<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="text-align: left; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;" class="">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</div><div style="text-align: center; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""><br class=""></span></div><div style="text-align: left; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">Call for papers</span></div><div style="text-align: left; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">American Anthropological Association Meeting (Nov. 18-22, 2020, St. Louis, MO)</span></div><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align: left; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span></p><div style="text-align: left; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><b class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">Opaque Anthropologies: Confession, Transparency, Refusal, and Recognition</span></b><span lang="EN-US" class=""></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span></p><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><u class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">Co-organizers:</span></u></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">Cory-Alice André-Johnson, University of Virginia: <a href="mailto:ca9bm@virginia.edu" class="">ca9bm@virginia.edu</a></span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">Raphaëlle Rabanes, University of California Berkeley: <a href="mailto:raphaelle@berkeley.edu" class="">raphaelle@berkeley.edu</a></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span></p><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><u class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">Discussant:</span></u></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">John L. Jackson Jr., University of Pennsylvania</span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span></p><div style="text-align: justify; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">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. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""><br class=""></span></div><div style="text-align: justify; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">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,<i class=""> </i>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. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""><br class=""></span></div><div style="text-align: justify; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">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?</span></div><div style="text-align: justify; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""><br class=""></span></div><div style="text-align: justify; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">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?</span></div><div style="text-align: justify; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""><br class=""></span></div><div style="text-align: justify; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">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?</span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span></p><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">We invite interested scholars to send us (Cory-Alice André-Johnson, <u class=""><a href="mailto:ca9bm@virginia.edu" class="">ca9bm@virginia.edu</a></u> and Raphaëlle Rabanes, <u class=""><a href="mailto:raphaelle@berkeley.edu" class="">raphaelle@berkeley.edu</a></u>) a 250-words abstract by <u class="">Saturday, April 20th.</u></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span lang="EN-US" class=""> </span></p><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><b style="font-size: 12pt; text-align: justify;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">Bibliography</span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class=""></span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-align: justify; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">Britton, Celia. 1999. <i class="">Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory. Strategies of Language and Resistance.</i> Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.</span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-align: justify; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">Foucault, Michel. 1978 (1976). <i class="">The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction</i>. New York: Random House.</span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-align: justify; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">Glissant, Edouard. 1997 (1981). </span><i class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">Le Discours Antillais</span></i><span lang="EN-US" class="">. Paris: Gallimard.</span><span lang="EN-US" class=""></span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-align: justify; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">Han, Byung-Chul. 2015 (2012). <i class="">The Transparency Society</i>. Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford: Stanford University Press. </span><span lang="EN-US" class=""></span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-align: justify; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">Hurston, Zora Neale. 1935. <i class="">Mules and Men. </i>New York: Harper Collins.</span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-align: justify; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">Mbembe, Achille. 2019 (2016). <i class="">Necropolitics</i>. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham: Duke University Press. </span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-align: justify; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">McGranahan, Carole. 2016. “Theorizing Refusal: An Introduction”. <i class="">Cultural Anthropology</i> 31 (3): 319-25.</span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-align: justify; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class=""><span lang="EN-US" class="">Simpson, Audra. 2007. “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship.” <i class="">Junctures</i> 9: 67-80.</span></div></div></body></html>