The Massacre and Martyr(dom)s of Oak Creek

On the Problem of Diaspora, the Economy of Agonism, and the Extimacy of Relation-Making

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2435787
AutoresRandeep Hothi (0000-0002-4703-094X, University of Michigan, autor correspondente)
Ano2024
Volume39
Fascículo2
Data de publicação2024-05-21
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoCultural Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0886-7356 • E-ISSN: 1548-1360
EditoraAmerican Anthropological Association (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.14506/ca39.2.04
OpenAlexW4399071325
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas4
Referências citadas45

This article concerns how competing investments in the real motivate political disagreement. The ethnography focuses on face-to-face debate in the wake of spectacular white supremacist violence against Sikhs in the United States. Young activists relate their struggle against racial supremacy to martyrs from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, motivating their call for a politics that would defy empire, cultivate coalitional alliances, and refuse well-worn performances of multicultural docility. However, for institutional decision-makers of rank, who ground their authority in having witnessed majoritarian state terror first-hand, such agonism risks decades of partial but hard-won respectability, legibility, and safety. This article argues that the in/comparability of evental violence is staked by a global "economy of agonism," which mobilizes in this case at least two political forms distinctive of the late-twentieth century in each the politics of recognition and ethnonationalism. The article probes the competing investments motivating political disjuncture by tracking what is here called the "problem of diaspora," the seeming untenability of calibrations to and between home(land) and sites of dispersion. An ethnographic pursuit of psycho-social cleavages consequently reveals the "extimacy" of, or mutual co-implication of internal and external in, "collective relation-making," i.e., in making solidarity, alliance, or coalition amongst seemingly similarly situated others

Archaeology · Art · Martyr · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Race, History, and American Society · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies