Project MUSE®: Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 20 (2000) through current issueLatest Articles: Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle EastTWOProject MUSE®Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East1548-226X1089-201XLatest articles in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editors' Note
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980174
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The first quarter of the twenty-first century has belonged to the US war apparatus. From "Operation Enduring Freedom," which officially began on October 7, 2001, with airstrikes in Afghanistan, wars have proliferated across much of the Muslim world. Theaters of war have shifted across Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Libya (to list just a few) and have featured troops from North America, Australia, and Europe. But the United States led these efforts. Military tools and techniques are crucial artifacts in this war apparatus, but it also emerges from the attendant technologies of race, religion, and sexuality that shape the social and political infrastructure of the twenty-first century. As this note goes to press
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmallEditors' Note2026-01-22text/htmlen-USEditors' Note2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®49822026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22The Lifeworlds of Ghanaian Film Posters: A Conversation with Joseph Oduro-Frimpong
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980175
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Recall the scene in Mrs. Doubtfire when Robin Williams stabs a guy's eye with a broom, drills his skull, and blood squirts everywhere? It may not have appeared in the movie you have seen, but it graces a striking Ghanaian poster for the film. Between the 1980s and the early 2000s, Ghanaian artists developed a unique visual culture. Hand painted on flour sacks, their film posters helped the emerging video clubs attract more customers through their visual excess. Film posters of that era are a cornucopia of muscular bodies, beheadings, and dismemberments, embellished by scenes nowhere to be found in the actual movie. The practice spread to Cape Coast, Kumasi, Takoradi, and Sunyani and reached the rural villages
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmallThe Lifeworlds of Ghanaian Film Posters: A Conversation with Joseph Oduro-Frimpong2026-01-22text/htmlen-USThe Lifeworlds of Ghanaian Film Posters: A Conversation with Joseph Oduro-Frimpong2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®388622026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22Technology and Critique: Genealogies of Digital War
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980176
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Between fall 2021 and spring 2022, twenty-one scholars, writers, artists, and activists convened virtually across nine conversations collectively titled "Technologies of Power: Tracing Empire at Home and Abroad" to grapple with and against twenty years of the global "war on terror." Series sessions centered on themes related to the fault lines of empire: intimacy, geopolitics, place, enclosure, opacity, postcolony, trace, memory, and imagination. We met not as neutral observers but as subjects entangled in the very circuits of mediation and violence we sought to chart. In these discussions, we named the intimacies, brutal enclosures, spectacles, and residues of the US imperial formation made possible by
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmallTechnology and Critique: Genealogies of Digital War2026-01-22text/htmlen-USTechnology and Critique: Genealogies of Digital War2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®1069012026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22(Counter)-Mapping US Empire in Africa: Scattered Hegemonies, Feminist Methodologies, and Situated Knowledge
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980177
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In February 2014, armed counterterrorism police raided a mosque in the Majengo neighborhood of Mombasa in coastal Kenya. Witnesses to the raid reported that the police fired tear gas and rubber bullets in an attempt to disperse the worshippers.1 At least seven people were killed and over one hundred arrested, further inflaming tensions between Kenya's Muslim minority population and the Kenyan government.2 While these tensions date back to the early days of independence, they worsened in the aftermath of the Kenyan military's invasion of Somalia in October 2011, which triggered a wave of violent attacks inside Kenya attributed to the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab. In response, the Kenyan government unleashed
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmall(Counter)-Mapping US Empire in Africa: Scattered Hegemonies, Feminist Methodologies, and Situated Knowledge2026-01-22text/htmlen-US(Counter)-Mapping US Empire in Africa: Scattered Hegemonies, Feminist Methodologies, and Situated Knowledge2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®1026092026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22Gimmicks of War
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980178
