Amy Shuman

Representing Trauma: Political Asylum Narrative

The trauma narratives told by refugees in their appeal for asylum status in the United States are culturally constructed, based not only on local cultural discourses for talking about grief, tragedy, struggle, and displacement, but also on the legal and bureaucratic cultures of the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (B.C.I.S.). On the basis of interviews with asylum seekers and with immigration lawyers and B.C.I.S. officials, we discuss the cultural obstacles of the asylum application process.

PRODUCING EPISTEMOLOGIES OF IGNORANCE IN THE POLITICAL ASYLUM APPLICATION PROCESS 1

The granting of political asylum is implicated in other often competing agendas and discourses, including national security, the obligation to provide safe haven, the histories of past immigrants and asylum seekers, and the criminalization of people who cross borders illegally, for whatever motive. Political asylum serves two sometimes contradictory ends: protection of the state and refuge for the applicant. This contradiction is at the root of the production of ignorance in a process that overtly seeks to generate knowledge. Restricted access to knowledge is part of persecution both as a form of control, and in the classification of knowledge as illicit, covert, or traitorous. We examine the conditions for producing knowledge and ignorance in the political asylum process in which the stories presented by applicants are evaluated by bureaucrats to determine whether they are credible and whether they meet the criteria of a well-founded fear of return to the homeland. We discuss narratives told by both asylum seekers in the United States and the United Kingdom and those who help them through the asylum process.

Gender and cultural silences in the political asylum process

Individuals claiming persecution on the basis of gender or as sexual minorities have faced many obstacles in the political asylum process including additional burdens of proof of identity and of persecution. Based on our own work with political asylum applicants, on legal reports, and on reports by groups providing assistance to asylum seekers, we review the law and the obstacles and consider the conditions underlying and supporting suspicion of the applicants. We observe how particular narratives are rendered untellable in the interrogation process and how the identities of sexual minorities become either invisible or hypervisible.

Food gifts : Ritual exchange and the production of excess meaning

Food exchanges often produce excesses of meaning, and those excesses can be spaces for maintaining or renegotiating social relationships. The Jewish festival of Purim enacts symbolic inversions of everyday cultural practices that produce excesses of food and food exchanges that symbolically threaten religious, social, and interpersonal social categories. Building on theories of gift exchange, from Marcel Mauss to Annette Weiner, the A. explores the limits and capacities of reciprocity to negotiate social relationships.

Normalizing Desire Stigma and the Carnivalesque in Gay Bigmen’s Cultural Practices

Girth & Mirth (G&M) is a social group for big gay men who face exclusion and discrimination from both mainstream and gay communities. Based on extensive ethnographic research and interview data, we consider a variety of the group’s activities, including gatherings at coffeehouses, participation in a gay pride parade, and a national carnivalesque weekend retreat. The group engages in performances that are complicit with both heteronormative gender practices and normative gay men’s practices and that reinscribe capitalist commodified desires. This exploration of the full range of G&M’s activities, from the everyday to the carnivalesque, provides an opportunity to examine how a stigmatized group negotiates visible and less visible forms of discrimination through a playful reconfiguration of heteronormative masculine performances.

Getting Out: Political asylum, sexual minorities, and privileged visibility

As part of an emerging field of films documenting the obstacles faced by sexual minorities fleeing persecution and seeking political asylum, the film Getting Out documents both the persecution of sexual minorities in Uganda and the obstacles individuals face in their attempts to get political asylum in South Africa. Using the film as a springboard, we assess the larger issues of recognition, visibility, hypervisibility, and performativity in encounters between sexual minorities, their advocates, and political asylum officials. The rhetorical power of Getting Out lies in its performative staging of LGBTQI asylum seekers’ navigation of often competing cultural and legal logics on sexuality. The film calls attention to profound contradictions in the political asylum system for sexual minorities and for any others who challenge the normativity of a social group.

