I have just finished reading an incredible article by Liisa H. Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization,” which does nothing less than point me back to the core of my scholarship, of (dare I say) my calling.
This article was brought to my attention through a network of connections but, more importantly and strangely, a day after I decided to do a project on Hotel Rwanda.
I can only give you excerpts because I have no words available to me.
“…the examination of the figure of the refugee as an object of concern and knowledge for the “international community,” and for a particular variety of humanism…The central purpose here is to examine some of the specific effects of the contemporary dehistoricizing constitution of the refugee as a singular category of humanity within the international order of things.”
“…the camp was a site of intense historicity, and to be a refugee was a historicizing and politicizing condition…”
“There was a pronounced tendency to try and fix the “real” refugee on extralegal grounds. And one key terrain where this took place was that of the visual image of the refugee, making it possible to claim that given people were not real refugees because they did not look (or conduct themselves) like real refugees. This suggests that refugees status was implicitly understood to involve a performative dimension.”
“In his or her case, wounds speak louder than words.”
“So the ideal construct, the “real refugee,” was imagined as a particular kind of person: a victim whose judgment and reason had been compromised by his or her experiences. This was a tragic, and sometimes repulsive, figure who could be deciphered and healed only by professionals, and who was opaque even (or perhaps especially) to himself or herself.”
“So, in a sense, they had to be cared for and understood obliquely, despite themselves.”
“[T]he political and moral history of displacement that most Hutu in Mishamo themselves insisted on constructing was generally rejected by their administrators as too messy, subjective, unmanageable, hysterical––as just “stories.” ”
“In this manner history tended to get leached out of the figure of the refugee, as imagined by their administrators. This active process of dehistoricization was inevitably also a project of depoliticization.”
“What emerges from this and other accounts is that the refugees were thought to be at their purest when they first arrived, and when their condition was visibly at its worst. So instead of refugee status imagined as a state of being attained gradually (as the Hutu camp refugees themselves saw it) or as a legal status that one has or has not, the administrators tended to imagine refugee status as a processual condition that was at its purest and most recognizable early in exile, and was thereafter subject to gradual adulteration over time. All this added up, in a subtle way, to the barely noticeable but nevertheless powerful constitution of the real or true refugee––an ideal figure of which any actual refugees were always imperfect instantiations.”
“The visual representations of refugees appears to have become a singularly translatable and mobile mode of knowledge about them.”
“This global visual field of often quite standardized representational practices is surprisingly important in its effects, for it is connected at many points to the de facto inability of particular refugees to represent themselves authoritatively in the inter- and transnational institutional domains where funds and resources circulate.”
“This vision of helplessness is vitally linked to the constitution of speechlessness among refugees: helpless victims need protection, need someone to speak for them. In a sense, the imagined sea of humanity assumes a similar helplessness and speechlessness.”
“One cannot help but feel horror and profound sadness, I think, in the face of such images or in the knowledge that such social circumstances do exist. But it is also possible and, indeed, useful to notice that in their overpowering philanthropic universalism, in their insistence on the secondariness and unknowability of details of specific histories and specific cultural or political contexts, such forms of representation deny the every particulars that make of people something other than anonymous bodies, merely human beings.”
“And yet the scene and the expert voice operate precisely to erase knowledge.”
“…I would like to make perfectly clear that….I am not thereby seeking to belittle the importance of the moral, ethical and political motivations that are clearly at the core of humanitarian interventions. It is necessary to state that these forms and practices of humanitarianism do not represent the best of all possible worlds…”
“It is a historicizing (and politicizing) humanism that would require us, politically and analytically, to examine our cherished notions of mankind and the human community, humanitarianism and humanitarian “crises,” human rights and international justice. For if humanism can only constitute itself on the bodies of dehistoricized, archetypal refugees and other similarly styled victims––if clinical and philanthropic modes of humanitarianism are the only options––then citizenship in this human community itself remains curiously, indecently, outside of history.”
I am moved to tears.
At the very brink of pedagogical sanity, the loss of belief in students’ abilities, in my efforts to ‘teach’ anything, come the student comments that save me from myself. During a recent meeting, a student said that the class has politicized his worldview, giving him both an alternative narrative and a critical apparatus/ space form which to examine the world.