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As the summer dusk fell upon Jerusalem in September 2023, a palpable tension hung in the air at the Armenian Quarter. In a corner of the old city, an activist in his twenties walked nervously toward a mic, crossing paths with the weary figure of a visibly irked community elder. The young man silently removed a smartphone from his pocket and lit up an SOS signal. This ironic gesture, hinting at the world's indifference, concluded a protest against the Quarter's leadership and its decision to sign away a critical swath of land for a ninety-nine-year lease. The contract cleared the ground for construction on a historic garden and resting place for pilgrims in life and death. Located strategically on high grounds along
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmallGimmicks of War2026-01-22text/htmlen-USGimmicks of War2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®954902026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22Drone Empires: Ethnic Conflict, Techno-Spectacle, and Imperial Machinations Across Eurasia and Africa
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980179
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Drones launch from the ground, but they do not require runways, jet engines, or significant energy to fly high into the sky, surveil, and destroy. Hovering over the lush mountains of Nagorno-Karabakh, they render rugged and often impassable mountains into a smooth sea of greens and grizzly grays. Those landscapes have inspired Armenians and Azeris for centuries, but lately they have inspired fierce animosities. In 1988, crumbling Soviet authority and outbreaks of ethnic cleansing sent the region hurtling toward the first Karabakh war (1988–94). Continued ethnic cleansing "unmixed" Armenia and Azerbaijan, and Karabakh's Armenians—77 percent of the province's population in 1988—became its sole residents.1 In 1992
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmallDrone Empires: Ethnic Conflict, Techno-Spectacle, and Imperial Machinations Across Eurasia and Africa2026-01-22text/htmlen-USDrone Empires: Ethnic Conflict, Techno-Spectacle, and Imperial Machinations Across Eurasia and Africa2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®1060312026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22Distributed Empire: A Technics of Drone War
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980180
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Roughly two weeks after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, the residents of Jacobabad, Pakistan, began noticing that strange things were happening at the city's air force air base. For one, there appeared to be Americans moving in and out of the base. For another, pilotless surveillance planes (as drones were called in the earliest local reports), were falling from the sky due to technical failure. They smashed into rice fields. They tumbled onto the land around the base. They slammed directly into the base. The Americans, it turned out, were using the Pakistani base to launch their unstable technology—and it was crashing.Word of the goings-on in Jacobabad traveled, and political parties descended
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmallDistributed Empire: A Technics of Drone War2026-01-22text/htmlen-USDistributed Empire: A Technics of Drone War2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®969102026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22iPhones as Compromised Talisman: Data Control and the "Imperial In-Between" in Northwest China
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980181
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In the contemporary moment, digital sovereignty is a dominant policy and technical frame in many states and industries around the world. As recent scholarship has noted, this largely state-based frame of autonomous technology use finds its origins in intellectual debates and government in the mid-1990s and early 2000s in China.1 At the center of this debate was a critique of colonialism and a well-founded fear of US cultural imperialism. As in other formerly colonized states such as India, the legacy of China's past semi-colonization by Global North powers formed an important node of collective memory and self-understanding. The "moral wound" of past atrocities at the hands of the European, North American, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmalliPhones as Compromised Talisman: Data Control and the "Imperial In-Between" in Northwest China2026-01-22text/htmlen-USiPhones as Compromised Talisman: Data Control and the "Imperial In-Between" in Northwest China2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®446632026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22Big Data Before the Age of Big Data: The 1917 Anglo-Egyptian "Dress Rehearsal" of the Nazi Census
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980182
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After the September 11 attacks of 2001, 762 Arabs, Muslims, and South Asian detainees were held without cause for months while more were being tracked down for possible detention.1 Since six of the attackers had absconded their visas, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) needed help locating the remaining sixteen hundred Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians who had also overstayed.2 With no records or other means of tracking them, the FBI turned to the general public. Ninety-six thousand calls poured into the FBI hotline in the first week after 9/11 with possible leads.3 A "Special Registry" of Arabs and Muslims was created to provide government officials with more information to track down these individuals
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmallBig Data Before the Age of Big Data: The 1917 Anglo-Egyptian "Dress Rehearsal" of the Nazi Census2026-01-22text/htmlen-USBig Data Before the Age of Big Data: The 1917 Anglo-Egyptian "Dress Rehearsal" of the Nazi Census2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®986462026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22Pivots
