Caroline Faria

Critical feminist reflexivity and the politics of whiteness in the ‘field’

Feminist geographic commonsense suggests that power shapes knowledge production, prompting the long-standing reflexive turn. Yet, often such reflexivity fixes racial power and elides more nuanced operations of difference – moves feminist scholars have, in fact, long problematized. To counter this, we revisit Kobayashis (1994) ‘Coloring the Field’ [‘Coloring the Field: Gender, “Race”, and the Politics of Fieldwork,’ Professional Geographer 46 (1): 73–90]. Twenty years on, and grounded in our fieldwork in South Sudan and Honduras, we highlight how colonial and gender ideologies are interwoven through emotion. Decentering a concern with guilt, we focus on the way whiteness may inspire awe while scholars of color evoke disdain among participants. Conversely, bodies associated with colonizing pasts or presents can prompt suspicion, an emotive reaction to whiteness not always fixed to white bodies. These feelings have significant repercussions for the authority, legitimacy, and access afforded to researchers. Our efforts thus disrupt notions that we, as researchers, always wield power over our participants. Instead we argue that the positioning of ‘subjects of color’ in the global south, racially and in their relationships with us, is historically produced and socioculturally and geographically contingent. Rethinking the field in this way, as a site of messy, affective, and contingent racialized power, demonstrates the insights offered by bringing together feminist postcolonial and emotional geographies.

Staging a new South Sudan in the USA: men, masculinities and nationalist performance at a diasporic beauty pageant

This article explores the gendering of cultural nationalism at a South Sudanese beauty pageant with a focus on the promotional work, organizing efforts and performances of men. Through a visual and textual discourse analysis of materials related to the event, as well as a series of interviews with participants, promoters, judges and audience members, I argue that these male participants articulate a distinctly masculinized form of South Sudanese nationalism. They do so by promoting notions of both a shared, militarized and oppressive past and a peaceful, proud and celebratory future. Central to the production of this nationalist imaginary is an emphasis on the healing of past ethnic-regional conflicts within the South and an image of South Sudanese unity and brotherly, non-violent masculinity. However, whilst pageantry emcees, speakers and musicians call on men to build and nurture the ‘New South Sudan’, the event itself emerges as a site for conflict both online and in incidences of physical violence amongst young male attendees. Members of the community understand this conflict to be bound up with a sense of ethnic-regional allegiance as well as a collective crisis experienced by many young men following the war and amidst the challenges of life in the diaspora. In this way, the pageant works to promote South Sudanese nationalism through the efforts, performances and bodies of young men and the scripting of peaceful nationalist masculinities – even as these are contested and contradicted behind the scenes.

“I Want My Children to Know Sudan”: Narrating the Long-Distance Intimacies of Diasporic Politics

Attending to the gendered intimacies of diasporic politics offers rich insights for studies of transnationalism, nationalism, and citizenship. This article focuses on South Sudan and the narrative accounts of thirty U.S.-resettled women collected in the transitional era prior to independence in 2011. Their stories point to the embodied nature of political subjectivity enacted during this time through everyday parental acts in the United States, care for family in South Sudan, and emergent community-based engagement and activism in and between both places. This work extends studies of transnationalism, nationalism, and citizenship by drawing on the productive junctures of feminist political and emotional geographies. It does so first by attending to oft-marginalized and gendered subjects and spaces of politics and, second, by recognizing the intimate and affective scalings through which long-distance political subjects distantly engage with, take responsibility for, and actively remake their home. Here I pay attention to the work of feelings: grief, nostalgia, worry, excitement, ambivalence, and anger that drive and are evoked by long-distance nationalisms and citizenships. Intimately binding distant places, people, and moments, they demonstrate the emotional valence of diasporic politics. Finally, this article calls for empirical attention to new nationalisms and citizenships emerging through places like the contemporary South Sudan, those with histories of multiple colonialisms, marked by shifting geometries of power, and shaped from afar by the political intimacies of the diaspora.

The importance of everyday encounters: young scholars reflect on fieldwork in Africa

This edited series explores the experiences of conducting field-based geographic research in an African setting with a particular focus on the importance of everyday encounters and relationships. As graduate students preparing for fieldwork, we spend much time thinking about and planning our research methods, yet it is often only when we begin our work that we realize the ways in which seemingly mundane acts, encounters and events shape and influence the kinds of knowledge we produce. With this mini-special issue we aim firstly to make space for the rich and valuable methodological reflections of graduate students who have recently returned from the field, voices we less frequently hear in the pages of scholarly journals. Secondly, we aim to contribute to the well-established work on critical methodologies in Geography and to prompt wider debate, discussion and collaboration within African Geographies in particular. The series includes three pieces from young scholars working in a diverse range of geographic sub-fields, using varied methodological approaches, and writing on differing aspects of the research process. Through a focus on movement, mindfulness and the seemingly mundane, they each highlight the ways in which a thoughtful attention to the everyday has enriched their work on the African continent.

Towards a countertopography of intimate war: contouring violence and resistance in a South Sudanese diaspora

Abstract Recent feminist geographic scholarship insists we rethink domestic violence as ‘intimate war’. Using this concept I analyze narratives of violence and resistance articulated by U.S.-resettled South Sudanese women and collected in the wake of a fatal incidence of domestic violence in 2005. One of a spate of intimate partner murders that shook the community at this time, this tragic event spurred debates about shifting gender norms, the stresses and opportunities of life in the diaspora, and the irradicable legacies of war. Bringing Pain and Staehelis ‘intimacy-geopolitics’ to bear on this particularly violent, momentary and publicized aggression, I situate it within a more complex, quotidian, and dynamic terrain of power. In line with feminist political geography, this analysis complicates scalar distinctions of body, home and nation-state, demonstrating the common foundations of ‘private’, domestic and ‘public’, state-sanctioned violences. Inspired by Katz’s countertopographical approach, I extend our understanding of intimate war by contouring moments of violence and resistance in a diasporic context, over the lifecourse of refugee women, and across their sites of flight, displacement and resettlement. Tracing the mobilities of intimate war in this way productively reveals the spatial and temporal, as well as scalar, folds that may form part of its foundation.