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Catarina Kinnvall, svartvitt foto.

Catarina Kinnvall

Professor

Catarina Kinnvall, svartvitt foto.

Ontological Security and the Limits to a Common world: Subaltern Pasts and the Inner-Worldliness of the Tablighi Jama’at

Author

  • Catarina Kinnvall
  • Ted Svensson

Summary, in English

In this article, the often conflictual intersection between transnational dimensions of religious social formations and narratives of global governance and national security is interrogated. Concretely, the article examines how the relation, between the transnational activities and commonalities actuated by the Islamic revivalist movement Tablighi Jama’at and the perception that it hosts and nourishes extremist elements, both activates and makes manifest efforts at attaining ontological security. At the heart of the analysis is hence the question of where to locate the limits to the common world as it finds embodiment in contemporary expressions of global governance and transnationalism. By critically engaging the possibility of incorporating the many voices of being human into a singular and all-encompassing framework of human existence, the article moreover builds and expands on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s theorising of ‘subaltern pasts’ and relates it to the seeming need of selfhood to strive towards wholeness, that is, for subjectivity to be securitised. It is, as a consequence, suggested that the identity formation that emerges through Tablighi Jama’at’s comportment, and the controversies that surround it, must be understood as a manifestation of the limits to what narratives of globality might accommodate. By claiming this, the article confirms and furthers extant reasoning on the incomplete and fractured relation between the possibility of a common world and the intrinsic silence of the subaltern within the realms of the international and the global.

Department/s

  • Department of Political Science

Publishing year

2017-10-16

Language

English

Pages

333-352

Publication/Series

Postcolonial Studies

Volume

20

Issue

3

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Routledge

Topic

  • Political Science (excluding Public Administration Studies and Globalization Studies)
  • Globalization Studies

Keywords

  • global governance
  • ontological security
  • Tablighi Jama'at
  • subaltern
  • postcolonialism

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1466-1888