The Self-immolation Of Thich Quang Duc – Smsu

June
11, 1963, in Saigon, Vietnam, a Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc immolated
himself in a busy intersection. The following is an excerpt taken from
my Manufacturing Religion, pp. 167-177, which discusses this incident. 

Representing
Vietnamese “Self-Immolations”

The
often-occluded relations among power, imperial politics, and the specific
portrayals of religious issues is perhaps no more apparent than in the
case of the interpretations American media and intellectuals gave to the
much publicized actions of several Vietnamese Buddhists who, beginning
in mid-June of 1963, died by publicly setting themselves on fire. The first
of these deaths occurred at a busy downtown intersection in Saigon, on
11 June 1963, and was widely reported in American newspapers the following
day, although the New York Times, along with many other newspapers, declined
to print Malcolm Browne’s famous, or rather infamous, photograph of the
lone monk burning (Moeller 1989: 404). The monk, seventy-three-year-old
Thich Quang Duc, sat at a busy downtown intersection and had gasoline poured
over him by two fellow monks. As a large crowd of Buddhists and reporters
watched, he lit a match and, over the course of a few moments, burned to
death while he remained seated in the lotus position. In the words of’
David Halberstam, who was at that time filing daily reports on the war
with the New York Times, 

 I
was to see that sight again, but once was enough. Flames were coming from
a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head
blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning flesh; human
beings burn surprisingly quickly. Behind me I could hear the sobbing of
the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused
to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think…. As he
burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure
in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him. (1965: 211)

After
his funeral, where his remains were finally reduced to ashes, Quang Duc’s
heart, which had not burned, was retrieved, enshrined, and treated as a
sacred relic (Schecter 1967: 179). 

In
spite of the fact that this event took place during the same busy news
week as the civil rights movement in the United States was reaching a peak
(with the enrollment of the first two black students at the University
of Alabama and in the same week as the murder, in Jackson, Mississippi,
of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers), as the week progressed, Quang
Duc’s death and the subsequent demonstrations associated with his funeral
were covered by the American media in greater detail. From the small initial
article on page three of the New York Times on 12 June that reported the
death accompanied only by a photograph of a nearby protest that prevented
a fire truck from reaching the scene, the story was briefly summarized
and updated on page five the next day and then was moved to the lead story,
on page one on 14 June 1963, accompanied by the following headline: “U.S.
Warns South Vietnam on Demands of Buddhists: [South Vietnamese President]
Diem is told he faces censure if he fails to satisfy religious grievances,
many o which are called just.” The story, no longer simply involving the
actions of a lone Buddhist monk but now concerned with the official U.S.
reaction, remained on page one for the following days, was reported in
greater detail by Halberstam in the Sunday edition (16 June 1963), and
was mentioned for the first time in an editorial column on 17 June 1963,
one week after it occurred. By the autumn o that year, the images of either
protesting or burning monks had appeared in a number of popular magazines,
most notably Life Magazine (June, August, September, and November issues). 

In
spite of the wide coverage this event received in newspapers and the popular
presses, it seems puzzling that it received relatively little or no treatment
by scholars of religion. Apart from a few brief descriptions of these events
in an assortment of books on world religions in general (such as Ninian
Smart’s World’s Religions, where it is interpreted as an “ethical” act
[1989: 4471) or on Buddhism in Southeast Asia, only one detailed article
was published at that time, in History of Religions, written by Jan Yiin-Hua
(1965). This article was concerned with examining the medieval Chinese
Buddhist precedents for Quang Duc’s death, a death that quickly came to
be interpreted in the media as an instance of self-immolation, or selfsacrifice,
to protest religious persecution of the Buddhists in South Vietnam by the
politically and militarily powerful Vietnamese Roman Catholics. According
to such accounts, the origin of the protests and, eventually, Quang Duc’s
death, was a previous demonstration, on 8 May 1963, in which government
troops aggressively broke up a Buddhist gathering in the old imperial city
of Hue that was demonstrating for, among other things, the right to fly
the Buddhist flag along with the national flag. The government, however,
took no responsibility for the nine Buddhists who died in the ensuing violence
at that time, blaming their deaths instead on Communists. Accordingly,
outrage for what the Buddhists considered to be the unusually violent actions
of the government troops at Hue was fueled over the following weeks, culminating,
according to this interpretation, in Quang Duc’s sacrificial death. 

