Affect,Aesthetics,and Sovereign Attachments

Journey to Sovereign Attachments

My work has generally been attentive to the interplay of gender and power in the lives of Muslims in Pakistan as well as in the North American diaspora. This interest in gender and power has in turn led me to study discourses of education, national security, and human rights, to illuminate how these multiple discourses are constitutive of gendered and racialized subjectivities. The idea for Sovereign Attachments emerged as I was wrapping up my first book, on women’s education, which had raised questions about state power and gender that I realized I wanted to examine further.

My first book, Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia, responded to what I noticed as a convergence on the ‘figure of the girl’ in International Development policy and practice. ¹ We can find numerous campaigns that portray girls in the Global South as threatened by poverty, disease, and terrorism – and as containing the potential to resolve these problems. These campaigns often present education as the primary social practice that can enable girls to reshape and reinvent themselves, often into productive workers. The argument is that if girls go to school, they will delay marriage, delay childbearing, enter the labor force, contribute to the national GDP, and by doing all of the above they will pull themselves and their families out of poverty. In previous work, I had written that the burden of development and ending poverty was being shifted onto black and brown girls, without due consideration of the reality that poverty is political and is an effect – not only a cause – of historical relations. ² Girls were being called on to reshape themselves into flexible labor for the neoliberal economy, but without significant accompanying critique of the capitalist and racist exploitation and extraction that had originally produced the dispossession of these girls and their families.

Since I was then concerned about Muslim girls in South Asia, I also investigated the kind of girlhood being portrayed as desirable. I noticed that models of ‘successful girlhood’ were often premised on white, middle-class sensibilities; girls who were prevented by structural disadvantages from enacting this form of girlhood risked incurring the label of ‘failed’ girlhood. In the American context, girls threated by failed girlhood are often called ‘at-risk’; when NGO staff see them in a Pakistani context, they identify them as ‘traditional/backward/oppressed’ girls. Though Western NGOs and aid agencies have played a significant role in creating this figure of the oppressed or backward girl, she is not constrained to the world of international development. She travels to national security discourses and there is made to tell a particular story about Islam and Pakistani society: in this story, Muslims are presented as uniquely oppressive, out-of-time, and in turn justify imperialist interventions. I wrote extensively about these practices of racialization (rereading/coding as failure any departure from white middle-class educational norms) and the related phenomenon of casting Muslims as impure or uncivilized. But as I did this research into contemporary framings of Muslim girls’ education, I was reminded that this yearning after the figure of the ‘educated girl’ is not a new phenomenon. We find similar writings about Musalman women’s education in colonial India during the 19th and 20th centuries. British administrators, Christian missionaries, and also Muslim social reformers – albeit for different reasons – claimed that education would save, civilize, or reform native women. In Forging the Ideal Educated Girl, I had thus decided to track these myriad articulations of the ‘educated Muslim girl’ from the turn of the twentieth century, considering this figure as a discursive space within which multiple actors – from religious and national elites to international development organizations – advance constructions of ideal girlhood, and at the same time constructions of class relations and national and religious subjectivities.

Over the course of that earlier book project, I had become increasingly concerned with the narrow figurations of women – not only of girls, and not only in respect to education – that were circulating in Pakistani public culture. In writing Sovereign Attachments, I wanted to understand how and why – whether or not educational change happens – women’s roles in Pakistan remain so persistently circumscribed. Since the state is such a powerful institution, I decided to pay attention to the state’s role in sustaining in public culture certain ideations of gender. While previous studies on the interrelationship of gender and state had focused on the laws that affected Pakistani women’s lives, in Sovereign Attachments I was more interested in the cultural and affective modes that revealed and shaped gender hierarchies. I had noticed how the state often mobilized kinship feelings and gendered figurations to legitimize its violence and cultivate consent for its actions, and I wanted to examine this practice more closely. But I also saw gendered imagery mobilized by those who were contesting statist authority.

