Carole McGranahan (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2001)
I am a cultural anthropologist and historian specializing in contemporary Tibet. My research focuses on issues of colonialism and empire, history and memory, power and politics, refugees and citizenship, nationalism, senses of belonging, gender, war, and anthropology as theoretical storytelling. Since 1994, I have conducted research in Tibetan refugee communities in India and Nepal on the history and politics of the guerilla army Chushi Gangdrug, culminating in my book Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Histories of a Forgotten War (Duke University Press, 2010). Thinking of 20th-21st century Tibetan histories and experiences as imperial in a global sense is a key part of my work in relation to the CIA, British India, and the People's Republic of China. My work on Tibet as “out-of-bounds” empire can be found in Imperial Formations, an SAR volume I co-edited with Ann Stoler and Peter Perdue. Currently, I am working on two new projects: a Wenner-Gren funded project with John Collins on “Ethnographies of U.S. Empire,” and a new solo research project with Tibetans in India, Nepal, New York City, and Toronto titled “Refugee Citizenship: Tibetan Practices of Political Subjectivity in Diaspora.” I regularly teach classes on Tibet and the Himalayas, feminist anthropology, history and memory, and contemporary social theory.
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Selected Publications:
- 2012 "An Anthropologist in Political Asylum Court, Part I" and "Anthropology and the Truths of Political Asylum, Part II," Anthropology News, March and April. PDF
- 2012 "Mao in Tibetan Disguise: History, Ethnographic Theory, and Excess." HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(1): 213-245. PDF
- 2012 "Teaching Tibet in a Time of Precarious Emotion," in Self-Immolation as Protest in Tibet. Special issue of Cultural Anthropology. http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/539
- 2012 Self-Immolation as Protest in Tibet. Special issue of Cultural Anthropology. Co-edited with Ralph Litzinger. http://www.culanth.org/?q=node%2F526
- 2010 Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War. Duke University Press.
- 2010 "Narrative Dispossession: Tibet and the Gendered Logics of Historical Possibility," Comparative Studies in Society and History 52(4), pp. 768-797. PDF
- 2007 Imperial Formations. Co-edited with Ann Stoler and Peter Perdue. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
- 2007 “Introduction: Refiguring Imperial Terrains,” with Ann Stoler, in Imperial Formations, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 3-47. PDF
- 2007 “Empire Out-of-Bounds: Tibet in the Era of Decolonization,” in Imperial Formations, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 187-227. PDF
- 2006 Public Anthropology. Guest Editor of Special Issue of India Review 5(3-4). PDF
- 2006 “Tibet’s Cold War: The CIA and the Chushi Gangdrug Resistance, 1956-1974,” Journal of Cold War Studies 8(3), pp. 102-130. PDF
- 2005 “Truth, Fear, and Lies: Exile Politics and Arrested Histories of the Tibetan Resistance,” Cultural Anthropology 20(4), pp. 570-600. PDF
- 2003 “From Simla to Rongbatsa: The British and the “Modern” Boundaries of Tibet,” The Tibet Journal 28(4), pp. 39-60. PDF
- 2003 “Kashmir and Tibet: Comparing Conflicts, States, and Solutions,” India Review 2(3), pp. 145-180.
- 2002 “Sa sPang mda’ gNam sPang mda’: Murder, History, and Social Politics in 1920s Lhasa,” in Lawrence Epstein, ed., Khams pa Local Histories: Visions of People, Place, and Authority, Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, pp. 103-126. PDF
- 1996 “Miss Tibet, or Tibet Misrepresented?: The Trope of Woman-as-Nation in the Struggle for Tibet,” in Colleen Ballerino Cohen et al., eds., Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power, New York: Routledge, 1996, pp. 161-184. PDF