Pub Date : 2022-12-16DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2022.2157306
Chrisalice Ela Joseph, Vinod Balakrishnan
The Burmese Refugee Exodus of 1942 was one of the worst forced migrations in South Asia. The capture of Burma by the Japanese during the Second World War forced the British to retreat and the occupants to flee as refugees to India. Despite its magnitude and impact, it remains largely understudied by both historians and scholars. The few records that exist are largely Eurocentric and reduce the Indian refugees to a nameless, faceless mass of travellers. Not only were the refugees victims of official apathy and neglect, they were also victims of historical amnesia. This essay makes a case for the refugee archive in the backdrop of the Burmese Exodus of 1942. Hannah Arendt’s concept of the refugee as human condition forms the theoretical framework of the essay. It draws on Arendt’s concept of “spaces of appearances” to conceptualize the refugee archive as alternative spaces of appearances that allow the refugee to be visible and be heard and seen in public. It then reads the Burmese refugee memoir Ayya’s Accounts: A Ledger of Modern Hope in India in the light of Arendt’s concepts of “refugee as vanguard”, “storytelling as political action” and “spaces of appearances” to illustrate how refugees through their narratives create a space of appearance for themselves, become agents of change and thus contribute to inclusive refugee policies. This essay argues for a comprehensive refugee archive that registers the refugee in history and has implications on inclusive policies.
1942年的缅甸难民大逃亡是南亚最严重的被迫迁移之一。第二次世界大战期间，日本占领了缅甸，迫使英国撤退，占领者作为难民逃往印度。尽管它的规模和影响很大，但历史学家和学者对它的研究在很大程度上仍然不足。现存的为数不多的记录主要以欧洲为中心，并将印度难民减少为一群无名无名的旅行者。难民不仅是官方冷漠和忽视的受害者，也是历史失忆症的受害者。本文以1942年缅甸大逃亡为背景，对难民档案进行了分析。汉娜·阿伦特关于难民作为人类状况的概念构成了本文的理论框架。它借鉴了阿伦特的“表象空间”概念，将难民档案概念化为另一种表象空间，使难民能够在公共场合被看到、听到和看到。然后，在阿伦特的“难民作为先锋”、“讲故事作为政治行动”和“表象空间”概念的指导下，阅读缅甸难民回忆录《Ayya’s Accounts: A Ledger of Modern Hope in India》，说明难民如何通过他们的叙述为自己创造一个表象空间，成为变革的推动者，从而为包容性难民政策做出贡献。本文主张建立一个全面的难民档案，记录历史上的难民，并对包容性政策产生影响。
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Pub Date : 2022-12-16DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2022.2157305
Farid Hafez
This essay examines Austria’s political approaches to Islam between 2011 and 2022 at the interface of political science and religious policy as informed by postcolonial studies. Austrian political approaches to Islam are analyzed through the study of publications, press releases, government and party programmes, as well as laws, all conceptualized as an Islam dispositif. Against the backdrop of a restrictive policy on integration, it is considered that a similar situation exists for political approaches to Islam. In addition to an ambivalence of ideas of openness and restriction, the co-option of right-wing positions taken from the racist far right can be observed, which goes hand in hand with seemingly tolerant speech. The essay shows how on a discoursive level, the civilization and modernization theorem of the Habsburg Monarchy can today be found in the discourse of an Austrian/European form of Islam that stands for progress, enlightenment, and modernity in contrast to adherents of an alleged “political Islam” that represents independent Muslim agency. This idea of “political Islam” is then used to legitimize legal discrimination of Muslims. In all these discourses, Said’s concept of othering acts as a central formation for those in dominant positions to legitimate their position of power.
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Pub Date : 2022-10-06DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2021.2003228
Xiao Liu, Shuang Shen
The idea for this special issue grew out of a workshop the co-editors organized at the Conference on “InterAsian Connections VI: Hanoi” in December 2018. This special issue conjoins critical infrastructure studies with inter-Asian perspectives in an effort to transcend a techno-nationalist framework of infrastructure as solely an instrument of state power and superpower competition. We are particularly interested in exploring the “deep time” that critical infrastructure studies bring to the examinations of local and transregional connections in Asia and beyond. We argue that the “deep time” of infrastructure is evident in the ways in which previous and existing social relations are mobilized, appropriated, transformed, obscured or occluded with newer layers of infrastructural development. Furthermore, the essays collected here demonstrate self-reflection on the pertinence of the study of infrastructure to the production of knowledge about regions and regionalization in general, foregrounding such questions as “What is gained by adopting an infrastructural approach on ‘Asia’ as a social and cultural imaginary?” and “What does it mean to call something infrastructural?”
