abstract:
My PhD, which developed research on an intercultural music festival in Lisbon, confirmed Bela Feldman-Bianco's contention that Portugal's 'metamorphosis' into a modern European nation - when it became an EU member in 1986 - not only recreated old imageries of universal Atlantic vocations, but also disguised its former colonial bonds between race and nation by promoting Portugal as a white, homogenous country. This awareness, combined with the idea of the CPLP-Community of Portuguese-Language Countries, founded in Lisbon in 1996, inspired me to analyze current strategies used by players in the field to both deconstruct and resignify European post-empires as potential places of hope. In this presentation, I focus on Portugal's flag carrier TAP Air Portugal, which has arguably played a central role in the construction of Portuguese cultural identity over time. Framing my work conceptually within current debates on the use of social memories and cultural narratives, I aim to shed more light on the ways in which notions of national belonging have come to be used by TAP. My specific objective is to study how over the last decade, this national airline has converted popular representations into a marketing model that extends to postcolonial communities of customers which it aims to both educate and fidelize. Particularly, which visual, sonic and discursive elements have conveyed feelings of hospitality or similar evocations of reconciliation in a postcolonial perspective? Ultimately, I am interested in finding out whether TAP's cultural strategies may eventually promote intercultural understandings, turning the societies it involves more inclusive.