A case in point was the 2014 Taliban attack on an Army Public School in Peshawar, in which 132 children, and nine teachers and staff, were killed. In the weeks that followed, I noticed an uptick in media productions – music videos and magazine articles, in particular – by both the Pakistani army and the Taliban. Each blamed the other for the attack. The army released music videos labeling the Taliban as ‘the coward enemy’, while the Taliban mimicking the same genre, even the same melody, to mock the army for being ‘corrupt’, as each sought to influence public opinion. Importantly, both the state and the Taliban mobilized Islam, gender, and emotion as they sought public support for their respective political claims. I therefore decided that Sovereign Attachments would examine public cultural articulations like these, as each side advanced its right to rule and engage in legitimate violence – and advanced these claims specifically via mobilization of gendered images, kinship feeling and heteronormative family life.

In the book I take the reader through a set of gendered figurations that emerged from my close reading and unpack these figurations to understand the constellation of ideas and histories that produce them. Donna Haraway describes figurations as distillations of shared meanings through which we make sense of the world around us. ³ And Imogen Tyler identifies ‘figurative methodology’ as a useful approach ‘to describe the ways in which at different historical and cultural moments specific “social types” become overdetermined and are publicly imagined (are figured) in excessive, distorted, and caricatured ways’. ⁴ By unpacking figurations and following their social and political work, we can discover the terms, registers, and affects through which Sovereign Attachments – that is, affective attachments to entities claiming state authority – develop in Pakistani public culture. Ingram’s suggestion of counter-figurations points to the idea that figurations can be taken up and form oppositional publics (or publics not originally intended): we see this, for example, when the state mobilizes the term shahid to appease mothers who have lost their children in terrorist attacks but the mothers use the same term to reject statist concessions and seek additional forms of redress. Figurations then do wide-ranging work. They are simultaneously specific to the historical moment under study and carry the residue of the past. That they change with time shows their constructedness.

In the dyadic relationship between the Pakistani state and the Taliban, we notice how scripts of gender and Muslimness (or competing notions of normative Islam) become the very means through which sovereignty is performatively iterated. When the Taliban explain their project as reinstituting khilafat, they are seeking the loyalty of a Muslim observer by harnessing affect that has accumulated over time in the idea of a Muslim dominion. Ingram rightly observes that I have left ‘normative Islam’ undefined. I have done so because ‘proper Muslim’ remains a contested term, for which multiple Muslim actors offer specific, and at times mutually exclusive, definitions. The army’s articulations around Islam, for example, are tied to middle class sensibilities, with an emphasis on modernity, development, and the nuclear family that I discussed in my first book when looking at statist understandings of ideal girlhood. How different actors define Muslimness can depend on class aesthetics, among many other factors.

There are indeed other competitors for sovereignty on the Pakistani scene besides the Taliban – the ulama, as Ingram points out, as well as imperial powers such as the U.S., India, and China. My hope for the book itself was to use a close examination of the Pakistan–Taliban dyad to tease out new ways of thinking about sovereignty and to examine the scripts that emerge in that particular relationship. More broadly I hope that other scholars will consider models of affect and attachment, and the method figuration, in relation to other dyads, triads, and networks. Ingram’s observation about how the ulama have articulated sovereignty – God’s and nation’s – in colonial India gestures just one promising direction for comparative investigation. It is precisely when we do situate the Pakistani state and the Taliban within the broader assemblage of actors – ulama, the U.S., India, Afghanistan, and China (mentioned in passing but nonetheless emphasized as a salient part of this network) – that we can best perceive the dyadic actors’ claims to absolute sovereignty as a form of fantasy. And when I call sovereignty a fantasy – an argument that intrigues Chaudhary – I intend that formulation precisely as Chaudhary suggests when he writes, ‘The fantasy is not that some of us can be sovereign but rather that all of us can be sovereign’. The contingent nature of claims to sovereignty is perhaps most evident in the treatment of Mukhtar Mai, Aafia Siddiqui, and Naureen Laghari by the state and the Taliban (discussed in the chapter entitled Kinship Metaphors). Here we see that concrete exercises of sovereign power and violence – punishment, incarceration, enclosure – vary as each claimant has differential access to the material resources necessary to mete out violence. And we see how each claimant shifts to (and draws symbolic power from) kinship relations to insist on its singularity and its absolute right to injure, punish, and govern. In his comments, Ali Mian usefully elaborates on this fantasy of sovereignty by observing that while this fantasy remains ‘utopian’, its claimants must contend with that which already exists; the fantasy then ‘often invests ordinary, familiar objects with utopic aspirations and dreams of transcendence’. The ordinary, familiar objects that first drew my attention to the book were the gendered roles that seem so commonsense.