Given
that the event was generally acknowledged by most interpreters to be a
sacrifice, an essentially religious issue, it is no surprise that the central
concern of Jan was to determine how such actions could be considered Buddhist,
given their usually strict rules against killing in general, and suicide
in particular. In his own words, these actions “posed a serious problem
of academic interest, namely, what is the place of religious suicide in
religious history and what is its justification?” (243). The reader is
told that the monks’ motivations were “spiritual” and that their self-inflicted
deaths were “religious suicides,” because “self-immolation signifies something
deeper than merely the legal concept of suicide or the physical action
of self-destruction” (243). Given that the event is self-evidently religious
(an interpretation that is based on an assumption that is undefended),
the question of greatest interest has little to do with the possible political
origins or overtones of the event but rather “whether such a violent action
is justifiable according to religious doctrine” (243). It seems clear that
for this historian of religions, the action can only be properly understood-and
eventually justified-once it is placed in the context of texts written
by Chinese Buddhist specialists from the fifth century C.E. onward (e.g.,
the Biographies of Eminent Monks by Hui-chiao [497-554 C.E.] and the Sung
Collection of Biographies of Eminent Monks by Tsan-ning [919-1001 C.E.]).
Jan’s concern, then, is to determine whether these actions were justifiable
(something not properly the concern of scholars of religion) exclusively
on the basis of devotee accounts, some of which were written over one thousand
years before the Vietnam War. 

After
a survey of these texts, the article concludes that these actions are indeed
justifiable. Basing his argument on changing Chinese Buddhist interpretations
of self-inflicted suffering and death, Jan finds a “more concrete emphasis
upon the practical action needed to actualize the spiritual aim” (265).
Accordingly, these actions largely result from the desire of elite devotees,
inspired by scriptures (255), to demonstrate great acts of selflessness
(acts whose paradigms are to be found in stories of the unbounded compassion
and mercy of assorted bodhisattvas). The closest Jan comes to offering
a political interpretation of any of these reported deaths is that the
“politico-religious reasons” for some scriptural instances of self-immolation
are “protest against the political oppression and persecution of their
religion” (252). 

In
terms of the dominance of the discourse on sui generis religion, this article
constitutes a fine example of how an interpretive framework can effectively
manage and control an event. Relying exclusively on authoritative Chinese
Buddhist texts and, through the use of these texts, interpreting such acts
exclusively in terms of doctrines and beliefs (e.g., self-immolation, much
like an extreme renunciant might abstain from food until dying, could be
an example of disdain for the body in favor of the life of the mind and
wisdom) rather than in terms of their socio-political and historical context,
the article allows its readers to interpret these deaths as acts that refer
only to a distinct set of beliefs that happen to be foreign to the non-Buddhist.
And when politics is acknowledged to be a factor, it is portrayed as essentially
oppressive to a self-evidently pure realm of religious motivation and action.
In other words, religion is the victim of politics, because the former
is a priori known to be pure. And precisely because the action and belief
systems were foreign and exotic to the vast majority of Americans, these
actions needed to be mediated by trained textual specialists who could
utilize the authoritative texts of elite devotees to interpret such actions.
The message of such an article, then, is that this act on the part of a
monk can be fully understood only if it is placed within the context of
ancient Buddhist documents and precedents rather than in the context of
contemporary geopolitical debates. (And further, that the ancient occurrences
of such deaths can themselves be fully understood only from the point of
view of the intellectual devotees [i.e., Buddhist historians].) That the
changing geopolitical landscape of South Asia in the early 1960s might
assist in this interpretation is not entertained. It is but another instance
of the general proscription against reductionism. 

