Imagining Afghanistan examines how Afghanistanhas been imagined in literary and visual texts that were published after the9/11 attacks and the subsequent U.S.-led invasion-the era that propelledAfghanistan into the center of global media visibility. Through an analysis offiction, graphic novels, memoirs, drama, and film, the book demonstrates thatwriting and screening "Afghanistan" has become a conduit for understanding ourshared post-9/11 condition. "Afghanistan" serves as a lens through whichcontemporary cultural producers contend with the moral ambiguities of twenty-first-centuryhumanitarianism, interpret the legacy of the Cold War, debate the role of theU.S. in the rise of transnational terror, and grapple with the long-term impactof war on both human and nonhuman ecologies. Post-9/11 global Afghanistan literary productionremains largely NATO-centric insofar as it is marked by an uncriticalinvestment in humanitarianism as an approach to Third World suffering and inanti-communism as an unquestioned premise. The book's first half exposes how persistinganti-socialist biases-including anti-statist bias-not only shaped recent literaryand visual texts on Afghanistan, resulting in a distorted portrayal of itstragic history, but also informed these texts' reception by critics. In thebook's second half, the author examines cultural texts that challenge thislimited horizon and forge alternative ways of representing traumatic histories.Captured by the author through the concepts of deep time, nonhuman witness, andwar as a multispecies ecology, these new aesthetics bring readers asophisticated portrait of Afghanistan as a rich multispecies habitat affectedin dramatic ways by decades of war but not annihilated.
Alla Ivanchikova is an assistant professor of English and comparative literature at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. She holds a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo, as well as degrees from Moscow State University and Central European University. Her research and teaching focus on the post-9/11 global novel, post-socialist studies, ecocriticism and new media theory. Her recent articles on the global novel and film appeared in Textual Practice, Camera Obscura and Modern Fiction Studies (forthcoming).
Acknowledgments Introduction: Global Afghanistan 1. Humanitarian Sublime and the Politics of Pity: Writing and Screening "Afghanistan" Circa 2001 2. Imagining the Soviets: The Faustian Bargain of Khaled Hosseini's Kabul "Trilogy" 3. Humanitarian Jihad: Unearthing the Contemporary in the Narratives of the Long 1979 4. Witness: Modes of Writing the Disaster 5. The Deep Time of War: Nadeem Aslam and the Aesthetics of the Geologic Turn 6. The Kabubble: The Humanitarian Community Under Scrutiny Conclusion: The End of an Era Notes Works Cited Index
"With power and brilliance, Alla Ivanchikova presents Afghanistan as a screen for competing geopolitical fantasies of the future--socialist, Islamist, and neoliberal. In so doing, she teaches us to see the ongoing disaster of a Cold War militarism that masquerades as twenty-first-century liberal humanism. Imagining Afghanistan is a much-needed contribution to the urgent project of dismantling the anti-communism that shields capitalism and imperialism in the Anthropocene."