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980183
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"Tech companies routinely push out other businesses only to flop or morph or migrate, leaving only emptiness in their wake.""So, creating pressure points amounts to an internal churning … the annihilation of caste, that's the biggest vision."Pivot, verb, to shift, swerve, about face, take on a new direction, to evade.Solidarity has never been easy. Today, it seems ever more difficult, as campus politics threaten to engulf forging ties, and criticizing US war machines is equated with supporting terrorism. These patterns echo what the other essays in this collection consider through the lens of the long, renewed, endless global war on terror. As I write this, it seems almost impossible to imagine what the work of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmallPivots2026-01-22text/htmlen-USPivots2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®458152026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22Decolonization as Dissent, Dissent as Decolonization
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980184
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Twentieth-century decolonization was about dissent. Across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and beyond, individuals, organizations, and communities protested sociopolitical status quos that had been enacted within empires by foreign masters and their collaborators. They searched for alternative ways of doing politics and organizing societies and economies. They sought citizenship rather than subjecthood and new social contracts they could not only participate in but actively shape. They envisioned world and regional orders that would upend the global "color line" dividing white and nonwhite populations and promise better protections for rights and resources.1 Political independence seemed to offer a means through
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmallDecolonization as Dissent, Dissent as Decolonization2026-01-22text/htmlen-USDecolonization as Dissent, Dissent as Decolonization2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®302712026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22The "Winds of Change" Blew in Many Directions: Decolonization, Dissent, and Opposition
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980185
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Frequently led by the individuals and groups with whom former colonial powers were most willing to negotiate, decolonization reflected the triumph of certain nationalist visions and political frameworks over others. In turn, these groups have often dominated narratives in and of colonies-turned-states, positioned as they were to actively shape emerging national histories of local independence struggles. In consequence, far less attention has been paid to the afterlives of those individuals, communities, and groups that promoted other visions and frameworks and were therefore excluded from new state bureaucracies and positions of influence. Still, many of them continued their activities in a variety of forms—as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmallThe "Winds of Change" Blew in Many Directions: Decolonization, Dissent, and Opposition2026-01-22text/htmlen-USThe "Winds of Change" Blew in Many Directions: Decolonization, Dissent, and Opposition2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®1074342026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22Ripples of Partition: Circumscribing Bombay's Commercial Connections
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980186
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In early 1947, business leaders in the industrial city of Bombay broke from tradition. Addressing the Annual General Meeting of the Indian Merchants' Chamber (IMC) on January 29, 1947, the chamber's outgoing president, Mahomed Husein Hasham Premji, whose association with the broad-based organization of trading interests dated back more than a decade, chose to deviate from the accepted practice of taking stock of the political developments of the previous year: "I sincerely feel that in the existing position of fluidity attaching to the whole problem, it will be the part of wisdom not to say anything which may be the starting point of fresh controversies."1In the speech delivered just months after the launch of his
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmallRipples of Partition: Circumscribing Bombay's Commercial Connections2026-01-22text/htmlen-USRipples of Partition: Circumscribing Bombay's Commercial Connections2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®1096122026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22"Dividing the Nation into Patricians and Plebeians": Pakistan National Congress and the Decolonizing Politics of Constitution Making
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980187