Such
an idealist and conservative interpretation is also offered by several
contributors to the Encyclopedia of Religion. Marilyn Harran, writing the
article on suicide (Eliade 1987: vol. 14, 125-131), agrees with Jan’s emphasis
on the need to interpret these events in light of doctrine and in the light
of spiritual elites. She writes that although religiously motivated suicide
(an ill-defined category that prejudges the act) “may be appropriate for
the person who is an arhat, one who has attained enlightenment, it is still
very much the exception to the rule” (129). And Carl-Martin Edsman, writing
the article on fire (Eliade 1987: vol. 5, 340-346), maintains that although
death by fire can be associated with “moral, devotional, or political reasons,”
it can also be “regarded as promoting rebirth into a higher existence as
a bodhisattva, an incipient Buddha, or admittance to ‘the paradise’ of
the Buddha Amitabha” (344). In a fashion similar to the exclusive emphasis
on the insider’s perspective, and having isolated such acts in the purer
realm of religious doctrine and belief, Edsman immediately goes on to assert
that the “Buddhist suicides in Vietnam in the 1960s were enacted against
a similar background; for this reason-unlike the suicides of their Western
imitators-they do not constitute purely political protest actions” (344).
The “similar background” of which he writes is the set of beliefs in a
pure land, compassion, selflessness, and so on, all of which enable Edsman
to isolate the Vietnamese deaths from issues of power and politics. Because
similar deaths in the United States took place’ without the benefit of,
for example, a cyclical worldview and notions of rebirth, and the like,
he is able to conclude that the U.S. deaths by fire may have been political.
For Edsman, the doctrinal system of Buddhism provides a useful mechanism
for interpreting these acts as essentially ahistorical and religious. 

Some
will no doubt argue that, if indeed the discourse on sui generis religion
was at one time dominant, it no longer is. Even if one at least acknowledges
that the study of supposedly disembodied ideas and beliefs is interconnected
with material issues or power and privilege, it is easy to banish and isolate
such involvements to the field’s prehistory, its European, colonial past,
in an attempt to protect the contemporary field from such charges (recall
Strenski’s attempt to isolate interwar European scholarship as a means
of protecting the modern profession). To rebut such isolationist arguments,
one need look no further than Charles Orzech’s 1994 article, “Provoked
Suicide,” to find this discourse in its contemporary forma form virtually
unchanged since jan’s article was published some thirty years ago. Like
Jan, Orzech attempts to overcome the “huge cultural gulf that separated
the observer from those involved” (155) by placing Quang Duc’s tradition
of what Orzech terms the “self-immolation paradigms” (149) as well as the
many other stories of selfless action one finds throughout the mythic history
of Buddhism (e.g., from the jataka tales, the story of the bodhisattva
who willingly gives up his life to feed the hungry tigress). Also like
Jan, Orzech is concerned to answer one of the questions often asked about
these apparently puzzling Vietnamese Buddhists’ actions: “whether ‘religious
suicide’ was not a violation of Buddhist precepts condemning violence”
(145). Using Rene Girard’s theory of sacrificial violence, Orzech answers
this question by recovering a distinction he believes to be often lost
in the study of Buddhism: its sacred violence as well as its much emphasized
nonviolent aspect (for a modern example of the latter emphasis, see the
essays collected by Kraft [1992]). 

For
our purpose, what is most important to observe about both Jan’s and Orzech’s
reading of Quang Duc’s action is that in neither case are historical and
political context of any relevance. In both cases, it is as if the burning
monk is situated in an almost Eliadean ritual time, removed from the terrors
of historical, linear time-a place of no place, where the symbolism of
fire is far more profound than the heat of the fire itself. For example,
in his interpretation of the early selfimmolation tales, Orzech explicitly
acknowledges that “(al)though little context information is available to
us, it is clear that in each case the sacrifice is performed as a remedy
for an intolerable situation” (154, emphasis added)–clearly, social and
political contexts are of little relevance for authoritatively interpreting
timeless ritual or religious actions. Several lines later, when he addresses
Quang Duc’s death directly, Orzech effectively secludes and packages this
particular event within its insider, doctrinal, and mythic context, by
noting that the “politics are complex, and I will not comment on them now”
(154). At no point in his article does he return in any detail to the geopolitics
of mid-twentieth-century Vietnam; instead, Quang Duc’s actions are exclusively
understood as “sanctioned by myth and example in Buddhist history” and
as reworked, reenacted Vedic sacrificial patterns (156). Assuming that
mythic history communicated through elite insider documents provides the
necessary context for ultimately interpreting such actions, Orzech is able
to draw a conclusion concerning the actor’s motivations and intentions:
“Quang Duc was seeking to preach the Dharma to enlighten both Diem and
his followers and John Kennedy and the American people” (156); “As an actualization
of mythic patterns of sacrifice it [the self-immolation] was meant as a
creative, constructive and salvific act, an act which intended to remake
the world for the better of everyone in it” (158). Simply put, Quang Duc’s
death is an issue of soteriology. 

