Beyond Crisis Re-evaluating Pakistan [Hardcover]

Through the essays in this volume, we see how the failure of the state becomes a moment to ruminate on the artificiality of this most modern construct, the failure of nationalism, an opportunity to dream of alternative modes of association, and the failure of sovereignty to consider the threats and possibilities of the realm of foreignness within the nation-state as within the self.

The ambition of this volume is not only to complicate standing representations of Pakistan. It is take Pakistan out of the status of exceptionalism that its multiple crises have endowed upon it. By now, many scholars have written of how exile, migrancy, refugeedom, and other modes of displacement constitute modern subjectivities. The arguments made in the book say that Pakistan is no stranger to this condition of human immigrancy and therefore, can be pressed into service in helping us to understand our present condition.

Acknowledgements 1. Foreword byVeena Das 2. Introduction byNaveeda Khan Part I:Artificiality of the State3. Towards a Lyric History of India byAamir Mufti 4.The Politics of Commensuration: The Violence of Partition and the Making of the Pakistani State by Tahir Hasnain Naqvi 5. A Real Terrorist, An Excerpt from Sayyid Pakistani and the Wedding of the Dead byOskar Verkaaik 6. Re-imagining the Land of the Pure: A Sufi Master Reclaims Islamic Orthodoxy and Pakistani Identity byRobert Rozehnal Part II: Nationalist Visions7. Registering Crisis: Ethnicity in Pakistani Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s byIftikar Dadi 8. Listening to the Enemy: The Pakistani Army, Violence and Memories of 1971 byYasmin Saikia 9. Strength of the State Meets Strength of the Street: The 1972 Labour Struggle in Karachi byKamran Asdar Ali 10. Learning to blï