Khattak, Aiman (2022) The bio-political empire sovereignty, race and war in Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani literatures. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

Post 9/11 literature in English produced by local as well as diasporic writers from conflict-ridden countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan constituted a growing corpus over the past three decades. Most literature within this corpus considered and incorporated a whole range of crucial issues for the local populations, like health and gender inequalities, sexuality, racism, ethnic and class conflicts, failed or weak governance, global migration crisis, disability, environmental concerns and the Anthropocene, animal rights, trauma, marginality and indigeneity, religiosity, secularism, global security, neoimperial warfare, neo-liberalism, globalization and transgression of international law. Although laden with these contents, this corpus also drew attention to violent US-led Empire’s interventionism in these regions and local armed or un-armed resistance that opposed them (both in South Asia and the Middle East) mostly after the Cold War and 9/11. The US, in turn, made use of various technologies of global governance (like cross-border interventions) to strengthen its image as a global imperial empire, even though the financial crash of 2008 and recent US-withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq display these interventions as weaknesses of its imperial pretensions. Terror, warfare and neoimperialism are therefore recurrent tropes throughout this Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani literary corpus. In this project, I investigate these technologies of governance and control in a complex juxtaposition of sovereignty, race and war as they evolved and operated against these countries in the US-led empire since the Cold War. Through a postcolonial lens, I analyze how these technologies were registered and investigated by literary writers (in their anglophone and non-anglophone literature) from the given regions, even though at times considered as ‘native informants’ and ‘comprador intellectuals’ yet indispensable to anti-colonial and anti-imperial resistances (Ball and Mattar 69). I also figure out the nuanced ways in which the social, cultural or political control of this empire was informed, driven and implemented by biopolitics, i.e. the political management of human populations.

There have been previous critical inquiries into the war-on-terror and post-9/11 fictions like Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction; Beyond 9/11 (2015) by Aroosa Kanwal and Islamophobia and the Novel (2018) by Peter Morey, but these works mostly analyse literature in relation to religion and fundamentalism. There has not been even a single research study before this that specifically registers a collective and comparative response of Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani literatures towards the execution of the US-led Empire’s governmentality over the given regions specifically in terms of biopolitics, sovereignty, race and war. This study fills this critical gap. It not only provides a critical introduction to post-9/11 Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani literatures but also analyses how such literatures were inspired by, or at times informed, prevailing political conditions. Through an analysis of post-9/11 Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani literatures, this study explores how these literatures reacted to ongoing international political developments and to the ensuing philosophical, social, cultural and economic changes that their respective regions faced. As biopolitics increasingly informed imperial power, the US-led Empire exercised its control across borders without the need to form territorial colonies like previous colonial empires. This study has thus provided a nuanced way of examining this transformed version of empire largely under US control in the past three decades that had adverse implications for the selected regions after 9/11.

All research and analysis has been done within the bio-political frame of reference starting from Michel Foucault’s theorizations of biopolitics to more recent additions by later Foucaultian scholars. These include Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Julian Reid, Thomas Lemke and some others. If America was an empire in the past few decades, what form did it take? How did it operate? What were its implications for those populations who found themselves on the wrong side of this empire, such as in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan? How did this specific political rationality along with its practical forms inform, and got informed by, literary creations from the given regions? These questions are raised and explored in this study.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D880 Developing Countries P Language and Literature > PK Indo-Iranian P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0080 Criticism P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0441 Literary History P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Afghanistan -- Literatures -- History and criticism -- 2001-, Iraq -- Literatures -- History and criticism -- 2001-, Pakistani literature (English) -- History and criticism -- 2001-, September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001, in literature, War on Terrorism, 2001, Postcolonialism in literature, Sovereignty
Official Date:	September 2022
Dates:	Date Event September 2022 UNSPECIFIED
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Lazarus, Neil, 1953- ; Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo
Sponsors:	Punjab Education Endowment Fund
Format of File:	pdf
Extent:	276 pages
Language:	eng

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