Social Smoking: An Untenable Position

Abstract Social smokers manage the conflicting aspects of their liminal identities by negotiating complex roles of performance and exchange. Using a combination of methods, including both participant observation of cultural performances and informal interviews, to elicit lay theories and accounts of self-conscious practices, this project examines social actors, self-defined as nonsmokers (or reformed smokers), who engage in recreational tobacco use. Through in-depth interviews and observations of self-identified female social smokers, we document general characteristics of this subpopulation, sampled from a large Midwest capital and its surrounding areas. Social smokers occupy an untenable social space; as neither smokers nor nonsmokers, they use both practices and discourses about those practices to stake their claim to an untenable social position. We conclude with a theoretical discussion that compares our findings with other discourses on smoking, especially the discourse of addiction narratives. In an age of increasing awareness of the health consequences, smoking has become a culturally unavailable category producing “disconfirming realities” in which social smokers constantly renegotiate their status.

Emergent Human Rights Contexts: Greg Constantine's "Nowhere People"

In ‘‘Nowhere People: The Global Face of Statelessness,’’ the photojournalist Greg Constantine documents the conditions of statelessness and the lives of stateless people across the globe. The online version of the exhibition consists of several multimedia compilations and photo-essays on the Rohinyga in Burma, Dalit in Nepal, Bihari in Bangladesh, Hill Tamils in Sri Lanka, children in the state of Sabah in Malaysia, Nubians in Kenya, and ex-Soviets in Ukraine. As Constantine notes in his introductory materials, the United Nations estimates that nearly fifteen million people are stateless: ‘‘Statelessness can come as a result of conflict, shifting borders or in the creation of a new state, but in most cases, statelessness is rooted in discrimination and intolerance.’’ Constantine’s stated rhetorical intent is evidentiary; he wants to counter the invisibility of statelessness and ‘‘provide tangible documentation of proof that millions of people hidden and forgotten all over the world actually exist.’’1 Although we approach Constantine’s documentary project from distinct disciplinary perspectives as professors of rhetoric and folklore, we share an interest in understanding the pragmatic and ethical challenges of representing the conditions of statelessness and, more broadly, the circulation of knowledge about human rights violations. Constantine’s stated goal is to ‘‘document and expose the human face and personal histories and stories of stateless people.’’ We are interested in the conditions of this invisibility. Constantine points out that ‘‘stateless people are invisible to most.’’ We ask, for whom are the stateless invisible? In asking ‘‘for whom’’ the stateless are invisible and ‘‘to whom’’ their newly staged global visibility is addressed we aim to contextualize the evidentiary promise of ‘‘Nowhere People.’’ Through the examination of the disciplinary protocols, the aesthetic principles, and the symbols that designate social groupings and to which human rights representations are tethered, we hope to show how Constantine navigates these protocols. Given that the tools to create and distribute images have democratized and the subaltern increasingly can and does speak directly for herself, we ask what role photojournalists and scholars can play in the generation of human rights contexts and witnessing publics. Social media may be transforming the power dynamics of human rights representation, but we should not overestimate the impact of technological innovations or underestimate the valiant efforts and material risks that those resisting repressive regimes continue to face. Additionally, we should attend to the risks of romanticizing stateless subjects or unmooring representations of statelessness from the contexts and technologies that shape their production, reception, and circulation as part of a

Your Bribery Is My Networking: Understanding the Meaning of the Exchange of Favors

This chapter focuses on cultural assessments to illustrate the difficulty of evaluating evidence cross culturally. The authors examine the use of bribery and corruption; bribery falls into the category of things that are “illegal” and therefore make the officials suspicious. They assume this is something only people from asylum-sending countries do, though in fact we all do it but we consider it perfectly acceptable and call it “networking” or “making use of contacts.” The authors show that certain kinds of fraudulence are considered offensive and reprehensible (and not credible) even though they are business as usual in the society from which the applicant is fleeing and especially so for someone fleeing persecution.

Victim or Perpetrator

This chapter examines the difficulty of differentiating between victim and perpetrator in some cases. There is no question that there are legitimate asylum seekers in great numbers fleeing violence, but the violence itself, especially in contemporary civil wars, makes it difficult to sharply divide perpetrators and victims. This complicated question of whether someone is a victim or a perpetrator illustrates the high stakes involved in the assessment of asylum claims in the current security environment. The authors examine cases where aggressors self-identify as heroic or as victims themselves, while members of the victim group, in particular in the diaspora, identify them as perpetrators. The authors’ goal is not to provide a panacea or easy solution (they argue there is none) but to elucidate the complexity.