Tafakori, S. orcid.org/0000-0002-3670-7193 (2023) The intimate public as a decolonial lens: "cripping" affect, nationalism and imperial violence. Review of International Studies, 49 (4). pp. 694-720. ISSN 0260-2105
Abstract
This article brings an intimate perspective to bear upon the violence of economic sanctions, shifting attention away from an exclusive focus on state actors, in order to examine how 'wounds enter politics'.1 In this research, I 'stretch' Berlant's notion of the intimate public, reconfiguring it as a decolonial analytic lens on subaltern suffering in conditions of endemic imperial violence. I focus on the Facebook page of the Iranian chief negotiator, Javad Zarif, during Iran's talks with the P5+1 powers over its nuclear programme, under the pressure of what the Obama administration itself termed 'crippling' economic sanctions. Examining Zarif's audience's readings of his back injury during the talks as representing the 'crippled' nation, I trace how subaltern injury is intimately narrated through a racialised framework of disablement and 'recovery', where 'recovery' signifies a desanctioned and deracialised national body. I firstly complicate the prevailing conception of the intimate public as oriented around a 'national fantasy', theorising it as an affective structure that simultaneously locates imperial power, as well as the nation-state, as sources of complaint and hope; secondly, I draw on a critical disability ('crip') lens to understand the intimate public as mediating both the debilitation of racialised underdevelopment, and the fantasy of a normative, 'developed' national body in a post-sanctions future. Through examining the intimate politics of economic sanctions, this study contributes to a decolonial perspective on the entanglements of affect, nationalism and imperial violence.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. |
Keywords: | affect; race; coloniality; disability and crip; intimate public; sanctions; nationalism |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Media & Communication (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 21 Jun 2024 12:03 |
Last Modified: | 21 Jun 2024 12:03 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
Identification Number: | 10.1017/S0260210523000116 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:213733 |