Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge

Description

Over time and across different genres, Afghanistan has been presented to the world as potential ally, dangerous enemy, gendered space, and mysterious locale. These powerful, if competing, visions seek to make sense of Afghanistan and to render it legible. In this innovative examination, Nivi Manchanda uncovers and critically explores Anglophone practices of knowledge cultivation and representational strategies, and argues that Afghanistan occupies a distinctive place in the imperial imagination: over-determined and under-theorised, owing largely to the particular history of imperial intervention in the region. Focusing on representations of gender, state and tribes, Manchanda re-historicises and de-mythologises the study of Afghanistan through a sustained critique of colonial forms of knowing and demonstrates how the development of pervasive tropes in Western conceptions of Afghanistan have enabled Western intervention, invasion and bombing in the region from the nineteenth century to the present. 01.0_pp_i_ii_Imagining_Afghanistan 02.0_pp_iii_iii_Imagining_Afghanistan 03.0_pp_iv_iv_Copyright_page 04.0_pp_v_v_Dedication 05.0_pp_vi_vi_Epigraph 06.0_pp_vii_vii_Contents 07.0_pp_viii_viii_Figures 08.0_pp_ix_xii_Acknowledgements 09.0_pp_1_22_Introduction 10.0_pp_23_65_The_Construction_of_Afghanistan_as_a_Discursive_Regime 11.0_pp_66_104_A_Space_Contested_or_the_State_of_Afghanistan 12.0_pp_105_142_The_Emergency_Episteme_of_the_Tribe_in_Afghanistan 13.0_pp_143_179_Framed 14.0_pp_180_220_Subversive_Identities 15.0_pp_221_229_Coda 16.0_pp_230_248_References 17.0_pp_249_252_Index