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In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, many nation states in the postcolonial world – even those least affected by religious terrorism – jumped on the “war on terror” bandwagon in an attempt to contain the threats posed by the organized violence of dissident minorities and other marginalized groups. Since 2001, for instance, insurgent groups from India to the Philippines and Nigeria to Burma were labeled as “terrorist” by their respective governments in spite of the colonial origins of these conflicts, and more importantly, their postcolonial continuities. While a number of critics have rejected such wholesale characterization of rebels, dissidents, insurgents or ethnic nationalists as terrorists, much of postcolonial literary criticism after 9/11 remains solely preoccupied with counter-discourses to Orientalist and imperialist representations of migrants, Muslims and religious nationalists. This approach fulfills a self-serving purpose: far from accounting for the modalities of insurgency violence in literary texts from the postcolony, it concerns itself with the crisis in Western representations of terrorism itself. Instead of treating the critique of terrorism as the object of critical terrorism or counter-Orientalist discourses, this paper attempts to narrate, theorize and, more importantly, articulate the modes and modalities of violence that shape the socio-political mantle of post-independence Burmese society. Drawing from an emerging corpus of Anglophone texts, this talk suggests that while there is an attempt to record the periodic acts of terrorism as indispensable, if not inevitable, to meet the respective political demands of the marginalized ethnic communities in the postcolonial world, the figures of terrorism themselves undergo constant transformation; from insurgents, rebels, lovers and neighbours to the victims of state or counter-terrorism itself. To capture the social pressures that forge the means of such disfiguration, I propose the notion of ‘intimate violence’ as a form of organized violence employed by insurgents and dissidents which is made familiar to them by their most ‘intimate enemy’ (Nandy, 1983) – be it the state, the sovereign or the forces of foreign aggression. The embodied reception of the enemy’s violence, this paper argues, is reenacted as the insurgent violence that is often appropriated by the discourses of ‘terrorism’ and the ‘war in terror’.
Pavan Malreddy teaches English Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt. He has written widely on terrorism and organized violence in postcolonial literature. His recent publications include a monograph Insurgent Cultures: World Literatures and Narratives of Violence from the Global South (forthcoming with Cambridge UP), and co-edited collections, Violence in South Asia: Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge, 2019), “Writing Brexit: Colonial Remains” (Journal of Postcolonial Writing 57.5, 2020), and Mapping World Anglophone Studies (forthcoming with Routledge).
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Het Rustpunt - Prinsenzaal (entrance Burgstraat 116 or Prinsenhof 39, 9000 Gent)
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04-05-2023 13:45 - 14:45
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