In
both Jan’s and Orzech’s readings, as well as those of Harran and Edsman
cited earlier, the death of Quang Duc has nothing necessarily to do with
contemporary politics. In fact, it appears from the scholarship examined
here that to understand this death fully requires no information from outside
of elite Buddhist doctrine whatsoever. In all four cases-much as in the
case of the comparative religion textbooks examined earlier-the discourse
on sui generis religion effectively operates to seclude so-called religious
events within a mythic, symbolic world all their own, where their adequate
interpretation needs “little contextual information.” For example, in all
these studies, Quang Duc is never identified as a citizen of South Vietnam
but is understood only as a Buddhist monk, a choice of designation that
already suggests the discursive conflict I have documented. In other words,
from the outset, the parameters of the interpretive frame of reference
are narrowly restricted. Quang Duc is hardly a man acting in a complex
sociopolitical world, in which intentions, implications, and interpretations
often fly past each other. Instead, he is exclusively conceptualized as
a transhistorical, purely religious agent, virtually homologous with his
specifically religious forebears and ancestors. It is almost as if Thich
Quang Duc–the historical agent who died on 11 June 1963, by setting himself
on fire at a busy downtown intersection in Saigon–has, through the strategies
deployed by scholars of sui generis religion, been transformed into a hierophany
that is of scholarly interest only insomuch as his actions can be understood
as historical instances of timeless origin and meaning. 

However,
it is just as conceivable that for other scholars, the death of Thich Quang
Duc constitutes not simply “spiritually inspired engagement” but a graphic
example of an overtly political act directed not simply against politically
dominant Roman Catholics in his country but also at the American-sponsored
government of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. This alternative
framework, one that recognizes the power implicit in efforts to represent
human actions, is best captured by Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins: 

 Coming
to political consciousness through the period of the Vietnam War, we were
acutely aware of the power of photographic images to evoke both ethnocentric
recoil and agonizing identification. Malcolm Browne’s famous photo of a
Buddhist monk’s self-immolation in Saigon was profoundly disturbing to
Western viewers, who could not fathom the communicative intent of such
an act. (1993: 4)

According
to Paul Siegel, this event constituted an act of protest against the Vietnamese
government “which was carrying on a war of which they [the Buddhists] were
profoundly weary” (1986: 162). The distance between these two readings
is great indeed. On the one hand, one finds representations varying from
the Diem government’s own press release that, according to the New York
Times, maintained that the event was an example of “extremist and truth-concealing
propaganda that sowed doubt about the goodwill of the Government” (12 June
1963), to the Times’ and Orzech’s (1994: 154) portrayal of the protest
as being against the specifically religious persecution of the Buddhists
by the powerful Roman Catholics. On the other hand, however, one can question
the relations between the presence of Christianity in South Vietnam and
European political, cultural, military, and economic imperialism in the
first place as well as question the relations between Diem’s government
and his U.S. economic and military backers. To concentrate only on the
specifically religious nature and origins of this protest, then, serves
either to ignore or, in the least, to minimalize a number of material and
social factors evident from other points of view using other scales of
analysis. 

