Interpellating the state

Abstract

No longer the sole purview of comedians, satire is increasingly used by activists as a tool of political intervention. During a protest campaign in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, activists used the satirical frame of a fake confession as a form of an “inverse interpellation” to provoke a response from the disinterested and dysfunctional postwar state authorities. This unusual series of events involved an unpopular prime minister, incriminating graffiti, and citizens who were hailing the police in an ironic key, showing how some forms of leftist political activism may be based on a desire to restore, rather than oppose, an overarching governing authority. [interpellation, satire, activism, postsocialism, the state, Bosnia and Herzegovina]

The affective labor of commoning: Street art in illiberal Hungary

“…Nadkarni, 2020). In the context of postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, Larisa Kurtović has analyzed how political activists engaged satire to shame the government for failing to perform its administrative tasks such as guaranteeing public safety and managing infrastructural maintenance (2019). Viewing the state as a governing body whose foremost responsibility lies in ensuring the welfare of citizens is a form of political claim‐making that is common in East‐Central Europe (Gille, 2002; Greenberg, 2014; Razsa, 2015).…”

The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019

“…Yet, this fabrication does not proceed uncontested. The state surfaces as a contested arena in diffuse sites, such as through the production of “indigenous” wine terroir as an instrument of settler colonialism in Israel/Palestine (Monterescu and Handel 2019), weekly street parties as celebratory departures from the state socialist temporality of la lucha in Santiago de Cuba (Garth 2019), the speculative politics of land restitution in post‐conflict Colombia (Morris 2019), the ritual negotiation of transnational maritime crossings with “other‐than‐human entities” by Haitian migrants (Kahn 2019), satirical billboards that compel ostensibly dysfunctional Bosnian politicians toward greater public accountability (Kurtović 2019), collective memories of state violence in Kurdistan as a subversion of the state's narrative monopoly on legitimate violence (Günay 2019), the “spectral fiction” of a Somali maritime sovereignty abrogated by US and German counter‐piracy ventures in Somali territorial waters (Dua 2019, 98), and the uneven distribution of augmented‐reality Pokémon GO in‐game items and events that virtually project a “unified Jerusalem without a Palestinian presence” (Meneley 2019, 139; emphasis in original). Perspectives of this sort remind us that the coherence of the state cannot be taken for granted, as its territorial hegemony is either secured or disrupted by ritual, vernacular, or performance.…”