EVENTS

Abstract:

In the 1950s, thousands of ordinary Tibetans rose up to defend their country and religion against Chinese troops. Their citizen army fought through 1974 with covert support from the Tibetan exile government and the governments of India, Nepal, and the United States. Decades later, the story of this resistance is only beginning to be told and has not yet entered the annals of Tibetan national history. Having featured as an important component of the speaker’s research focus for the last 25 years, the presentation will attempt to unravel some of the complexities pertaining to this issue by majorly drawing from her book, Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War (Duke University Press, 2010).

About the Speaker:

Carole McGranahan is an anthropologist and historian of Tibet, and an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado. At any given time, she would be working on one of the following projects: Tibet, British empire, and the Pangdatsang family; the CIA as an ethnographic subject; contemporary US empire; the ongoing self-immolations in Tibet; the Chushi Gangdrug resistance army; refugee citizenship in the Tibetan diaspora (Canada, India, Nepal, USA); and, anthropology as theoretical storytelling. She regularly teaches courses on anthropological theory, history and memory, ethnography, colonialism and empire, Tibet, Nepal,  and the Himalayas. Her latest book is entitled Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War (Duke University Press, 2010). Currently, she is doing a Part Two of the Arrested Histories/Chushi Gangdrug project, this time focusing more solidly on the CIA as a key part of the spread of US empire during the Cold War.