Concerning
the links between Christianity and European imperialism in Southeast Asia,
it should be clear that much is at stake depending on how one portrays
the associations among European cultures, politics, religion, and the ever
increasing search for new trading markets. For example, one can obscure
the issue by simply discussing an almost generic “encounter with the West,”
where “the West” stands in place of essentially religious systems, such
as Judaism and Christianity (for an example, see Eller 1992). Or one can
place these belief and practice systems within their historical, social,
and political contexts-a move that admittedly complicates but also improves
one’s analysis. For instance, in practice, the presence of Christianity
was often indistinguishable from European culture and trade. This point
is made by Thich Nhat Hanh, in his attempt to communicate the significance
of Quang Duc’s death for his American readers. Much of his small book,
Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire (1967), is concerned with contextualizing
this event by placing it not simply in a religious but also in its wider
historical, social, and political framework. Accordingly, of great importance
for him is not simply to identify elements of Buddhist doctrine for his
reader but to clarify early on that, since its first appearance in Vietnam
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Roman Catholicism has always
been “closely associated with white explorers, with merchants, and ruling
classes”-specifically with the explorers, traders, and cultural and political
elites of France between the years 1860 and 1945 (1967: 15). Whether intentional
or not, the exportation of Christianity throughout the world brought with
it new people, new architecture, new languages, new legal and ethical systems,
new styles of dress, new economic arrangements, new trading goods, and
so on, all based on the standards of large, powerful, and distant European
countries. Because of these interrelated issues, it is inaccurate and misleading
to understand Christian missionaries exclusively in terms of what may very
well have been their good intentions. Such missionaries were part of a
complex and interrelated system or bloc of power relations, all of which
presupposed that the other was in desperate need of European-style education,
economies, technologies, trade, wisdom, and, ultimately, salvation. To
understand missionaries as somehow removed from this system of power would
be to inscribe and protect them by means of the sui generis strategy. Without
the benefit of such a protective strategy, however, it is easily understood
how, at least in the case of Vietnam, the popular belief arose that Christianity
was the religion of the West and “was introduced by them to facilitate
their conquest of Vietnam.” As Thich Nhat goes on to conclude, this belief
“is a political fact of the greatest importance, even though [it] may be
based on suspicion alone” (20). 

It
is completely understandable, therefore, that Thich Nhat takes issue with
circumscribing these provocative actions that took place in Vietnam in
the early 1960s as essentially sacrificial, suicidal, and religious. In
his words, 

 I
wouldn’t want to describe these acts as suicide or even as sacrifice. Maybe
they [i.e., the actors themselves] didn’t think of it as a sacrifice. Maybe
they did. They may have thought of their act as a very natural thing to
do, like breathing. The problem [however,] is to understand the situation
and the context in which they acted. (Berrigan and Thich Nhat Hanh 1975:
61)

The
context of which Thich Nhat Hanh writes is not simply the context of mythic
self-immolation paradigms so important to other scholars but the context
of Vietnamese meeting Euro-American history over the past several centuries.
Emphasizing this context, Thich Nhat’s remarks make it plain that insomuch
as sui generis religion plays a powerful role in dehistoricizing and decontextualizing
human events, the very label by which we commonly distinguish just these
deaths from countless others that took place during the Vietnam War-for
example, “religious suicide”–is itself implicated in the aestheticization
and depoliticization of human actions. What is perhaps most astounding
about Thich Nhat Hanh’s comments is that, despite the discourse on sui
generis religion’s tendency to limit scholarship to the terms set by religious
insiders (recall Cantwell Smith’s methodological rule), Thich Nhat Hanh
-most obviously himself an insider to Vietnamese Buddhism-is the only scholar
surveyed in this chapter whose remarks take into account the utter complexity
of human action as well as the many scales of analysis on which participants
and nonparticipants describe, interpret, understand, and explain these
actions. 

That
the death of Quang Duc had a powerful influence on the events of 1963 in
South Vietnam is not in need of debate. It has been reported that Browne’s
photograph of Quang Duc burning, which ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer
on 12 June 1963, was on President Kennedy’s desk the next morning (Moeller
1989: 355). And virtually all commentators acknowledge that the imminent
fall of the Diem government was in many ways linked to the Buddhist protests
and their popular support among the South Vietnamese. In the least, most
commentators would agree that the deaths had what they might term unforeseen
or indirect political implications. The question to be asked, however,
is just what is at stake for secluding politics to the margins of these
otherwise self-evidently religious events. 

