The intimate public as a decolonial lens: “cripping” affect, nationalism and imperial violence

Abstract This article brings an intimate perspective to bear upon the violence of economic sanctions, shifting attention away from an exclusive focus on state actors, in order to examine how “‘wounds” enter politics’. 1 In this research, I ‘stretch’ Berlant’s notion of the intimate public, reconfiguring it as a decolonial analytic lens on subaltern suffering in conditions of endemic imperial violence. I focus on the Facebook page of the Iranian chief negotiator, Javad Zarif, during Iran’s talks with the P5+1 powers over its nuclear programme, under the pressure of what the Obama administration itself termed ‘crippling’ economic sanctions. Examining Zarif’s audience’s readings of his back injury during the talks as representing the ‘crippled’ nation, I trace how subaltern injury is intimately narrated through a racialised framework of disablement and ‘recovery’, where ‘recovery’ signifies a desanctioned and deracialised national body. I firstly complicate the prevailing conception of the intimate public as oriented around a ‘national fantasy’, theorising it as an affective structure that simultaneously locates imperial power, as well as the nation-state, as sources of complaint and hope; secondly, I draw on a critical disability (‘crip’) lens to understand the intimate public as mediating both the debilitation of racialised underdevelopment, and the fantasy of a normative, ‘developed’ national body in a post-sanctions future. Through examining the intimate politics of economic sanctions, this study contributes to a decolonial perspective on the entanglements of affect, nationalism and imperial violence.