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The Pakistan National Congress (PNC) was the first oppositional party within the newly independent state of Pakistan. Composed predominantly of caste Hindus, and rooted in the politics of pre-Partition Bengal, the PNC was the lone voice in Pakistan's first constituent assembly in official opposition to the overwhelming majority of the country's founding party, the Muslim League. The three pillars of the PNC's political vision were secularism, anticommunalism, and political representation on the basis of a broadly conceived cultural Bengali identity. In many ways, these mutually reinforcing pillars constituted a counterpoint to the central Muslim League's majoritarian agenda of Muslim nationalism—malleable and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmall"Dividing the Nation into Patricians and Plebeians": Pakistan National Congress and the Decolonizing Politics of Constitution Making2026-01-22text/htmlen-US"Dividing the Nation into Patricians and Plebeians": Pakistan National Congress and the Decolonizing Politics of Constitution Making2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®1170672026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22Feudal Lords, Foreign Hands, and the Formation of Sovereignty in Decolonizing Morocco
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980188
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Morocco obtained its independence in 1956 amid the collapse of the French empire during the early Cold War, a process driven by anti-colonial revolts rather than economic considerations in Paris.1 The struggle over the future of North Africa lay at the heart of this process. Compared to the Algerian Revolution (1954–62), Morocco's decolonization involved only limited violence. Historians have thus narrated this episode exclusively as a political struggle among the colonial state, the royal palace, and Hizb al-Istiqlal (the Independence Party).2 The party gained hundreds of thousands of members following its establishment in December 1943, though its social base consisted predominantly of Arabic-speaking city
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmallFeudal Lords, Foreign Hands, and the Formation of Sovereignty in Decolonizing Morocco2026-01-22text/htmlen-USFeudal Lords, Foreign Hands, and the Formation of Sovereignty in Decolonizing Morocco2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®1265042026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22Neo–Mau Mau and Ex-Loyalists: The Politics of Chieftaincy in Central Kenya, 1960–69
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980189
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Not all families enjoyed the festivities amid the jubilation accompanying Kenya's independence on December 12, 1963. Nyeri District abounded with threats and rumors of blacklists. "Those said to be in danger generally are all persons known to have been loyal to the Government during the Emergency," wrote Charles Koinange, the chief official in the district, referencing the families who had sided with the British during the brutal counterinsurgency waged to defeat the Mau Mau uprising in the previous decade.1 Rumors predicted that loyalists would face higher tax assessments from nationalist chiefs under the new dispensation.2 Ex–Mau Mau fighters were deemed to be behind the "rumors and counter-rumors" suggesting
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmallNeo–Mau Mau and Ex-Loyalists: The Politics of Chieftaincy in Central Kenya, 1960–692026-01-22text/htmlen-USNeo–Mau Mau and Ex-Loyalists: The Politics of Chieftaincy in Central Kenya, 1960–692026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®1153832026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22For Faith and Nation: The Political Ideas and Methods of the Buddhist Movement of 1963 in the Republic of Vietnam
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980190
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In late May 1963, an elderly Buddhist monk in Saigon wrote to his superiors offering to burn himself to death. Thích Quảng Đức had been shocked earlier that month when local security forces killed at least nine young believers in Huế on the central Vietnamese coast. He was also disappointed when Ngô Đình Diệm, president of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam), refused to grant Buddhist demands following the tragedy. Quảng Đức argued that Buddhism had contributed to every aspect of Vietnam's culture and society and had served as the country's official doctrine during its golden, medieval age. Summing up the intimate connection between his religion and the Vietnamese nation, he declared, "The spirit of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmallFor Faith and Nation: The Political Ideas and Methods of the Buddhist Movement of 1963 in the Republic of Vietnam2026-01-22text/htmlen-USFor Faith and Nation: The Political Ideas and Methods of the Buddhist Movement of 1963 in the Republic of Vietnam2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®1365732026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22Dissenting Histories: A Dialogue on Activism and the Left in Decolonizing Asia
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980191
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In the Global South, the practice of history is an act of dissent. Teleological narratives of decolonization entrenched the role of the state and authoritarian leaders, many of whom were in power for generations. From Nigeria and Uganda to Sri Lanka and Malaysia, narratives of indigeneity have solidified the position of certain ethnic groups favored by colonial powers as ruling elites.1 Moreover, the Cold War further exacerbated the suppression and vilification of the Left by rulers aligned with and propped up by the West. In countries such as Indonesia, which saw the Left's complete decimation in 1965 with the rise of the US-backed General Suharto, government-sanctioned films painting communists as ruthless
