An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Sara Tafakori (Postdoctoral Fellowship 2020; London School of Economics and Political Science):
Imagining the ‘crippled’ nation: a decolonial approach to intimate publics
Abstract:
The concept of intimate publics was developed by Lauren Berlant to conceptualise some of the ways in which citizens emotionally attach to or detach from the political. In making the concept travel beyond the Western liberal democratic contexts in which it was first elaborated, I develop a decolonial perspective on attachments to the political in a global South context. Specifically, I ask what resources the idea of intimate publics offers for understanding the emotional politics around economic sanctions on Iran, especially in relation to posts and comments on the Facebook page of the Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, during the negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme in 2013-15.
Situating economic sanctions as colonial violence, this article examines how that violence is narrativized within the imagined reciprocity of the injured nation that the Zarif Facebook page constructs around the image of Iran as disabled by sanctions, and hence as blocked from pursuing a normative developmental path. Within the page’s intimate public space, I argue, this re-appropriation by the Iranian state of US/Western discourses on ‘crippling’ sanctions, while it invites recognition of ‘shared’ injury, ignores the inequalities that produce different experiences of injury and disability among the population, as some of the page’s followers point out. While the intimate in non-Western contexts has been understood either as a tool for the centre to dominate the periphery, or as mediating culturally localised affects, this article utilises the concept of intimate publics to elucidate the relation between imperial and national in a global South context as a highly mediated and reflexive interaction in which tropes of suffering are mobilised, interrogated and contested in affectively resonant and complex ways.
The link to join the seminar is https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81322391722 Passcode: Vr8f3ew2
As standard, attendees' mics will be muted and their cameras disabled during the seminar, for security. If you wish to ask a question during the Q&A, we will switch your microphone back on.