REVIEWER MEETS REVIEWED
SEMINAR SERIES AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM’S ANTHROPOLOGY LIBRARY AND RESEARCH CENTRE
The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Post-War Polity
Thursday 13 February at 10.00 am (tea & coffee served from 9.30 am)
Anthropology Library and Research Centre, British Museum
THIS IS A FREE EVENT
The British Museum’s Anthropology Library and Research Centre, in conjunction with the Royal Anthropological Institute, is pleased to present the fifth seminar in the 2013-14 series of ‘Reviewer meets Reviewed’, a discussion between Dr Yael Navaro-Yashin, author of ‘The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Post-War Polity’, and Dr Nicolas Argenti, who reviewed the book for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
The Make-Believe Space is a book of ethnographic and theoretical meditation on the phantasmatic entanglement of materialities in the aftermath of war, displacement, and expropriation. “Northern Cyprus,” carved out as a separate space and defined as a distinct (de facto) polity since its invasion by Turkey in 1974, is the subject of this ethnography about postwar politics and social relations. Turkish-Cypriots’ sociality in a reforged geography, rid of its former Greek-Cypriot inhabitants after the partition of Cyprus, forms the centerpiece of Yael Navaro-Yashin’s conceptual exploration of subjectivity in the context of “ruination” and “abjection.” The unrecognized state in Northern Cyprus unfolds through the analytical devices that she develops as she explores this polity’s administration and raison d’être via affect theory. Challenging the boundaries between competing theoretical orientations, Navaro-Yashin crafts a methodology for the study of subjectivity and affect, and materiality and the phantasmatic, in tandem. In the process, she creates a subtle and nuanced ethnography of life in the long-term aftermath of war.
Bookings/enquiries: Ted Goodliffe ( TGoodliffe@britishmuseum.org)
