THE PHANTOMS OF THE ARCHIVES: MAKING ANTICOLONIAL CONNECTIVITIES SENSIBLE IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

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dc.contributor.advisorSoguk, Nevzat
dc.contributor.authorRao, Akta
dc.contributor.departmentPolitical Science
dc.date.accessioned2025-02-20T22:36:15Z
dc.date.issued2024
dc.description.degreePh.D.
dc.embargo.liftdate2027-02-18
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10125/110147
dc.subjectInternational relations
dc.titleTHE PHANTOMS OF THE ARCHIVES: MAKING ANTICOLONIAL CONNECTIVITIES SENSIBLE IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
dc.typeThesis
dcterms.abstractThis dissertation theorizes phantoms as spectral agents that haunt dominating power relations through the transfer and animation of histories otherwise obscured or silenced. It establishes phantoms as resisting normalized historical narratives and hauntology as tracing their moves epistemologically. What phantoms reveal are historical experiences – rich and textured, shaped either in trauma or affirmation – that are secreted by relations of power. In revealing silences and what is obfuscated, phantoms become a lens to witness and detect alternative visions, fantasies, and ways of being-in-the-world. Hence, this dissertation invokes and tracks phantoms as heuristics that expose marginalized histories and as paradigmatic agents that reanimate those histories. The objective is to demonstrate how colonialism still pervasively incises into contemporary postcolonial societies (e.g., India and Western societies), such as the US and Canada. Mediating on and analyzing anticolonial connectivities, this dissertation points to where/how they appear and may be sensible as “phantoms” even in their orchestrated obscurity within hegemonic histories. It names three historical moments/events/episodes – migrations, assassinations, and suicides – where it is possible to observe, investigate, and proclaim their phantoms as spectral agents restoring history to its fuller self, which, though not a complete picturing, makes previously alienated anticolonial connectivities more perceivable and visible. The dissertation, thus, argues that anticolonial activities and connectivities better mapped or remapped through a concatenation of phantoms exhibit continuing colonial paradoxes and the politics of decolonial projects. It also compels International Relations (IR) to be more responsive to its phantoms as diminished histories of global relations. Against this background, the dissertation sets out to make five interrelated moves. The first two moves are epistemological and methodological, and the latter three are historical and genealogical-cum episodic. First, the dissertation introduces the concept of phantoms, explaining what they are and how they work as spectral agents by animating alternative memories vis-ά-vis dominant historical remembrances. Second, it situates phantoms in relation to the field of hauntology as a method/approach/sensibility and shows how hauntology fuels phantoms epistemologically in support of their substantive roles. Hauntology both hosts and enlivens phantoms as heuristics and spectral agents. Third, the dissertation explores anticolonial connectivities conceptually: how to locate them – as episodes/events/moments – and detect them as “phantomatic” anticolonial connectivities despite their choreographed marginalization, erasure, or suppression. Fourth, the dissertation mines these three historical episodes/events/moments of migrations, assassinations, and suicides because of how they encapsulate forms of political action that are reflective of phantoms of colonialism and elucidate the kinds of criminalization of dissent they encounter. Fifth and finally, the dissertation tracks, recovers, and links these phantoms to “anticolonial connectivities” across both colonial and postcolonial histories and landscapes. Following this introductory chapter and the more substantial chapter on theory, Chapters 3, 4, and 5 conjure and unearth anticolonial phantoms – from the migrations of Indians to North America before and after Independence from the British, from haunting afterlives of assassinations and Indo-U.S. historical relations, and, lastly, from farm suicides as shadowing the farmers’ movements in postcolonial Indian politics. Illuminating the specters of colonialism that manifest in each of these spheres in resonance with the spectral turn in critical theory and anticolonial approaches and studies in IR, the dissertation summons phantoms to trace the presence, distortions, and erasures of anticolonialism in the imbrications of Western colonial/imperial and Indian postcolonial relations.
dcterms.extent314 pages
dcterms.languageen
dcterms.publisherUniversity of Hawai'i at Manoa
dcterms.rightsAll UHM dissertations and theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission from the copyright owner.
dcterms.typeText
local.identifier.alturihttp://dissertations.umi.com/hawii:11698

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