Afghan “Legal Double Consciousness”: Lyricism and the International Humanitarian Regime’s Hermeneutical Paradigm

• In Event: Global and Transnational Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 2. Knowledge and Politics I

Abstract

In this paper, I apply a hermeneutical approach towards examining the refugee label as it is constructed amidst two distinct sets of interpretive resources: those of individual Afghans poets and writers, who are part of a diaspora that has been labelled by the international humanitarian regime for over forty years, and those of relevant refugee labelling institutions. Accordingly, I juxtapose a corpus of literature and poetry by Afghans alongside relevant institutional labelling processes and ancillary discourses. The ensuant dialectic I trace between subjective and institutional hermeneutics is organized around the following sets of interrelated themes, which I have developed based on their prominence within the corpus: 1) legality and liminality, and 2) return, grief, and memory. Viewed through Miranda Fricker’s (2007) notion of hermeneutical injustice, the incongruity between individual and institutional understandings of Afghans’ narratives can be understood as a patently epistemic problem: by extension, I identify how analyzing Afghans’ lyrical subjectivity uniquely reveals the privileging of institutional subjectivity and the existence of sizable interpretive lacunas in the international humanitarian regime’s hermeneutical paradigm. Furthermore, I argue that beyond constructing narratives that account for these interpretive lacunas in order to navigate existing legal paradigms, Afghans also articulate their own subjectivities. This simultaneity can be understood through the lens of “legal double consciousness.” Deviating from Fricker, I foreground Afghans’ own interpretive resources and conclude that, by way of this legal double consciousness, the epistemic violence of institutional labelling paradigms do not render the experiences of individuals less intelligible to themselves. Instead, they subvert legal meaning making per se by rendering the law subsidiary to their lyricism.

Author

• Asma Rahimyar, Yale University