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Pub Date : 2022-10-06DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2021.2015701
M. Ernst, Rossen Djagalov
Over the last decade, a hitherto forgotten literary magazine, Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings (1968–1991), has become an object of ever-greater scholarly attention. Indeed, whether seen as an instantiation of the Third World project in literature, a pre-history of postcolonial studies, or a distinct vision for world literature, Lotus offers a fresh perspective on many old questions. Before the magazine could be launched, however, many practical questions had to be resolved. Where would the resources for such a publication be found? How could it become a representative journal? In which country should such an international magazine be located and how would it operate in practice? Finally, who would edit or otherwise contribute to it? At least, these are the questions that Faiz Ahmad Faiz considered in his October 1963 proposal to the Soviet Union of Writers. In the process of answering them, he also offers the most fascinating of snapshots of Arab literary, intellectual, and political life ca. 1963. We translate it below along with two other documents that accompanied it in the archival file: the formal proposal the Soviet Writers Union leadership sent to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, where, basing themselves on Faiz’s letter, they requested permission and funding to establish and run the magazine, and finally, a brief biography of Faiz written by his Russian translator. Beyond illuminating the specifics of Lotus’s history, the publication of these documents should illustrate the immense utility of the Soviet archive for postcolonial or Global South scholarship. There are thousands of such documents there, waiting for their hour.
在过去的十年里，一本迄今为止被遗忘的文学杂志《莲花:亚非文学(1968-1991)》已经成为一个越来越受到学术界关注的对象。的确，无论是被视为第三世界文学项目的实例，后殖民研究的史前史，还是世界文学的独特愿景，《莲花》都为许多老问题提供了一个新的视角。然而，在杂志发行之前，有许多实际问题需要解决。在哪里可以找到这种出版物的资源?它是如何成为有代表性的期刊的?这种国际杂志应设在哪个国家?它在实践中如何运作?最后，谁来编辑或以其他方式贡献?至少，这些是Faiz Ahmad Faiz在1963年10月向苏联作家提出的建议中所考虑的问题。在回答这些问题的过程中，他还提供了1963年左右阿拉伯文学、知识分子和政治生活的最迷人的快照。我们将其翻译如下，并附上档案文件中的另外两份文件:苏联作家联盟领导层向苏联共产党中央委员会提交的正式提案，他们根据Faiz的信，请求批准和资助创办和经营杂志，最后是由他的俄语翻译撰写的Faiz简短传记。除了阐明Lotus历史的细节之外，这些文件的出版应该说明苏联档案对后殖民或全球南方奖学金的巨大效用。那里有成千上万的这样的文件，等待着他们的时间。
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Pub Date : 2022-10-03DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2022.2080574
Rachel Douglas
How to decolonize time from the perspective of the Caribbean, particularly Haiti? This essay tackles the question of decolonial temporalities in narratives of Haitian pasts, presents, and futures. For Caribbean historians, the past of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) provides a transformative set of coordinates for projecting anti- and decolonial visions. This essay pays special attention to the layered histories and temporal condensations entailed in James, Trouillot, and Casimir’s interventions. To discuss decolonial time, this essay analyzes a range of histories, dramas, literary texts, and oral storytelling. Connections across these different texts, and, especially, their various iterations over the decades will be used to explore the shifting understandings of time and historical change. The essay will illustrate how new visions of the past are understood through the changing lenses of the present. How, the essay asks, are imagined futures grounded in, shaped by, and how do they refashion in turn, historical pasts and contemporary presents? Rasanblaj – meaning gathering/reassembling/rebuilding in Haitian Kreyòl – is the central decolonial concept and process for this essay, which builds on Gina Athena Ulysse’s previous articulations. This essay’s argument links space to time and relates to the specific spaces of Haiti and the Caribbean, and to rewriting literary and historical narratives. Such is the power of rewriting and rasanblaj that they completely refashion any discussion of time and space in the postcolonial Caribbean literary and historiographical narratives discussed here.
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Pub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2022.2099944
C. Bushnell
This essay suggests that we reconsider orientalism by including women’s largely disregarded perspectives about the orient. It focuses on Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental as a model for disorientalizing the Orient through a poetics of adjacency – a creative process that puts voices, events, and circumstances side-by-side using modes borrowed from narrative’s sister arts – to suggest a basis for an orientalism that doesn’t forget Said’s Orientalism, but rather sets beside it another orient that modifies it. Generated by aesthetic strategies from cinematography and music, Djavadi creates the disoriental subject, one who has left the Orient but carries with her an alternate orient emerging from comparative practice built upon modes of recontextualization in the Kuleshov effect, of juxtaposition in rear projection, and of inversion suggested by the 45-rpm record. Notions of disorientation, beside, and cultural collage underwrite Djavadi’s plan of besidedness, which conceives an orient for the disoriental subject.
