The UCSIA Summer School is proud to announce that Randeep Singh Hothi, a participant in the 2022 programme, has recently published a significant article in the renowned journal Cultural Anthropology. His piece, titled The Massacre and Martyr(dom)s of Oak Creek: On the Problem of Diaspora, the Economy of Agonism, and the Extimacy of Relation-Making, examines how competing investments in the real motivate political disagreement.
The ethnography focuses on face-to-face debate in the wake of spectacular white supremacist violence against Sikhs in the United States. Young activists relate their struggle against racial supremacy to martyrs from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, motivating their call for a politics that would defy empire, cultivate coalitional alliances, and refuse well-worn performances of multicultural docility. However, for institutional decision-makers of rank, who ground their authority in having witnessed majoritarian state terror first-hand, such agonism risks decades of partial but hard-won respectability, legibility, and safety.
This article argues that the in/comparability of evental violence is staked by a global “economy of agonism,” which mobilizes in this case at least two political forms distinctive of the late-twentieth century in each the politics of recognition and ethnonationalism. The article probes the competing investments motivating political disjuncture by tracking what is here called the “problem of diaspora,” the seeming untenability of calibrations to and between home(land) and sites of dispersion. An ethnographic pursuit of psycho-social cleavages consequently reveals the “extimacy” of, or mutual co-implication of internal and external in, “collective relation-making,” i.e., in making solidarity, alliance, or coalition amongst seemingly similarly situated others.
Randeep’s participation in the UCSIA Summer School played a role in shaping his interdisciplinary approach to understanding complex socio-political dynamics. We congratulate him on this achievement and look forward to his continued contributions to academic and public discourse.
Currently Randeep Singh Hothi is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California in Los Angeles.