Fear and posting in Nepal: countering spectacles of fear through everyday social media practices

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article sheds light upon the cultural politics of fear in post-war Nepal by narrowing in on the Nepal banda – a recurring political spectacle in which the organizers seek to shut down Nepalese society through violent means – tracing both how it shapes and is appropriated in (offline and online) everyday life. In doing so I demonstrate how the online tactics that people employ to navigate the Nepal banda may be understood as countering its spectacle of fear. This happens primarily through the injection of everyday creativity, enjoyment, and leisure into the spectacle of fear embodied in the Nepal banda via the Instagram hashtag #Nepalbanda. As such, the findings indicate that in a society like Nepal where political violence has remained widespread in the post-war period, online engagement often appears as a more viable avenue to practice political dissent than offline resistance. The study furthermore demonstrates the benefits of exploring everyday tactics which are not explicitly political in their intent as countering spectacles of fear. An additional benefit of focusing on such subtle practices is that it does not run the risk of re-iterating the trauma of the original spectacle; an ethical issue raised by previous studies on the matter.