Displacing the ‘authentic account': historical trauma, political subjectification and the overdetermination of Tibetan youth subjectivities and agencies

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Connell, James Astley (2017). Displacing the ‘authentic account': historical trauma, political subjectification and the overdetermination of Tibetan youth subjectivities and agencies. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This thesis considers the reputedly constitutive effects of violence and (intergenerational) loss on youth political subjectivities and agencies, with specific regard for young Tibetans of the refugee-diaspora of Northern India. While the effects of violence on socialisation and agency are currently a significant concern, prevailing clinical, cultural, and even radical psychoanalytical explanations tend – in universalising the traumatic event – to advance underdetermined accounts of experience, subjectivity and agency, leading to depoliticisation of the young or overstatement of their agency. In contrast, this study draws on the Foucauldian concept of political subjectification to reflect on the displaced wider overdeterminative material-discursive field through which young subjects, their subjectivities, and agencies are constituted. Through an ethnographically-informed genealogical method I attempt to trace the signification and affective-internalisation of a specific masternarrative of (national) loss, and the displacements the advent of this account has caused –with specific regard for the displacement of classed, gendered and generational experiences of loss. Finally, drawing on Foucault’s parrhesia as a heuristic for decentred agency, I consider how far young people in exile are able to resist patrifilial hegemony through indexing alternative forms of loss.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):