| This dissertation interrogates questions of 'identity' in international relations and advances the argument that disciplinary IR, rather than needing to incorporate 'identity' into its framework, is already itself an identity practice. This argument is developed with reference to the case of Muslim identities in colonial Bengal, and more specifically, to the ways in which a particular image of the 'true' Muslim was (re)produced. I argue that to understand disciplinary IR as an identity practice is to acknowledge that the discourses of the discipline serve to (re)produce and (re)affirm the subjectivities which disciplinary IR claims simply to reflect.; I argue that disciplinary IR authorises certain of these subjectivities and locates them at its centre, simultaneously marginalising and delegitimising others/Others. Theoretically, this marginalisation occurs through discursive strategies that invalidate those voices which seek to decentre and denaturalise the discipline. At best, these strategies serve to trivialise the voices speaking from the margins that the discipline continues to produce; at worst, these voices are constructed as both illegitimate and dangerous. Empirically, the marginalisations (re)produced by disciplinary IR relate to the question of what counts as a legitimate topic of study, of what properly falls within 'international relations.' A line of inclusion has been drawn, and it is from within that privileged space that disciplinary IR asks: 'what does Muslim identity in colonial Bengal have to do with international relations?' This case has been positioned by disciplinary IR as a marginal site; however, I argue that an exploration of Muslim identities in colonial Bengal tells us much about the world which we have made. It offers a position from which to consider ways in which subjectivities are discursively produced, but it does so from a different ('unauthorised') place, a particular ('trivial'), local ('unimportant') place, from which to explore how, in Cynthia Enloe's words, the 'artifices of international politics are constructed.' As a marginalised group in a colonised political space, the ways in which the Bengal Muslims (re)produced themselves cannot be separated from an analysis of the ability of the powerful to constitute 'Others,' as Rob Walker has put it, as 'subjects subject to subjection.'... |
