Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge

by Nivi Manchanda

Over time and across different genres, Afghanistan has been presented to the world as potential ally, dangerous enemy, gendered space, and mysterious locale. These powerful, if competing, visions seek to make sense of Afghanistan and to render it legible. In this innovative examination, Nivi Manchanda uncovers and critically explores Anglophone practices of knowledge cultivation and representational strategies, and argues that Afghanistan occupies a distinctive place in the imperial over-determined and under-theorised, owing largely to the particular history of imperial intervention in the region. Focusing on representations of gender, state and tribes, Manchanda re-historicises and de-mythologises the study of Afghanistan through a sustained critique of colonial forms of knowing and demonstrates how the development of pervasive tropes in Western conceptions of Afghanistan have enabled Western intervention, invasion and bombing in the region from the nineteenth century to the present.

Genres: War, Race

264 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 1, 2020

Reviews

[Rowena Abdul Razak · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book that makes you re-think and question how Afghanistan is portrayed in books and in the media.

[Dylan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was written so as to obfuscate. The reader, evidently, is not meant to be able to make any sense out of what is written is here. That is, at least, the only conclusion one can come to after reading even just a few pages. From the frequent 50+ word sentences (including some in the 70s); to the words like "imbrication", "episteme" (which the author wouldn't even dream to deign to define for us mere readers), "revivified", "intersubjective", "subjectivation", "parti pris", "blinkered", and "co-constitutive"; to the altogether utter inaccessibility of the prose, the jargon, the arguments, and the historical and philosophical and "ontological" background for it all, this is not a book that was written with an audience in mind.

Even when the writing can be understood, plenty of the arguments don't hold water. Consider the not-actually-close-at-all "close reading" of Thomas Barfield's book, where Manchanda insists that Barfield says that "some inexplicable 'Afghan penchant for blood feuds and tribal rivalries' had a small but important role to play in the political upheaval that resulted from the power vacuum created by the dissolution of the ruling party in Afghanistan." In reality, Barfield said, "it was not the result of some Afghan penchant for blood feud or tribal rivalries (although these did play a part) but rather the...", where "these" can only be referring to its one plural antecedent: "tribal rivalries", not the singular "some Afghan penchant for... tribal rivalries" (in which case Barfield would have said "although this did play a part"). It doesn't take a particularly close reading to understand this; and yet Manchanda's supposedly uniquely close, and somehow published, close reading, fails to understand this.

Another case: Manchanda's first criticism of Entezar's book on Afghanistan is that the cover depicts a veiled woman, a stereotype of Afghanistan that presents it as vulnerable and in need of saving. Yet at the same time, the cover of this very book depicts tanks, kalashnikovs, helicopters, and fighter jets, also stereotypical symbols of Afghanistan (as argued earlier in this very book) that present it as belligerent and war-torn. Most of the rest of the arguments are just banal ("Afghans are not, in fact, inherently bloodthirsty warlords").

I wouldn't even recommend this book to a PhD student currently writing a dissertation on the history and politics of imperial knowledge regarding Afghanistan, let alone anyone else.

[Sana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fantastic. I read this book a week before finishing my final draft of my PhD and how much i wish i had this earlier.

Brilliant!