[Linganth] AAA session proposal on "Confession, Transparency, Refusal, and Recognition"

[Lise Dobrin]

A call for AAA papers that might spark the interest of some on this list. Please contact the organizers if you have questions — I’m just the messenger! Lise

Call for papers
American Anthropological Association Meeting (Nov. 18-22, 2020, St. Louis, MO)
 
Opaque Anthropologies: Confession, Transparency, Refusal, and Recognition
 
Co-organizers:
Cory-Alice André-Johnson, University of Virginia: ca9bm at virginia.edu <mailto:ca9bm at virginia.edu>
Raphaëlle Rabanes, University of California Berkeley: raphaelle at berkeley.edu <mailto:raphaelle at berkeley.edu>
 
Discussant:
John L. Jackson Jr., University of Pennsylvania
 
As we come together this year around the theme of ‘Truth and Responsibility’ in anthropology’s legacy and present-day practice, this panel turns to a notion often considered to be in opposition to this theme: Opacity. We draw parallels between two discrete anthropologies of opacity, Glissant’s “Right to Opacity,” grounded in Caribbean theory, and the “Opacity of Other Minds” language ideology common in linguistic anthropology of Melanesia and the Pacific. We see both as a way of doing and thinking anthropology against politics, technologies, and writing for surveillance, authentication, classification, and oppression. As such, we bring these two opacities into conversations around confession, transparency, refusal, and recognition. 

Theories of opacity serve to problematize two key features of biopolitics (Foucault 1976): confession and transparency (Han 2015). Insofar as biopolitics operates through confessional truths in order to produce transparent, visible, ordered subjects, opacity is both a linguistic refusal of the ability to access inner selves and intentions and a right for those to remain opaque. It actively opposes biopolitical statecraft and the production of certain lives at the expense of others. What’s more, both theories of opacity move us away from a focus of eliciting confessions, through interviews and observation for example, as a means of legitimizing anthropology’s capacity to speak authentically for and about ‘others.’ As such, it engages the question of resistance to the ethnographic gaze, a matter central to anthropological works on ethnographic refusal (from Hurston 1935 to Simpson 2007 to McGranahan 2016). In the defense of the “right not to be understood” (Britton 1999) lies a refusal of the objectification brought by the desire to understand. Thus, opacity can be thought of as an active strategy of resistance to the liberal ideal of transparency, but it also goes beyond resistance, opening up to other modes of being. It can be mobilized in order to support the unreadability of the other, and to work against the reduction of the world to ordered realities. 

As we recognize the “irreducible density of the other” (Glissant 1997) yet have not given up on ethnography, a set of questions arise: What possibilities are opened by a refusal of anthropology as an act of apprehension, a refusal of knowledge production through appropriation? What emerges when we do the work of rendering opacity, be it by recognizing the opacity of the people we engage with, or by developing strategies of unintelligibility in our writing?

Yet, systematic and institutionalized invisibility has long been a tool for state sanctioned disempowerment and necropolitics (Mbembe 2019). A tension exists, therefore, between opacity’s potential for destabilizing systems of power and its real dangers for people living within those same systems. With this tension in mind, we ask: How does the development of opacity as an ethnographic strategy challenge and redefine notions of truth and transparency? How do we make claims to justice and repair? Are there forms of veracity accessible not through claims to objective truth, but through opacity? Further, what are the stakes of practices of opacity? For whom is opacity a right, a privilege, or a form of oppression?

We are interested in forming a panel that takes up the invitation to bring Glissantian and linguistic opacity into conversation and explores the epistemological and ontological implications of opacity. We hope that proposed papers will reflect on opaque anthropology while also considering the following broader set of questions: What are the implications of opacity for anthropology rooted in colonial extraction, interviewing, and ‘making sense of’ people? What forms of disorientation and regrounding of our fieldwork and writing can opacity bring? Finally, who gets counted as human? What gets counted as truth? What does power look like without transparency?
 
We invite interested scholars to send us (Cory-Alice André-Johnson, ca9bm at virginia.edu <mailto:ca9bm at virginia.edu> and Raphaëlle Rabanes, raphaelle at berkeley.edu <mailto:raphaelle at berkeley.edu>) a 250-words abstract by Saturday, April 20th.
 
Bibliography
Britton, Celia. 1999. Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory. Strategies of Language and Resistance. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1978 (1976). The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Random House.
Glissant, Edouard. 1997 (1981). Le Discours Antillais. Paris: Gallimard.
Han, Byung-Chul. 2015 (2012). The Transparency Society. Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1935. Mules and Men. New York: Harper Collins.
Mbembe, Achille. 2019 (2016). Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham: Duke University Press. 
McGranahan, Carole. 2016. “Theorizing Refusal: An Introduction”. Cultural Anthropology 31 (3): 319-25.
Simpson, Audra. 2007. “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship.” Junctures 9: 67-80.
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