History in Person: Enduring Struggles, Contentious Practice, Intimate Identities

10 Figures of the Future Dystopia and Subjectivity in the Social Imagination of the Future

325 Since the early 1980s, anthropology, history, cultural studies, and other fields have seen a great deal of groundbreaking work on nationalism and its relationship with history and historical consciousness (e.g., Anderson 1991 [1983]; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Spencer 1990). Much challenging, innovative work has also been done on history making, struggles over history , and history and narrative (e.g., Cohen 1994; Coronil 1997; Dirks, Eley, and Ortner 1994; Donham 1990, 1999; Pemberton 1994; Rosaldo 1980; Sahlins 1985; Schoffeleers 1985, 1987; Wright 1985). The relationship between nationalism and ethnic absolutism (Gilroy 1990), on the one hand, and historicity and memory, on the other, also became the cornerstone of my own work among Hutu refugees from Burundi exiled in Tanzania (Malkki 1995). I explored the ways in which the lived circumstances of exile were transforming people’s sense of history and belonging, and how a particular refugee camp had become an intensified site of memory in which experiences, memories, nightmares , and rumors of violence converged to make and remake categorical enmities. I tried to understand how the social categories Hutu and 10 Figures of the Future Dystopia and Subjectivity in the Social Imagination of the Future Liisa H. Malkki Tutsi had become (and were constantly becoming) interchangeable in so many ways with the moral categories good and evil. Since the field research for that earlier project was completed in 1986, Burundi, like Rwanda, has seen massive new violence that is aptly described as genocidal in its logic. Numerous studies of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the massive violence of 1993 in Burundi (and all the violence since) exist already (e.g., African Rights 1994; Destexhe 1994; Guichaoua 1995; Jefremovas n.d.; Lemarchand 1994; Newbury 1998; Newbury and Newbury 1994; Prunier 1995; Reyntjens 1994; Vansina 1998; Wagner 1998). The political struggles and violence are still going on in both countries as of this writing. People in Burundi and its exiled populations in surrounding countries are fighting a shockingly underreported civil war. It was in the historical context of this continuing political violence and its accompanying bitter struggles over truth and history that I took exploratory steps toward a new research project among Hutu exiled in Montreal, Canada, by going to talk with people about whether research among them might be possible. The project is still in its initial phases. I spent one month, from August to September 1995, in Montreal and was able, in that time, only to formulate a better understanding of some of the research questions that would be meaningful and worthwhile to pursue in coming years. In this chapter, I cannot yet present “findings.” My purpose, rather, is to offer reflections on a project only just begun. This seems to me worth doing because the insights that the preliminary conversations with the Hutu refugees in Montreal produced seem particularly timely and important at this moment—in the Central African political context and in a global context where millennial fears, predictive management, and the projection of future scenarios tend to interject themselves into people’s lives with a heightened intensity. Since the preliminary fieldwork trip to Montreal, I have corresponded with a number of people I met there, and I sent this chapter for circulation and comment by those among them who, I thought, might be interested in reading it. Their comments are still coming in; here I quote extensively from only one person, Melchior Mbonimpa, a professor of theology and philosophy at a Canadian university and a Hutu exile from Burundi. The Montreal conversations opened up for me new fields of vision LIISA H. MALKKI 326 FIGURES OF THE FUTURE 327 into questions of subjectivity and the social imagination of the future. It became particularly clear that while linkages between nationalism and history have been extensively and well studied in anthropology, history , cultural studies, and other fields, links between visions of the future and transformations of national consciousness (or other forms of categorical thought) have been much less examined as yet. Perhaps part of the explanation for the relative inattention to visions and narratives of the future in the study of national identity and national thinking can be found in our accustomed uses of the concept of history. It might be suggested, in a preliminary way, that the category “history”—usually understood in practice as that which has in one manner or another become part of the past—tends...