‘If I speak, they will kill me, to remain silent is to die’: Poetry of Resistance in General Zia’s Pakistan (1977-88)

The ethnic and sectarian divisions that were part of General Zia’s (1977-88) political strategies in Pakistan were resisted not only through street protest and political opposition, but also in the realm of culture. In particular, poetry was a vehicle through which to express discontent as well as to mobilize the population. By offering an analysis of a number of poems and the biographies of the political poets who wrote them. This article offers another perspective on the question of resistance in this period of Pakistan’s history. Whilst the outcome of the policy of ethnic division was to divide the struggle against General Zia into a broad anti-Punjab front, this article highlights how it was class division and the securing of elite consent that was the major achievement of the Zia regime. In contrast to previous research, we highlight how resistance came from all groups in Pakistan as reflected in the poetry and literature of the time

Racial nationalisms : Brexit, borders and little Englander contradictions

This Introduction first proposes a definitional map applicable to the racial nationalisms currently ascendant in Britain (and Western Europe, more broadly). The paper then outlines the respective contributions to the Special Issue – with an emphasis on the politics of bordering that organizes today so much of nationalism's claim on the state. The second half thereupon establishes a wider conjunctural context within which such analyses can be most productively read. Drawing on Stuart Hall's formative analysis, we argue that it is an understanding of the distinctly contradictory drives intrinsic to recent capitalism that is required. Through mapping the uneasy nation/market bind constitutive of the “Little Englander” political subjectivity that Thatcherism forged, this section focuses on the “disjuncture” that has emerged in the intervening period: a disjuncture, compounded by complementary forms of “postcolonial melancholia”, that has seen the various nationalist drives in the body politic obtain today a more pronounced political autonomy