Intimate Investments: Homonormativity, Global Lockdown, and the Seductions of Empire (original) (raw)

In the Name of Resistance: Not Letting Live, Not Letting Die. How political violence shapes life into a form of existence and what happens after it ends?

How political violence shapes life into a form of existence and what happens after it ends? The effects of political violence are unfathomable. Collectively disturbing, these brutal social and political conditions turn sites of lived and shared experiences into sites where the everyday of trying to make sense of what happened predominates. As do the questions of why did it happen, and how are we going to find space for pain and suffering that was left behind in the continuity of days to come. It takes a long time to appreciate, at the level of interpersonal and intersubjective relations, the undying trust of those who share their testimony of their life histories of violence and allow them to take forms of ethnographic accounts. These personal histories, full of intimate detail, spring from exactly the same sources within each individual where the ability to trust itself had been deliberately frayed. Are we living in a world inflicted by an epidemic of lovelessness, one may ask? (hooks, 1999: 7) A world where people's inherent vulnerabilities are lost in a way that pushes people to do what is ostensibly good for bad unconscious reasons, and inflict harm for the good ones? (Rechtman, 2021: 43) Where trauma spreads contagiously-without our being able to trace it consciously-violence takes on the form of a language we are forced to become fluent in as we collectively narrate its origins, escalations, and aftermath to one another, whether or not we ourselves been directly subjected to it. This essay, then, will be an attempt to follow Veena Das' approach to interrogating everyday life as "the place where the ordinary and the extraordinary fade into each other" (2020: 174) and, in so doing, testing the boundaries of ethnographic accounts that try to make sense of an experience of political violence, as well as the way they stretch and pull at the meaning of the language the brute forces utilise. I suggest that violence, even before it is expressed and enacted in the form of extended periods of

The Demonic Genius of Politics? Social Action and the Decoupling of Politics from Violence

International Journal of Conflict and Violence, 2017

This paper explores why new ways of “knowing” and acting on violence could lead to a reconsideration of Weber’s pessimistic coupling of politics and violence. This coupling remains hugely influential almost a century after it was formulated. It has become possible to revisit it, firstly, because of the potential for new interdisciplinary conversations. These have opened up ways of understanding violence as a properly social phenomenon and the significance of our vulnerable, social bodies to its reproduction. Secondly, social action on violence has led to recognition as “violence” of varied acts of somatic harm previously not named as such. In the process, expressions of violence reproduced over time and through spaces of socialization (from the intimate to the construction of the nation state) are socially and politically de-sanctioned. Politics and the State could be reconceptualised as essential for reducing (rather than monopolizing) violence and creating conditions to live toget...

KILLERS: a Review-Essay on “WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING" by Chris Hedges (2002) © H. J. Spencer [20Nov.2021] <9,000 words; 12 pages>

This is a review of a radical 200-page book by a literate, war-correspondent who reviews the intoxicating effects of war on the various conflicts that he personally saw in his 15 years of the modern madness of civil wars that have broken out in Central America, the Balkans and Iraq. Hedges exposes the lies and deceits that trigger these fratricidal and ethnic conflicts that are exploited by thugs and gangsters for their personal gratifications. He knows that "War is Hell" as he has been there many times during the first half of his life. He argues that war seduces entire societies, creating fictions that the public believes and relies on to continue to support conflicts. He also describes how those who experience war may find it exhilarating and addictive. Indeed: "war's seduction and inevitability and sometimes even necessity" are a recurring theme in this book. He describes the negative impacts of war on injured societies. He convincingly proves that war is the worst human behavior that can overtake a society. As a literate intellectual, he is able to give first-hand descriptions of the immediate feelings that arise when first exposed to direct, life-threatening violence. Although he claims that he wrote the book "not to dissuade us from war but to understand it, so that Americans, who wield such massive force across the globe, see within ourselves the seeds of our own obliteration." He contrasts the visceral immediacy of existential situations with the bland, dullness of modern life that makes war so attractive an adventure for too many men. He calls on his classical education to illustrate the long history of violence that has seduced warriors and professional soldiers for far too long.

