Arrested Histories

In the 1950s, thousands of ordinary Tibetans rose up to defend their country and religion against Chinese troops. Their citizensrs" army fought through 1974 with covert support from the Tibetan exile government and the governments of India, Nepal, and the United States. Decades later, the story of this resistance is only beginning to be told and has not yet entered the annals of Tibetan national history. InArrested Histories, the anthropologist and historian Carole McGranahan asks how and why histories of this resistance army are "arrested" and what the ensuing repercussions are for the Tibetan refugee communityDrawing on rich ethnographic and historical research, McGranahan tells the story of the Tibetan resistance and the social processes through which this history is made and unmade, and lived and forgotten in the present. Veteransrs" desires for recognition hinge on the Dalai Lama and "historical arrest," a practice in which the telling of certain pasts is suspended until an undetermined time in the future. In this analysis, struggles over history emerge as a profound pain of belonging. Tibetan cultural politics, regional identities, and religious commitments cannot be disentangled from imperial histories, contemporary geopolitics, and romanticized representations of Tibet. Moving deftly from the military battlefield to nonviolent hunger strikes, and from diplomatic offices to refugee camps,Arrested Historiesprovides powerful insights into the stakes of political engagement and the cultural contradictions of everyday life.

Carole McGranahan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is a co-editor of Imperial Formations.