Category Archive: colonialism

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Familiar Heartbreaks: Review of McGranahan’s “Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War”

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Carole McGranahan’s Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War is an ethnography of heartbreak (2010). A heartbreak that began with the loss of Tibet. Every time I read this book, I am reminded of people from my childhood who were of the generation that was raised in Tibet but later died in exile. The same people who would share stories of Tibet prior to its invasion. These stories often began with joy, but would end abruptly with sadness—a sadness I did not understand as a child, but was taught about and grew familiar with as I grew older. This sadness, heartbreak, is captured and historicized in this book.

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Decolonizing Ethnographic ‘Responsibility’: Towards a Decolonized Praxis

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what happens when the question of responsibility becomes one of obligation; choice becomes necessity, and crisis exists as an everyday reality?

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The Chang ma Ama las of Dharamsala

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The following post is a section in Ch. 2 “There Is a Tension in Our Hearts” from the book Echoes from Dharamsala by Keila Diehl (2002, p57-62).

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The Art of (China’s) Colonialism: Constructing Invisibilities in (Tibetan) History and Geography

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What does an ethnographic discourse on the invisibility of a colonial empire in the 21st century look like? What does that invisibility contribute to, or rather take away from, the experiences of Tibetans inside and outside Tibet? In this post, I examine the historical and contemporary discourses on Tibet that frame Tibet as either not colonized or about human rights, which, I argue, silences Tibetan aspirations for Nationhood. Aside from contextualizing Tibetan subjectivities, I contribute to the ongoing discourse on how ethnographic narratives can re-construct the invisibility of existing colonial empires and justify their presence as a given right rather than foreign.

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Race & The Making of “Common Sense”

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Han chauvinism, in other words, Racism, seemed to have been the big issue in 1953. It’s too bad that this report only highlights a small fraction of the officials that felt this way then.

I’ve been reading Ann Stoler’s book, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power” and it has been making me think a lot about the role of the State in creating and/or encouraging cultural attitudes, such as racism, through the implementation of laws. Although Stoler’s archival ethnography focuses more on how these legislation affected the intimate lives of mixed children and their white/native parents with a focus on women at that time; for the purposes of this post, I want to center this discussion on the State.