Passionate Engagements, Intimate Entrapments: Love, War, and those caught between EMPIRE and Nation

Wasafiri, 2023

This essay looks at the rise of what Alisa Lebow calls the “first-person documentary” genre within the Filipinx diaspora as what Dada Docot identifies as ethnographic metacommentary, a method of expanding our thinking beyond what is representable on-screen, and “fleshes out difficulties of representation in relation to locatedness,” especially as it pertains to the “nuanced experiences of racialized bodies in transnational migration.” Filipinx filmmakers are turning their cameras onto themselves, reflecting on their own situated knowledges while at the same time teasing out the intimacies of colonization and imperialism that they continue to feel in themselves and their families until today. Their tiny, great realities map out filmmakers’ subjective spaces, situatedness, and hybridity within the Filipinx diaspora, critically examining the role that Filipino migration played in the colonization, settlement, and domestication of imperial and national peripheries such as Hawaiʻi and Mindanao. Memories of a Forgotten War (2002), by Camilla Benolirao Griggers and Sari Lluch Dalena, explores the Philippine American war even as the main filmmaker and narrator critically examines her own mixed heritage and the continued legacies of imperialism through the gendered, intergenerational violence that she and her foremothers felt. War is a Tender Thing (2013), by Adjani Arumpac, ruminates on her Moro father and Christian settler mother’s separation at the same time that Moros are calling for sovereignty and self-governance. Cane Fire (2020), by Anthony Banua-Simon, is a critical look at representations of Hawaiʻi in Hollywood, set alongside his own search for traces of his great grandfather, who migrated to Hawaiʻi from the Philippines to work at the plantations, and ended up becoming background actors in the very same Hollywood films. I argue that these documentaries have the ability to talk back to the imperial imaginary by creating a diasporic, archipelagic imaginary that is mindful of the legacies of empire in the island peripheries of both America and the Philippines today. These films can hopefully help us reflect on how narratives of migration must be critically revisited and unsettled in order not to reproduce imperial legacies. The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in Wasafiri Journal of International Contemporary Writing, Volume 38, Issue 4, November 2023 (DOI: 10.1080/02690055.2023.2238410). A version of this article was conferred the 2023 Biography Prize by the Center for Biographical Research (CBR) at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

Terror & Performance: Asymmetric Warfare, Martyrdom, & Necropolitics

Terrorism is not just an act of warfare, it is one which assumes an audience and is considered by some as a form of performance art. Terrorist organizations such as Daesh, Hamas, al-Qaida and Hezbollah make use of spectacles and extreme performances in order to accomplish their aims. Martyr videos, suicide bombing coverage, speeches by heads of state, activist recordings, satellite images on smartphones, and drone footage all take part in this ideological ‘war on terror’. This is a symptom of what Baudrillard calls the ‘Fourth World War’, a war in which “what is at stake is globalization itself”. Firstly, Achille Mbembe’s theoretical framework on race and colonization will be used to outline contemporary necropolitics, and showcase how race, terrorism and death are intertwined. Secondly, I will analyze how terrorist attacks hijack death as ‘sacrifice’. Thirdly, I will outline the aesthetics of violence, and the performativity of terror, in order to showcase how violence and terror are used to ‘make meaning’. Fourthly, I will illustrate the performativity of terrorism, showcasing how, viewed through the lens of ‘performance art’, military action is inefficient as a counter-terrorism effort.

The Body (Politic) in Pain: Violence Institutionalized as the Subjugated Subject (Torture, Terrorism, Refugees)

The enclosed draft paper is scheduled to be presented at the "Re-engaging Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain," a Thirtieth Anniversary Retrospective, conference at University of Brighton, Brighton, UK, December 10th-12th, 2015. The paper re-engages some of my own previous work on Elaine Scarry's landmark work, The Body in Pain. I argue that owing to her unwitting complicity in the dualism of Aristotle's attempt in de Anima to reserve the status of "knower"--and hence power--to a class of beneficiaries already well-established, Scarry misses important opportunities to articulate the "body in pain" in the wider context of institutionalized violence. I argue further that this re-inscribed dualism turns out to have devastating implications for the very ways in which conceive the subject--and most importantly the subjugated subject--especially in the contexts of pain experienced as the result of a "civilization" whose social order is rooted in and dependent upon that violence. Lastly, I show how analyses like my analysis of Scarry can lead to possible insight about how we conceive, for example, torture, rape, terrorism, and refugeeism. On this last note, I'll discuss the recent Islamic State bombings in Paris, Syrian migration, and Malaysian human slave trafficking.