Tales of Entanglement
| Author | Naeem Inayatullah,Jenny Edkins,Himadeep Muppidi,Robbie Shilliam,Aida A. Hozić,Julio César Díaz Calderón,Olivia Rutazibwa |
| DOI | 10.1177/03058298211034918 |
| Published date | 01 June 2021 |
| Date | 01 June 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Conference |
https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298211034918
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2021, Vol. 49(3) 604 –626
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/03058298211034918
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1. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of
Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), ix.
2. Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (New York: Routledge,
2000).
Tales of Entanglement
Jenny Edkins, Julio César Díaz Calderón ,
Aida A. Hozić , Himadeep Muppidi,
Naeem Inayatullah, Olivia Rutazibwa
and Robbie Shilliam
Introduction
Jenny Edkins
The University of Manchester, UK
Entanglement, and the way people and worlds ‘emerge through and as part of their entan-
gled intra-relating’,1 becomes nowhere more apparent perhaps than when we tell stories.
In telling stories we invoke a reader, a listener, an audience, even if sometimes that audi-
ence is within what we call our selves.2 But stories do more. They draw out the complex
and ambiguous mutual constitution of selves with others, of present with past, of person
with place, and bring into sight worlds that academic argument sometimes seems to
function to conceal. In this forum, five storytellers weave tales in poetry and prose – sto-
ries they told in a panel at the Millennium conference in 2020 – that reveal the deep-
rooted entanglements of diverse histories and geographies, and hopefully awake other
stories in readers.
Naeem Inayatullah was the person who prompted me to take the plunge into story-
telling – via autobiography. His own first autobiographical writing was a response to
the demand that immediately followed 9/11 from people asking him to speak as
Corresponding author:
Aida A. Hozić, University of Florida, 234 Anderson Hall, Gainesville, FL 32611-7011, USA.
Email: hozic@ufl.edu
1034918MIL0010.1177/03058298211034918Millennium – Journal of International StudiesEdkins et al.
research-article2021
Conference
Edkins et al. 605
3. Presented as ‘Love, War and Basketball: Recovering a Need for Afghanistan’ (plenary deliv-
ered at ‘4th Annual Conference on the Future of Cultural Memory’, University of South
Carolina, Columbia, SC, 14-17 February 2002). Available at: https://faculty.ithaca.edu/
naeem/docs/bios/naeempriorbio/afghanistan/).
4. Personal communication, December 2020. The essay ‘If Only You Could See What I have
Seen with Your Eyes’ (https://faculty.ithaca.edu/naeem/docs/bios/see/) was eventually pub-
lished as Naeem Inayatullah, ‘Distance and Intimacy: Forms of Writing and Worlding’, in
Claiming the International, eds. Arlene Tickner and David Blaney (New York: Routledge
2013), 194–213.
5. Ways of Writing: Feminist, Poststructural and Postcolonial Perspectives, British International
Studies Association (BISA) Poststructural Politics Working Group Workshop, ISA Annual
Convention, San Diego, CA, 21 March 2006.
6. Roxanne Doty, ‘Maladies of Our Souls: Identity and Voice in the Writing of Academic
International Relations’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 17, no. 2 (2004): 377–92,
37. https://doi.org/10.1080/0955757042000245951. Perhaps not unconnected, her work was
also an early exploration of the importance of colonial relations, Roxanne Doty, Imperial
Encounters: Patterns of Representation in North/South Relations (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press,1996); Roxanne Doty, ‘The Bounds of “Race” in International Relations’,
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 22, no. 3 (1993): 443–61. https://doi.org/10.11
77/03058298930220031001).
7. Stephen Chan, ‘A Problem for IR: How Shall We Narrate the Saga of the Bestial Man?’,
Global Society 17, no. 4 (2003): 385–413, https://doi.org/10.1080/1360082032000132153
(a paper first presented at Time and Narrative, a BISA Poststructural Politics Working
Group Workshop organised by Jenny Edkins, Maja Zehfuss and Véronique Pin-Fat at
the University of Manchester, 17 May 2002). Stephen Chan’s writings include poetry
(for example, ‘Body Count in Natal’, Alternatives 25, no. 3 (2000): 323–28, https://doi.
org/10.1177/030437540002500305) and novels as well as academic books.
8. See for example, Cynthia Enloe, Bananas Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of
International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Audre Lorde, ‘Poetry
is Not a Luxury’, in Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (New York: Crossing Press, 1984), 36–9;
Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other. Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington
and Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 1989); Carolyn Steedman, Past Tenses: Essays
on Writing, Autobiography and History (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1992). For important
later contributions see among others, Annick Wibben, Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative
Approach (London: Routledge, 2011), and Marysia Zalewski, Feminist International
Relations: 'Exquisite Corpse' (London: Routledge, 2013).
someone of Pakistani heritage.3 ‘The platform for such writing’, he explains, ‘came
from my analysis of the difference between novels and analytic texts’, set out in an
essay which appeared on his website.4 Finding his essays was part of what prompted
Maja Zehfuss and I to put together a workshop called ‘Ways of Writing’ for the
International Studies Association (ISA) conference in San Diego in 2006 that drew
together the work of feminist, poststructural and postcolonial scholars.5 Roxanne Doty
had already broken the surface in International Relations (IR) scholarship, and the way
she opened a path to different forms of engagement was also a significant influence for
me.6 By then, both she and Stephen Chan7 were writing autobiographically or autoeth-
nographically and exploring the implications, and numerous scholars from feminist
and postcolonial areas of IR, not to mention other fields, had been engaging with nar-
rative and different ways of writing.8 Christine Sylvester had hosted ‘Dramaturgies of
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