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This chapter examines three novels: Wendy Law-Yone’s Irrawaddy Tango, Lucy Cruickshanks’s The Road to Rangoon, and Charmaine Craig’s Miss Burma, and two works of life writing: Pascal Khoo Thwe’s From the Land of Green Ghosts and Aung San Suu Kyi’s Freedom from Fear. The fictional works unravel a world of insurgent figures that undergo a constant mitosis and metamorphosis, from lovers to rebels, from fathers to national fathers, and from husbands to dictators. The chapter discusses concepts of intimate violence, affective (in)justice, inherited violence, and intimate sovereignties. Unlike the soft or slow violence of poverty and precarity, intimate violence occurs in familiar sites and spaces, against a familiar enemy. The readings unveil how the intimate violence is bound by sovereign desires of armed secession. The second part pairs two readings, Aung San Suu Kyi’s Freedom from Fear and Thwe’s From the Land of Green Ghosts, offering a contrasting perspective on the interplay of intimacy, affects, violence and sovereign desires. If Suu Kyi’s narrative of defending the nation through militaristic means can be read as an extension of national autobiography then Thwe’s defense of tribal autonomy through affective insurgency can be read as the formative aspect of what I call subalter-nation.
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