‘Taboo’ and ‘Feeling Rules’ in Historical Denial: Transnational Remembrance of the Rohingya Genocide as Resistant Memory

Rin Ushiyama, Queen's University Belfast

Many historical debates are governed implicitly or explicitly by discursive and emotional rules. This presentation explores how ‘taboo’ and ‘feeling rules’ shape state and civil regulation of discourses about mass violence. Building on approaches in sociology of emotions and cultural trauma theory, this paper identifies two types of taboo, which, when transgressed, can result in moral outrage as well as severe legal, social, and political sanctions. Firstly, the ‘denial taboo’ (‘you must not deny that it happened’) dictates that denials of historical events are met with harsh penalties. Secondly, the ‘discursive taboo’ (‘you must not talk about it’) prevents one from discussing a historical event that has taken place. In both cases, breaking the taboo is seen as uncivil and profane, and a danger to the moral order of a given society. Applying this framework, this paper then focuses on the transnational and online remembrance of the Rohingya Genocide. Myanmar’s diasporic communities, working outside and beyond the constraints of Myanmar’s heavily censored domestic media, have been instrumental in ‘carrying’ and articulating the Rohingya Genocide as a cultural trauma transnationally, highlighting the Tatmadaw’s genocide denial as morally outrageous. In doing so, memory activists have engaged in cultural work to overcome the Tatmadaw’s ‘discursive taboo’ within Myanmar's borders and to create a ‘denial taboo’ around the Rohingya Genocide in the global civil sphere. This presentation foregrounds the relative autonomy of trauma narratives in the face of official denial and state silencing, and the potential resistant capacity of the transnational/global civil sphere in countering state control over memory discourses.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 51. History, Politics, and Memory I