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print versionUCLA Center for India and South Asia, 25 February 2008
Emergency, Difference, and Popular Politics in Karachi
Talk by Tahir Naqvi, Reed College
Audio MP3 | Duration: 44:30
Drawing on oral-historical research conducted in Karachi this paper considers formations of citizenship, difference and urban violence that develop in the wake of the imposition of martial rule in Pakistan and the suspension of mass-democratic participation. The martial state’s “interregnal†strategy of confining democratic participation to the neighborhood level, like its more tactical cultivation of ethno-nationalist movements throughout the 1980s, illustrates the emergency’s specific bearing on the postcolonial present. Rule by emergency, it is argued, incites the racialization and displacement (questioning, localization, parochialization) of the sovereign subject of Pakistani nationalism. The second part of the paper examines how non-elite urban actors conceive of autonomy, difference and territorial power in the wake of the emergency’s suspension of Pakistan’s /elite-driven/ conventions of the mass-political relation.
