Affective Critique: Fear, Hope, Abandonment and Pleasure in Dianne Otto's Living with International Law

Discusses Dianne Otto's engagement with international law in terms of affective critique

Review of Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (Hurst & Company, London, 2013)

In today’s world of nation states, the distinct pedigrees of independent polities are often organised into two foundational trajectories: states whose traditions of collective belonging are derived from, or adjusted to, the conventional mythology of European nationalism, with its focus on (the presumed bonds of) ‘blood and soil’, and states, such as settler societies, that somehow diverge from it. In Muslim Zion, Devji provides a seething analysis of Pakistan’s foundational narratives, guided by a bold claim that this state was founded on a radical, and quintessentially modern, demand for ‘the forcible exclusion of blood and soil in the making of a new homeland for India’s diverse andscattered Muslims’ (p. 9). For Devji, this demand emerged primarily from ‘the fantasy of creating a state by purely rational means, one that was founded upon its idea alone’ (p. 39). And just what was this foundational idea? That by working in the laboratory of Pakistan, to borrow Liaquat Ali Khan’s famous phrase (p. 249), a state primarily based on religious belonging, a ‘Muslim homeland’ par excellence, could be established

The Dera Paradigm: Homecoming of the Gendered Other

This article engages with the idiosyncratic dwelling practices of khwajasara, a Pakistani gender-variant subjectivity better known as hijre in the larger South Asian context. As a prevalent type of khwajasara household, the dera plays a paradigmatic role in their homecoming narratives; whether as a post-home, the refuge from an unhomely natal familial house and a terrorising school environment, or as an intermediary bodily, spiritual and communal sanctuary on a journey towards one’s Home after post-home. Anchored in the idea of the dera, and especially as intimated to me on a late September afternoon in Lahore, this article zigzags through khwajasara’s historical and present-day multi-local experiences of homecoming, which is posited here as both spatial and identitary journeying towards collective thereness. As a property of dwelling with kindred souls, I argue that thereness equips khwajasara with exploratory senses of the subject, including, at times, those of being otherworldly and nomadic. Such thereness disrupts the very idea of settlement and allows the dera and its inhabitants to not only transgress communal boundaries—such as those of gender, religion, ethnicity and language—but also to construe home as a journey, not a destination. At the same time, it reveals various productive anxieties about khwajasara’s—or, indeed, everyone’s—classed, urbanised, economised and gendered home-life

The Dera Paradigm: Homecoming of the Gendered Other

This article engages with the idiosyncratic dwelling practices of khwajasara, a Pakistani gender-variant subjectivity better known as hijre in the larger South Asian context. As a prevalent type of khwajasara household, the dera plays a paradigmatic role in their homecoming narratives; whether as a post-home, the refuge from an unhomely natal familial house and a terrorising school environment, or as an intermediary bodily, spiritual and communal sanctuary on a journey towards one’s Home after post-home. Anchored in the idea of the dera, and especially as intimated to me on a late September afternoon in Lahore, this article zigzags through khwajasara’s historical and present-day multi-local experiences of homecoming, which is posited here as both spatial and identitary journeying towards collective thereness. As a property of dwelling with kindred souls, I argue that thereness equips khwajasara with exploratory senses of the subject, including, at times, those of being otherworldly and nomadic. Such thereness disrupts the very idea of settlement and allows the dera and its inhabitants to not only transgress communal boundaries—such as those of gender, religion, ethnicity and language—but also to construe home as a journey, not a destination. At the same time, it reveals various productive anxieties about khwajasara’s—or, indeed, everyone’s—classed, urbanised, economised and gendered home-life

The Abyss

How might one think limits of one’s disciplinary world in a productive way, that is, with a view not to end up with yet another, even if more expansive, disciplinary cogito but rather, if you will, an epistemic abyss that opens to more radical imaginings of what lies ahead? Is there an external to law in legal theory? A space, even if but conceptual, that we might designate as alegal? Or, what’s beyond the grasp for social anthropology? A methodological move from humans to things so that one is encouraged to ‘think from things’ with a potential to transform, in turn, the entire discipline into the new field of ‘pragmatology’? Or, can one seize on the long impasse of the so-called empiricist history to suggest, as Saidiya Hartman would have it, the need for critical fabulation? My work to date, for the most part, intersects these three disciplines and so my provocation here is limited to them, although one can of course imagine interrogating just about any cognate socio-humanistic ‘science’ in this mode of critique. At issue is not an exercise in interdisciplinarity, so that where one disciplinary end is found one moves, methodologically, on to another, so as to create a space where disciplines help each other survive. I propose, rather, to pry open the unknowable amidst each separate disciplinary episteme and thus lay bare its existential crisis. And if, perchance, a discipline cannot survive this operation—so be it. Perhaps, after all, its death has been long overdue

Mir-Said Sultan-Galiev and the Idea of Muslim Marxism: Empire, Third World(s) and Praxis

This paper revisits the idea of Muslim Marxism, as espoused through the life and work of the Tatar Muslim and Bolshevik intellectual and revolutionary Mir-Said Sultan-Galiev (1892-1940). I argue that Sultan-Galiev’s oeuvre – a unique synthesis of Marxist, Muslim modernist, anti-colonial and Third World praxis – represents a path-breaking take on Muslim selfhood and practices of belonging

The Dera Paradigm: Homecoming of the Gendered Other

This article engages with the idiosyncratic dwelling practices of khwajasara, a Pakistani gender-variant subjectivity better known as hijre in the larger South Asian context. As a prevalent type of khwajasara household, the dera plays a paradigmatic role in their homecoming narratives; whether as a post-home, the refuge from an unhomely natal familial house and a terrorising school environment, or as an intermediary bodily, spiritual and communal sanctuary on a journey towards one’s Home after post-home. Anchored in the idea of the dera, and especially as intimated to me on a late September afternoon in Lahore, this article zigzags through khwajasara’s historical and present-day multi-local experiences of homecoming, which is posited here as both spatial and identitary journeying towards collective thereness. As a property of dwelling with kindred souls, I argue that thereness equips khwajasara with exploratory senses of the subject, including, at times, those of being otherworldly and nomadic. Such thereness disrupts the very idea of settlement and allows the dera and its inhabitants to not only transgress communal boundaries—such as those of gender, religion, ethnicity and language—but also to construe home as a journey, not a destination. At the same time, it reveals various productive anxieties about khwajasara’s—or, indeed, everyone’s—classed, urbanised, economised and gendered home-life