“History ties us to this place”: Territorial Amnesia, Placemaking, and Belonging
Topics: Political Geography
, Cultural Geography
, Asia
Keywords: Territorial Amnesia, Tibetan refugees, Nepal, Border, Memory, Belonging
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 51
Authors:
Rupak Shrestha, University of Colorado Boulder
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Abstract
The Tibetan national identity and national consciousness in South Asia is tied to a particular nurturing of homogenous public memory in the diaspora by the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), in Tibetan schools through curriculum, tourism discourse constructed by the CTA, and performances mandated by the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (Diehl 2002). However, as Emily Yeh (2007) contends, Tibetan diasporic subjectivities are multiple and relational, and are produced through interactions between historical processes, memory, embodied experiences, and power.
This paper examines how Tibetan refugees in the village of Phale in northeastern Nepal, at the Nepal-China-India borderlands, perform territorial practices through affective placemaking and familial relationships with Himalayan indigenous peoples. Drawing on re-memory (Tolia-Kelly 2004), this paper illustrates that engagements between Tibetans in Phale and Himalayan indigenous peoples are based on shared, place-based, intimate presents and pasts. However, state territorial practices of border securitization have created political belonging for some research participants through national citizenship, while simultaneously creating dislocation and alienation to others through the category of refugee. In doing so, they engage in what I call “territorial amnesia” through which their understandings of the futures are disparate, diverse, and differentially imagined.
“History ties us to this place”: Territorial Amnesia, Placemaking, and Belonging
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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