Politics Of Rehabilitation Research Articles

‘I Have a Voice’: speech, silence and the rehabilitation of empire

This article grapples with the performativity of speech as a crucial site through which empire brings into being that which it names. I offer a critique of reading (and rehabilitating) empire as a mild and benign force in conjunction with the popularity of the film The King’s Speech (2010) which, I argue, attaches a humanized and redeemed face to the violence of empire. In my analysis, I suggest that a film that is ostensibly about the triumph of the speech-act could be read more productively as a text about the silence of empire. Drawing on queer and disability rights critiques of the politics of rehabilitation, I argue that in attempting to contain the stigma of stuttering, the film implicitly rehabilitates the politics of empire for a new millennium. I read the film in conjunction with certain strands of colonial historiography that are invested in recuperating the colonial encounter and refashioning it as a potentially egalitarian and mutually beneficial force, implicitly rejecting the insights of postcolonial critique.

Haimanti Roy. Partitioned Lives: Migrants, Refugees, Citizens in India and Pakistan, 1947–1965.

The Partition of India, which had multiple layers of meaning for the people of the subcontinent, represents the most contested terrain of South Asian historiography. In recent years it has been widely acknowledged that the Partition was not just an event that happened in August 1947; it had a long afterlife. The historiography of Partition therefore has shifted its focus from a preoccupation with its causes and the allocation of blames to an increasing interest in recovering the experiences of its victims, as these had profound consequences for the subsequent nation-building processes and community relations in the subcontinent. As Gyan Pandey once argued, the “truth” of the Partition lay in the violence it produced; the history of Partition should therefore reflect how this violence was conceptualized, executed, experienced, and remembered by those who lived through it—as victims, aggressors, or onlookers. A series of studies following this line of inquiry have appeared in recent years. Among these the works of Pandey, Urvashi Butalia, Subir Kaul, Kamla Bhasin and Ritu Menon, Ravinder Kaur, Vazira Zamindar, and Neeti Nair have focused on the Partition in Punjab and the experiences of the Punjabi refugees. If Bengal was initially neglected in this literature, that imbalance has been somewhat redressed by the appearance of a few significant studies by Prafulla Chakraborty, Ranabir Samaddar, Willem van Schendel, Jasodhara Bagchi,, Subhoranjan Dasgupta, and most recently Joya Chatterji. These studies have explored the uncertainties created by the new borders, the experiences of displacement of the Bengali refugees and focused on the politics of rehabilitation. Above all, they have underscored the differences in the trajectories of Partition histories in Punjab and Bengal.

Politics of Rehabilitation

Politics of Rehabilitation

Reckoning without the Past: The HIAG of the Waffen-SS and the Politics of Rehabilitation in the Bonn Republic, 1950-1961

Reckoning without the Past: The HIAG of the Waffen-SS and the Politics of Rehabilitation in the Bonn Republic, 1950-1961