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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
164737
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| Summary/Abstract |
In this article I read a selection of Pashto literatures against the grain of world history, as critical thought about geopolitics. Drawing on Michael Shapiro’s concept of aesthetic subjects, as well as on border theory, I argue that the authors, the content, and the literary networks of these works all critically comment on global relations of power, ranging from the local bordering effects of geopolitics, to systems of knowledge embedded in the spatiality and temporality of empire. I argue that past and current imperial processes have led to fragmenting effects in Afghan society, and literature both reflects and analyses this. More than that, though, I argue – using the lives of authors as well as their work – that literary activity in Pashto has actively negotiated such processes throughout its recent history, and offers strategies for different notions of global connectivity. The decentralized and multiperspective images of life in these works sit in counterpoint not only to the systems-oriented views that drive military and other policy in Afghanistan during the on-going US moment, but also to universalist perspectives upon which disciplines like world history and geopolitics have traditionally relied. This contributes to the aesthetic turn in IR by arguing that it is not only the aesthetic vision in works that can challenge dominant forms of knowledge: the shape of the Pashto literary formation itself, organic with its contents, is an alternate form of knowledge-in-practice about the contemporary world.
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| 2 |
ID:
186583
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| Summary/Abstract |
When I first began my doctoral work on Afghanistan, and up until quite recently, I had never wanted to write about war. I began my PhD only a month before 11 September 2001, but already the field had been so overdetermined by war—by ideas of political Islam, by the political economy of violence—that I resolved to write a thesis about vital unanswered questions regarding Afghanistan's longer history. Of course I grew to regard this strategy of ignoring war as both naive and morally indefensible. For quite a while, this shaped my teaching more than my research. In my classes on Afghanistan's wars and on political Islam, for instance, we address the global structures of violence head on from a variety of directions, beginning with those that Yousef Baker outlines in his contribution to this roundtable, focusing on the generative forces in US politics amid a neoliberal global context and extending to the devastating ontological destruction that Kali Rubaii discusses in her contribution. In all of this, however, students in particular—especially at an institution like SOAS that is so directly tied to the Global South—repeatedly ask: “Where are we in this? We know that this is how global violence works, but this is surely in some way about us too. And our societies are more than what Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton call ‘War/Truth.’” Interlocutors in Pakistan and Afghanistan during my fieldwork there made these points even more strongly.
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| 3 |
ID:
185929
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article’s premise is that war is ontological devastation, which opens up questions as to how to write about it. The paper contends that even critiques of war, whether critical-geopolitical analyses of global structures or ethnographies of the everyday, center war in ways that underscore erasures of non-war life, and therefore risk participating in that same ontological devastation. Engagement with extra-academic conversational worlds, both their social lives and their intellectual ones, is ethically necessary in writing war. To that end, this article examines poetic production from one front in the US-led “Global War on Terror”: Swat Valley, Pakistan. Poets in Swat have produced an analysis of war as ontological devastation, but also protest their reduction, in the minds of others and themselves, to the violence-stricken present. This intervention is not an intellectual critique alone. Focusing on a new genre of “resistance” poetry, this article shows how poets resist war by maintaining worlds partly beyond it. In this, the critical content and the social lives of poetry are inseparable.
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