Abstract
In this paper, I analyse how the confluence of martyrdom, terror, and computer-mediated communications has contributed to the emergence of a Sikh diasporic cultural politics. I offer an analysis of a moment of conflict that took place in June 2001 when Sikhs around the world commemorated the seventeenth anniversary of ‘Operation Bluestar’—the Indian government's code-name for a military siege on Sikhism's holiest temple that led to the deaths of several thousand people. Commemorating this day of genocide refocused enduringly significant debates about the status of the martyr in Sikh life and reconstituted the tensions of an ongoing conflict between Sikhs and the Indian nation-state. This moment of conflict also effectively drew together transnational struggles to establish a separate sovereign Sikh state called Khalistan with the emergence of globalising information technologies like the Internet. What I call the diasporic sublime offers a means for addressing this moment of diasporic conflict in relation to intersecting histories of Sikh religious practice, the valorisation of martyrs, and the proliferation of images of corpses on Sikh websites. These instances of violence, technology and knowledge production prompt a rethinking of analytical models that privilege the ‘imagination’, ‘dispersion from a homeland’ and ‘experience’ in explaining the creation of diasporic communities. In contrast to these models, the notion of the diasporic sublime offers the possibility for developing a more precise way of talking about diasporic subject formation that marks out the powerful effectivity of the inexperiencable and the unimaginable.
Published Version
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