The Art of Dissident Domesticity

Abstract

What happens to domestic life when the state turns a troublesome subject's home into a prison; when an outlaw evading custody turns an extraterritorial space, such as an embassy, into a home? How is a foreign sovereign transformed into a private citizen through exile, house arrest, and return? Exile and forced domesticity have long linked sovereignty to the power to determine intimate life as centuries-old practices of house arrest and diplomatic asylum have taken on new forms in recent decades in the wake of emerging surveillance technologies and changing relationships between information, territory, and sovereignty. This paper examines two quite distinct, high-profile, celebrity instances of what we call dissident domesticity. In the first case, Prempeh I, the last sovereign king of Asante, is exiled by the British to the Seychelles from his capital of Kumasi in what is now Ghana, and placed under house arrest there to end a war of British Imperial conquest. In the second case, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the 21 st century's iconic dissident, seeks asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid arrest and extradition. Prempeh's exile on the edge of empire and Assange's confinement at its center show how the fight over the control of information-and those who circulate it-converges with the struggle for the control of territory-and those who police it, transverse it, and are trapped by it. We draw on ethnographic, archival, and artistic work at both these sites of incarceration to understand how information and surveillance, resistance and coercion are made in the interplay between center and periphery, inside and outside. Our examinations converge on two key spots: Prempeh's Seychelles veranda and Assange's Knightsbridge balcony, which mediate between intimate inside and public outside, an exchange that molds bodies within and against

The Contested Crown

“…To the staff of the Weltmuseum in Vienna, Xokonoschtletl embodies the threat of hostile community claims, leading some of them to tell me that he is "crazy." 39 On the other side of the debate, it is not surprising that Xokonoschtletl fi nds engaging with the museum, let alone engaging with the state, maddening, as his personal identity is entangled with the politics of nation building. In such a situation the self is projected onto the state in an act of extreme identifi cation, something that happens particularly to Indigenous people because of their dispossession from the land.…”

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