Suvendrini Perera

Torturous dialogues: Geographies of trauma and spaces of exception

How are suffering, damage and disaster produced and made visible across different sites, and how are they made to count, to matter? This essay considers certain philosophical, historical and geopolitical coordinates that locate trauma and disaster in the context of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. Trauma in its various significations – the banal, the aesthetic, the philosophical, the medicalized, the political, the pathologized – is an essential form of currency in the torturous dialogues that make, define and delineate the contours of disaster, damage and suffering. These are constitutively geopoliticized, as they are racialized and gendered, processes. Trauma is a medium that enables dialogue and exchange; it is eminently transactable, mobile and adaptable in its circulation between the refugee camp and the disaster victims camp; it ramifies, with uneven meanings and effects, across and between subjects, scenes, sites, practices and relations. This essay considers the geopolitics of the tsunami as a globalized trauma-event and asks how the biopolitics of trauma, as a set of institutionalized practices for managing and ordering the life and health of populations, plays out across the necropolitical terrain of global inequality and in relation to those it locates as bare life.

White shores of longing: 'Impossible subjects' and the frontiers of citizenship

This essay begins with an incident that occurred in 2001, the arrival of a group of asylum seekers from Sri Lanka who arrived off the coast of Coral Bay, Western Australia. It follows these castaway figures through a sequence of discursive histories and representational contexts, situating their stories against practices of embodied citizenship at the intersection of law, land (as territorialized geo-body) and nation, in the United Kingdom, Sri Lanka and Australia, the sites of different, but deeply entwined, dramas of citizenship.

Introduction: Heterochronotopes of exception and the frontiers and faultlines of citizenship

The five interlinked essays in this issue of Continuum consider questions of the (re)production of borders – biopolitical, spatial, legal, historical, symbolic – intended to contain and exclude asylum seekers. The essays situate these modalities and technologies of exclusion in the context of broader questions of nationalism, citizenship, biopolitics, neoliberalism and the transnational genealogies of colonialism and racism. They make the collective argument that the issue of border security is not the preoccupation of a single political party or government but serves to magnetize a cluster of concerns and issues that are central to contemporary formations of citizenship, identity, territoriality and statehood in the West.

Lines of sight

This special issue of Social Identities originated in a workshop, held in Sydney in 2016, as part of the research project, Old Atrocities, New Media. Funded by the Australian Research Council, the project explores the evolving relations between visual media and extreme violence in war, from colonial wars of extermination to the war on terror. The workshop brought together academics and practitioners from cultural, screen and media studies, international relations, art and politics to consider how visual media are mobilised by a range of actors – states, humanitarian agencies, ‘mainstream’ media, the ‘international community’ – in situations of war. The project is conceptualised along three intersecting lines of inquiry: iconological (studying images and their shifting meanings across media and across histories and locations), technological (the means and processes by which war images are produced, mediated, circulated and recirculated) and geopolitical (the spatialised global relations of power within which these images operate). In Paul Virilio’s words, the functions of seeing and waging war are closely entwined:

See you in the funny pages: penal sites, teletechnics, counter-artifactualities

ABSTRACT A 2016 image by cartoonist Chris Kelly powerfully brings together two regimes of detention in Australia, one ‘domestic’ and directed largely at Indigenous prisoners, the other ‘offshore’, and directed at refugees and asylum seekers. In both cases, it was CCTV footage which provided the means of exposure of violent abuses in these detention systems, although this exposure simultaneously exposes the very failure of CCTV, as a mechanism deigned precisely to magnify the state’s powers of surveillance. This paper traces the interactions between inmates, advocates, activists and artists in these two campaigns of exposure. It reprises James Der Derian’s 2001 concept of MIME-NET (Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network) to explore the possibilities of a new social activism of images.

Sexual Violence and the Border: Colonial Genealogies of US and Australian Immigration Detention Regimes

This article is concerned with delineating the material manifestations of state violence, with a particular focus on sexual violence in immigration detention prisons in the context of two settler-c...

Introduction—Lethal Imaginaries of Nationalism: A Brief History in Checkpoints

This is a brief introduction to ethnic biopolitics in Sri Lanka from the immediate postindependence period to the end of the war. It tracks the ethnicization of everyday life, social space and the body and suggests that ideologies of Sinhala supremacism underpinned both the socialist and neoliberal policies adopted by successive postindependence governments. It discusses the reactive nature of the Tamil separatist nationalism that emerged as the counterpart to Sinhala majoritarianism in its the various phases and the formations of Tamil diaspora nationalisms.

Conclusion—‘From What Has Happened to What Will Come’

The conclusion considers the possibilities for reconciliation in the light of V.V. Ganeshananthan’s poem, ‘We regret to inform you’.

Territory of Ashes: A Disjointed Unfolding

Chapter 5 discusses the acts of mass rape-torture that followed the LTTE’s defeat. It attempts to situate the multivalent figure of the LTTE female cadre, most often imagined as a suicide bomber, within discursive economies of gender, nationalism and terror.

Accounting for Disposable Lives: Visibility, Atrocity and International Justice

Chapter 4 discusses questions of accountability for the tens of thousands of civilian lives lost in the last weeks of the war. Analysis centres on the satellite images recorded by various international agencies as forms of remote monitorship that represent, both metaphorically and materially, the hovering telescopic oversight of international justice over this seemingly obscure war.