As
should be evident, depending on how one portrays this historical event,
one thing that is at stake is whether it could be construed as having possible
causes or direct implications for American political and military involvement
in the escalating war or whether, as many commentators seem to assume,
it was: (1) a localized Vietnamese issue, Of (2) an essentially religious
nature, which (3), due in large part to the Diem government’s mishandling
of the protest and its unwillingness to reach a compromise with the Buddhists,
only eventually grew from a local religious incident into an international
political issue. The event is thereby domesticated and managed. As the
children’s literary critic Herbert Kohl has convincingly demonstrated,
in the case of the surprisingly homogeneous and depoliticized school textbook
representations of the events surrounding the 19551956 Montgomery, Alabama,
bus boycott, the story is truncated, presented completely out of context,
and portrayed as the single act of a person who was tired and angry. intelligent
and passionate opposition to racism is simply not part of the story. [In
fact, often] there is no mention of racism at all. Instead the problem
is unfairness, a more generic and softer form of abuse that avoids dealing
with the fact that the great majority of White people in Montgomery were
racist and capable of being violent and cruel to maintain segregation.
Thus [in the dominant textbook account of this event] we have an adequate
picture of neither the courage of Rosa Parks nor the intelligence and resolve
of the African American community in the face of racism. (1995: 35)

The
very act of representation, in both the cases of the Buddhist death and
the bus boycott, acts to defuse what might otherwise be understood as the
tremendous sociopolitical power of the events and acts in question. In
the case of the self-immolations, the image of the monk burning has by
now become so decontextualized that it has been commodified; it is now
a consumer item in popular culture. For example, the photograph appears
on the cover of a compact disk for the alternative rock music group Rage
Against the Machine. 

Although
both the example of the Montgomery bus boycott and the Vietnamese deaths
arise from dramatically different historical and social contexts, both
actions are clearly part of an oppositional discourse that is today communicated
to us through, and therefore managed by, the means of dominant discourses
school textbooks in one case, and as a mechanism for selling both scholarly
privilege and expertise as well as a Sony Music product in another. Therefore,
it should not be surprising that, in both cases, we find strategies that
effectively package these actions in a decontextualized and delimited fashion.
It is in this precise manner that the strategies of representation that
constitute the discourse on sui generis religion are complicit with such
larger issues of cultural, economic, and political power and privilege.
One way to support this thesis further would be to examine carefully media,
government, and scholarly interpretations of other specific historical
episodes and demonstrate the ways in which it may have been economically,
socially, or politically beneficial for a specifiable group to portray
events as essentially and exclusively religious rather than, say, political
or military. The example of what was widely termed the self-immolation-a
term that from the outset does much to isolate the event as being exclusively
concerned with issues of religious sacrifice–of Vietnamese Buddhists is
a particularly useful example, because it seems that there was, and may
yet be, a great deal at stake, economically, politically, and militarily,
in the interpretation and representation of these events. 

Another
example well worth study would be the interpretations given to the practice
of suttee or, the practice of a woman following her deceased husband to
his funeral pyre, for only within an interpretive system founded on sui
generis religion and which privileges the insider’s account could such
a practice evade contemporary feminist analysis. As van den Bosch has recently
argued, the “question whether the custom [of suttee] should be regarded
as religious depends upon the definition of religion within this context”
(1990: 193 n. 76). In other words, one of the primary differences between
the frameworks that represent this practice as, on the one hand, an example
of pious female religious duty that embodies lofty motives (as suggested
by Tikku 1967: 108) and, on the other, an instance of institutionalized
misogyny is primarily the assumption of the autonomy of religious life
from social and, in this case, specifically gendered ideology (van den
Bosch 1990: 185). As already suggested, the deaths of the Buddhists could
be seen as a statement either against American-backed imperialism and war
or simply against the localized persecution of one religious group by another,
all depending on the scale of the analysis. If the former, then the repercussions
of the event strike deeply not only in Vietnam but in the United States
as well. If only the latter, then the problem is isolated, it remains in
Saigon, and it is up to the decision makers in Washington simply to distance
themselves from Diem’s mishandling of the episode. Washington’s decisions
are then based on reasons varying from declining public opinion in the
United States, once the images reach the popular media, to the realization
that in fact Diem did not represent the majority of South Vietnamese and
therefore was the wrong leader to back in the war against the North (this
is the dominant theme of the Times editorial on 17 June 1963). Clearly,
there are practical and political advantages and disadvantages depending
on which of the two above intellectual interpretations is favored. Furthermore,
it is intriguing that there exists a general correspondence between the
interpretations offered in the New York Times and those offered by scholars
of religion. Although differing in many ways, it appears that both are
part of a complex system of power and control, specializing in the deployment
of interpretive strategies-the politics of representation. 

Southwest Minnesota State University

Source:
http: //www.smsu.edu/relst/