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmallDissenting Histories: A Dialogue on Activism and the Left in Decolonizing Asia2026-01-22text/htmlen-USDissenting Histories: A Dialogue on Activism and the Left in Decolonizing Asia2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®1016922026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22The Young Turks and International Law: A Means to Challenge Two Despotisms
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980192
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International law, historically and in its contemporary form, has been used both to justify and to contest global inequality. This article theorizes the toolmaking of international law by non-Western intellectuals to simultaneously address domestic and international problems. It does so by investigating strategies used by Ottoman activists in the beginning of the twentieth century, which centered on leveraging international treaties and norms. These strategies were a response to the extent of reach the European Great Powers had in the politics of less powerful actors in global politics, when Europe could intervene in the domestic affairs of sovereign countries through international legal agreements. While the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmallThe Young Turks and International Law: A Means to Challenge Two Despotisms2026-01-22text/htmlen-USThe Young Turks and International Law: A Means to Challenge Two Despotisms2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®1029332026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22Humanitarian Agents, Colonial Officials, and the Greek State: Negotiating Sexuality Among Greek Refugees in the Middle East and Africa (1942–45)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980193
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Keti was only thirteen when she fled the hunger-stricken Greek island of Icaria in 1942. A makeshift boat carried her and other destitute refugees to Turkey. Very soon she found herself interned in a camp in Gaza together with almost nine thousand refugees from Greece. In her memoirs, written in 2021, Keti recalls her life as a refugee in Palestine living among Arabs and Jews and trying to be sympathetic to both. Yet she narrates them as complete civilizational opposites. Jews were favorably depicted as modern and progressive, with their "economic, civilizational and social structure being way ahead of the 20th century." Arabs, she claims, suffefred from superstitions and backwardness, and gender relations were the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmallHumanitarian Agents, Colonial Officials, and the Greek State: Negotiating Sexuality Among Greek Refugees in the Middle East and Africa (1942–45)2026-01-22text/htmlen-USHumanitarian Agents, Colonial Officials, and the Greek State: Negotiating Sexuality Among Greek Refugees in the Middle East and Africa (1942–45)2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®1239682026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22"A Positive Approach to the Problem of Indian Unity"? Alternative Approaches to Linguistic Territorialism in Eastern India (1954–57)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980194
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Due to the linguistic diversity of South Asia, there has long been a focus on histories of language within Indian scholarship. Most studies of Indian language politics explore movements initiated by linguistic majority groups in circumscribed areas. These include discussions of movements that demanded the creation of linguistically homogenous states, as well as anti- and pro-Hindi language movements across the country.1 Scholars have also examined the views of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, with regard to linguistic states and "passions" around language more generally.2 Less explored is the opposition to the linguistic principle from India's eastern region in the 1950s. Amid political wrangling
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmall"A Positive Approach to the Problem of Indian Unity"? Alternative Approaches to Linguistic Territorialism in Eastern India (1954–57)2026-01-22text/htmlen-US"A Positive Approach to the Problem of Indian Unity"? Alternative Approaches to Linguistic Territorialism in Eastern India (1954–57)2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®1267102026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22Thinking Beyond the Nation-State
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980195
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This Kitabkhana has been a long time in the making. The horror of living in a time of multiple genocides, the everableist norms of the academy, and the increasingly fraught academic and global environment of crisis in which we find ourselves today have shaped the process of creating this forum to an unusual degree. In such circumstances, it is no small pleasure to introduce four powerful contributions by scholars who bring varied perspectives from African studies, Sikh studies, Palestine studies, settler-colonial studies, and critical caste studies to bear on Hafsa Kanjwal's award-winning book Colonizing Kashmir: State-Building Under Indian Occupation.As is clear from the groundwork laid out in Kanjwal's
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmallThinking Beyond the Nation-State2026-01-22text/htmlen-USThinking Beyond the Nation-State2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®115732026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22Every Freedom Struggle is a Singularity
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980196
