Talk by Prof Hanifi on 'The Spatiality of Afghanistan: Place, Power and Representation'

Cambridge Central Asia Forum invites you to a talk by

Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, James Madison University

on

The Spatiality of Afghanistan:  Place, Power and Representation

Date: 20 October 2023

Time: 11am-1pm

Venue: Room 138 and Alison Richard Building and Zoom Registration: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYlfuqqpj8rHdGf7IdH4sg8Q5ueO9U1XSsN#/registration 

Abstract:  This talk will locate Afghanistan in the field of Central Asian Studies and other contemporary regional studies frameworks, on the one hand, and address how these distinct regional studies orientations have impacted the field of Afghanistan Studies, on the other hand. The dynamics between national and regional scales of analyses, and between local and global frames of reference for Afghanistan, highlight differently structured and competing political economies of knowledge production or “place making” about this space that will contextualize the historical conjunctures and eras addressed over the longue duree body of the talk. The talk will follow a pre-modern periodization aligning with shifts in patterns of mobility through Hindu Kush, with the ability to migrate and/or impede mobility understood as a key index of power relations among the respective groups of historical actors. The imperial bordering and global engagement of Afghanistan in the modern era significantly transformed flows of human and material traffic between the Amu Darya and Indus rivers, while also generating new forms of knowledge including the hegemonic concept of ethnicity, treated here as a highly racialized from of othering that is historically and culturally anchored in the epistemological violence of Orientalism and the material-physical violence of colonialism. The talk concludes with an argument for greater intellectual attention to spatial relations and political investment in shared space as remedial antidotes to a continuing tendency of non-Afghans that has become an endemically reified practice Afghans now use to represent peoples currently and previously inhabiting the place called Afghanistan via singular, hermetically sealed, violently opposed ethnicities.  

Biography: Prof Hanifi obtained his PhD from University of Michigan and BA degree from University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. He teaches courses on Modern Middle East, Global South Asia, Afghanistan, colonialism, and world history. His research interests are Afghanistan, the Persianate World, Pashto, colonialism, nationalism, tribal history, nomadic societies, Islamic urbanism, historical linguistics, migration, diasporas, identity formation, cartography, photography, animal and environmental studies. His most recent publications are Deciphering the History of Modern Afghanistan (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, 2022); Imperial Cartography and National Mapping in Afghanistan (International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2022);  "Local Experiences of Imperial Cultures" (Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2021); "The Battle for Minds in Cold War Afghanistan"  (Iran and the Caucasus, 2021)  and "Roundtable Papers" in the journal Afghanistan(Afghanistan, 2021). For more information visit- https://www.jmu.edu/history/people/all-people/hanifi.shtml

Everyone is welcome.