Turn to Affect and Future Directions

All three respondents recognized affect as a generative category within Sovereign Attachments and saw potential for future attention to affect in the study of South Asian Islam and politics. As Chaudhary observes, religion has often not received its due as a complex set of affectivities in the field of international relations. By looking at how religion operates at pre-personal, personal, and social levels, and by considering in particular the interplay between religion and masculinity, I have discovered how frequently would-be sovereign actors turn to gendered and religiously nuanced appeals to affect in the contested and contingent space of sovereignty. There are multiple ways of studying affect, and different academic disciplines have advanced their own conceptualizations of affect as a motivating or explanatory factor. Brian Massumi describes affects as ‘pre-personal intensities’ that cannot be fully realized in language and are always prior to and/or outside of consciousness. ⁵ In contrast, feelings are personal and biographical sensations that an individual can compare to previous experiences and interpret accordingly; thus, people draw on their personal histories and experiences to interpret their feelings. Emotions, meanwhile, are the social expressions or projections of those feelings. Emotions can be genuine or feigned, as they are produced for the consumption of others. And yet affect, feeling, and emotion are linked. I am inspired by Sara Ahmed, who uses affect and emotion interchangeably, and by Sianne Ngai, who views their difference as one of intensity. ⁶ In Ngai’s formulation, affects are less formed than emotions, but they do not lack form or structure altogether: they are not meaningless, nor are they devoid of organization or diagnostic power.

I follow this notion that affect can be intensified into emotion to understand how certain figures – such as the terrorist, the sexually violated sister, or the mourning mother – can be affectively charged and can also produce affective attachments that may bind or loosen connections between members of the public.

As Chaudhary comments, recent work on the Pakistani state has paid attention to this productive dimension of affect. In her examination of the state’s management of the Kashmir conflict, Nosheen Ali considers how the state is affectively structured and experienced, and Maria Rashid’s work with families of the Pakistan army’s ‘fallen soldiers’ provides yet another glimpse into the state’s affective technologies. ⁷ Omar Kasmani’s recent book takes up affect in relation to Sufi pilgrimage in Pakistan to examine how saintly affections tether individuals with the state in Pakistan. These are all encouraging interventions and will fuel future scholarly work.

At the same time, a focus on affect can be enhanced with attention to aesthetics as well, particularly to understand how political attachments influence social values and judgments. Jay Sosa’s forthcoming work, Sex War Aesthetics: LGBT+ Activism and Backlash Politics in Brazil, an ethnography of LGBT+ social movement activists in Brazil, makes a case for aesthetics. ⁸ Sosa argues that by focusing not just on sensations per se but also on what we do with sensations, we can understand how activists engage in the project of self-making and also entreat broader publics to change the way they judge social relations. For Sosa aesthetics is ‘a zone of transition, where social values are recalibrated, and where critical judgment is honed’. If recognizing affect allows us to understand sovereignty as always in the making, then looking at sovereign relationships through the lens of aesthetics might help us to realize how they translate into enduring individual and social judgments about gender, family life, and Muslimness. How might affect and aesthetics be worked together generatively to understand the intersection of gender, Islam, and politics in South Asia?

I again thank my inspiring interlocutors for their generous engagement with Sovereign Attachments.