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Pub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2022.2104171
Doha Tazi Hemida
This article turns to the trajectory of an often ignored figure in the history of French Islamology, Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch. Through the trajectory and circuits of de Vitray's life and thought, it explores the ambiguity of a forgotten variety of twentieth-century French Islamology, one which attempted to make itself into a mystical study of mysticism and follow the internal logic of its object of study. This article considers the aspects of de Vitray's life and thought that cannot be purely reduced to the circuits of imperialism, or predestined to be a spiritualist search for the “mystical East” as the inferior other of the “rational West.” It looks at the possibility of partial disidentifications from the Orientalist commitment to the European imperialist project, “moments of departure” from classic Orientalism. These can be found in the moments of identification with the mystics who are studied by Islamologists like de Vitray. The East, here in the form of Islamic mysticism, no longer functions as “a career” but rather enables possessive and colonial epistemological attitudes to be defied. Through de Vitray's biography, trajectory and works, I suggest that the Orientalist “type” she represents introduces a form of double-translation that does not make the studied object immediately available for colonial use or scholarly possession, but rather generates a transformative conversion of the translator and scholar whose position of mastery is “cast into dust,” to use Rumi's words, and is transformed into a position of discipleship.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-31DOI: 10.1080/1369801x.2022.2099939
Dima Abdulmajeed Abduljabbar
Odalisques feature prominently in western paintings of the secluded harem especially at the height of such paintings' popularity in the colonial nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Lewis, 2004). When a painter draws an Oriental odalisque, he is sure to draw an artistically scopophilic object. While indulging himself in his sensual art, this same painter exercises his masculine power to exploit the body of the woman whom the odalisque now represents. Noticeably, the presence of a harem odalisque, be it a presence in writing or in visual art, recalls the seminal The Arabian Nights, the mecca of odalisques' lovers; and its enchanting harems and harem women, on top of them is the arch-odalisque Scheherazad. It is drawing on the heritage of The Arabian Nights and its plethora of Orientalist images that the Arab American poet Mohja Kahf (b. 1967) is inspired to entitle both her poetry collection E-mails from Scheherazad (2003) and the poem under scrutiny in this paper “Thawrah des Odalisques at the Matisse Retrospective” (Kahf, 2003, pp. 64–69). In drawing on that heritage, Kahf, a writer who belongs to a racial minority and is a feminist herself, uses the renowned odalisques painted by the French artist Henri Matisse (1869–1954) as a mouthpiece that exposes the enduring Orientalist stereotypes and counterattacks them. Through Matisse's odalisques, Kahf narrates a story of how a past replete with misconceptions about the Orient and Oriental women continues to feed mainstream Western thought sabotaging the image of Arabs and Arab Americans (and the women among them in particular). It is in the heart of New York, one of the world's most modern cities, that those women-slaves of art inaugurate their revolution against the enduring stereotypes and liberate themselves.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-22DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2022.2099941
Mantra Mukim
By placing itself strategically within the debates surrounding the first Hindi short story, its authenticity and its colonial context, this essay wants to understand the repercussions that any claim of “first-ness” has for literature in general and Hindi literary historiography in particular. The underlying assumption is that in claiming something as a “first”, one inaugurates a tension – an event – in history. Latent in such a claim is the suggestion that the event, the first short story in this case, actually inaugurates a kind of prose writing that is absolutely new and singular without any historical antecedents. Instead of making any historically definitive claims of its own, or vouching for one of the many contending Hindi short stories, this essay traces the gestures of historiography that circumscribe Madhavrao Sapre’s short story Ek Tokri Bhar Mitti, and announce its originality. The essay’s focus on the Hindi prose, especially short story, would be guided by the historiography of the form, the choice of narrative technique, thematic models, the register of Hindi used in the stories, and quite significantly, the place and motive of publication. Also relevant to the essay, as both a backdrop and a conceptual optic, is Derrida’s theorization of generic events – events that mark the beginning of a specific genre of writing and of the laws that give the genre its proper name. The proper name attributed to Sapre’s work, to the advent it marks, is kahaani or short story and, with Derrida, this essay will question the possibilities of both the advent and its attendant proper name.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-21DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2022.2099945
S. Shahbazi
I approach life writing as one of the most prominent forms of microhistory narratives which questions the grand narratives of history produced internationally and locally. Focusing on a transnational Iranian background woman writer, I argue that lived-experience narratives, despite their contradictions and the politics of publication, which has placed them into the category of “misery narratives”, are still epistemically value-laden and they need to be carefully and empathetically read. I draw on feminist phenomenology and use an intersectional methodology to study Dina Nayeri’s Refuge (2017) and her autobiographical article “The Ungrateful Refugee”, which mostly reflect on the experiences of border crossing and home making in relation to asylum seekers as marginalized identities. Focusing on multiple voices in this memoir, I show how asylum seekers coming from different social locations practise homemaking and create a sense of belonging to “home” in a host country that is not very hospitable towards them. I study the intersections of homeland, identity and politics, using life writing as an epistemology which sheds light on the questions of belonging.
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