As the first comprehensive volume to explore the impact of empire on Afghanistan's past and present, Decolonizing Afghanistan marks a decolonial turn in Afghanistan and American studies. Featuring new and often sidelined ground-up perspectives this collection examines how Afghan communities have subverted, resisted, and participated in colonial projects from the early twentieth century to the present, with a particular focus on the US intervention that began in 2001. Contributors interrogate the relationship between knowledge and power to analyze how narratives about Afghanistan have framed and legitimated imperial governance. Topics span the contradictions and consequences of the US "forever" War, the rise of private security contracting, the deployment of biometric and surveillance technologies, the politics of US and Taliban counter-media operations, the evolution of gender discourses, and the mobilization of Afghan-Americans and "Afghan Culture," among others. Throughout, contributors draw important connections and insights to ongoing global anticolonial struggles and offer new decolonial futures. Contributors. Matthieu Aikins, Dawood Azami, Purnima Bose, Paula Chakravartty, Robert D. Crews, Marya Hannun, Ali Karimi, Nivi Manchanda, Sabauon Nasseri, Tausif Noor, Wazhmah Osman, Hosai Qasmi, Zohra Saed, Gazelle Samizay, Morwari Zafar, Helena Zeweri
Wazhmah Osman is Associate Professor of Media and Communication at Temple University. Robert D. Crews is Professor of History at Stanford University.
Introduction. Decolonizing Afghanistan: A Turning Point / Wazhmah Osman, Helena Zeweri, and Robert D. Crews 1 Section 1. Imperial Imaginaries and the Historical Production of Afghanistan as a Diagnostic Object of Global Security 1. Imperial Misconceptions: The Politics of Knowledge Production / Nivi Manchanda 35 2. Afghanistan and the Soviet Colonial Archive / Robert D. Crews 54 3. The Imperial Gaze and the Development Gaze: Reckoning with the Two Faces of American Empire and Its Afterlives and Deaths / Wazhmah Osman 72 Section 2. Infrastructures and Technologies of Empire 4. Operationalizing "Afghan Culture": Role-Playing and Translation in US Military Counterinsurgency Training / Morwari Zafar 97 5. Shifting Loyalties and Profits: The Rise of Afghanistan's Western-Funded Private Security Contractors / Matthieu Aikins 115 6. Tracking and Targeting: The US Surveillance Infrastructures in Afghanistan / Ali Karimi 134 Section 3. The Politics and Optics of Representation: Media and Propaganda 7. Modernity and Gender Beyond the European Gaze: International Media Coverage of Afghanistan and the Making of News in the 1920s-King Amanullah and Queen Suraya's Grand Tour / Marya Hannun 153 8. A Changing Orientalist Representation of Afghans and Afghanistan in Indian Cinema / Hosai Qasmi 174 9. Withdrawal Narratives: Afghan Women, Time, and Developmental Idealism / Purnima Bose 194 10. The Second Front: The Taliban Information Operation and the Battle for Hearts and Minds in the US/NATO War in Afghanistan (2001-2021) / Dawood Azami 218 Section 4. Reflecting and Speaking Back to Empire 11. Between Humanitarian Aid and Political Critique: Afghan American Mobilizations Post-Evacuation / Helena Zeweri 247 12. Reflections: Afghan Literature and Politics Under US Occupation / Sabauon Nasseri 267 13. Imperial Remainders: Reconfiguring the Legacy of US Occupation in Contemporary Afghan Art / Tausif Noor 284 14. Disrupting the Colonial Canvas: Afghan Art in the Wake of Withdrawal / Gazelle Simizay 295 15. An Other Afghanistan: Indigeneity, Migration, and Belonging in Andkhoy (1973) / Zohra Saed 317 Coda / Paula Chakravartty 335 Acknowledgments 343 Contributors 345 Index 351
"Groundbreaking, refreshing, eloquent, and powerful, Decolonizing Afghanistan makes a crucial intervention into the knowledge produced on Afghanistan in the United States and more broadly. It provides nuance, depth, and original perspectives in its analysis of Afghanistan's social, political, economic, and intellectual histories, and in its unique approach of decoloniality. Thanks to its wide scope and analytical richness, it represents a turning point in the dominant understanding of Afghanistan." - Zahra Ali, author of Women and Gender in Iraq: Between Nation-Building and Fragmentation
