Scales of imagination and political pleasure: ethnography of current Basque sovereignism

GAZTAÑAGA JULIETA

Workshop; News From the Field; 2022

Can people produce sovereignty politics even when their political work and imagination are tributaries of experiences of violence and repression? Can we speak of ‘sovereignty as pleasure’ that do not reproduce the basic mechanisms of sovereign violence...? My Answer is yes. For the last five years I've been doing fieldwork with people who consider themselves Basque independentists and sovereigntists, rather or instead of Basque nationalists. This people are engaged in various spaces of activism about self-determination rights in non-colonial settings, or the right to decide. In a place where efforts to democratize independentism must start by revisiting the link between state desire and armed struggle and where everyday life is still permeated by characterisations of Abertzale politics as anti-democratics, any research is risky. In this presentation I'd like to talk about sovereignty, political pleasure and scales of imagination.