Living Archives and Cyprus: Militarized Masculinities and Decolonial Emerging World Horizons

Citation:

Agathangelou, Anna M. 2017. “Living Archives and Cyprus: Militarized Masculinities and Decolonial Emerging World Horizons.” Critical Military Studies 3 (2): 206–11. 

Author: Anna M. Agathangelou

Abstract:

Huddled within the most influential theorizations and praxes of war and violence are imaginations of collating masculinities, texts and their embodiments. Interpreting and reading my mother as a non-dominant body, and her stories about war, violence, and Cyprus as re-iterative corporeal insights and practices challenging such toxic masculinities, I argue that such performances and embodiments (what I call living archives), albeit with multiple tensions, re-orient us to emerging decolonial horizons. In doing so, I directly challenge and unsuture the complacent IR historiographies of security and war and the ways they insist on composing and writing by bringing together certain archives (i.e., images of violent places and state documents) and silencing those which systematically and consistently point to modernity’s violent frameworks including their production of violent masculinities on which extinguishment and futures lie. Such an insistence colludes with certain toxic regimes of representation expecting certain subjects, sovereigns, and institutions to order and reiterate (produce) colonial and violent racialized masculine (and racialized feminized) practices between ourselves and the world. Living archives are also those invented signs, imaginations, and excesses that press materiality and its impasses (i.e., in the form of capture, blackness, non-genders, etc. and resolution of signs and fictions), exposing the limits of modernity’s fictioning, and gainst any resolution and labor that produces violence all the while sublating it.

Keywords: militarized masculinities, Cyprus, living archives, the colonial, imperial wars, decolonial struggles, international relations grammars

Topics: Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Gender, Masculinity/ies, Femininity/ies, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarization, Race, Security, Violence Regions: Europe, Southern Europe Countries: Cyprus

Year: 2017

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