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In Colonizing Kashmir, Hafsa Kanjwal rejects the "naturalized" geography of a unified India. Rather than taking the country's evolution as given, she describes how one uneasy piece of it—Kashmir—was made integral through planning, demographic engineering, and the manipulation of political emotions. Her focus is the administration of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad as Jammu and Kashmir's prime minister (1953–63)—a high-water mark of India's attempts to assimilate its sole Muslim-majority state. Kanjwal's argument is bold, but her sources are deep.A central point of Colonizing Kashmir is that, to some colonized people, the end of European colonialism didn't mean the end of domination. The Indian government behaved, in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmallEvery Freedom Struggle is a Singularity2026-01-22text/htmlen-USEvery Freedom Struggle is a Singularity2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®215872026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22Notes on Brahminical Coloniality and the Occupation of Kashmir
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980197
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Growing up in Delhi in the 1990s, Kashmir was a frequent cultural presence, from Bollywood films, to scenic photographs of Shalimar Bagh and Dal Lake, or salesmen coming to sell pherans or saffron to the Kashmiri Pandit neighborhood doctor. These references to Kashmir always invoked a sense of familiarity. Although I didn't have the language or the tools to unpack the familiarity, it often felt like an imposed narrative. Stories about Kashmir were invariably followed by phrases like atoot hissa (an integral part) as part of a call to make our territorial claims to the region; such claims were never made for any other part of India (Northeast India was largely absent from such sentimental narratives). At the same
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmallNotes on Brahminical Coloniality and the Occupation of Kashmir2026-01-22text/htmlen-USNotes on Brahminical Coloniality and the Occupation of Kashmir2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®278342026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22On Indetermination, Refusal, and the Given-ness of the Indic
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980198
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How might we consider calls for solidarity among struggles for self-determination, if neither self, nor determination, nor their relation are given?Hafsa Kanjwal's Colonizing Kashmir elaborates the many ongoing modalities of settler-colonial governmentality, concluding with a call "to rethink our categories of colonialism and (post-) colonialism, secularism, and democracy, as well as our strategies for solidarity and liberation."1 Here, I ask how the elusiveness of solidarity might further reveal the stakes of post/colonial refusal both analytically and otherwise,2 specifically among calls for self-determination articulated in the name of "the Sikh" and "the Kashmiri." This discussion addresses the above call by
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmallOn Indetermination, Refusal, and the Given-ness of the Indic2026-01-22text/htmlen-USOn Indetermination, Refusal, and the Given-ness of the Indic2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®324982026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22Sumoud: Periling Settler Colonialism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980199
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Hafsa Kanjwal's Colonizing Kashmir: State Building Under Indian Occupation is a valuable contribution to Global South studies, South Asian studies, postcolonial studies, and settler-colonial studies. The thought landscape underpinning the book implicitly revisits the analysis of some foundational revolutionary/critical thinkers such as Edward Said's analysis of Orientalism; Amilcar Cabral's writings on imperialism, culture, and revolution; and Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. The transcolonial conceptual framework by Maha Samman is also relevant in analyzing Kashmir's dependency trajectory set in the 1950s and 1960s under the Bakshi Gulam Mohammad government. Furthermore, Kanjwal's pushing back on reductive
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmallSumoud: Periling Settler Colonialism2026-01-22text/htmlen-USSumoud: Periling Settler Colonialism2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®569462026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22A Response from the Author
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980200
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To begin, I would like to sincerely thank Deepti Misri for organizing this Kitabkhana and for her patience in seeing it through to publication. I am very grateful to the contributors of this forum—Randeep Hothi, Samuel Fury Childs Daly, Awad Mansour, and Nishant Upadhyay—for generously taking their time to respond to my book. We are living in extremely difficult times, with multiple commitments both on and off campus that demand our attention, so the time and care taken by all of my colleagues is really appreciated.One of my aims for Colonizing Kashmir was to open up conversations with scholars who work on other sites that are like Kashmir, to see what kinds of resonances exist, and also to situate what perhaps
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/256/image/coversmallA Response from the Author2026-01-22text/htmlen-USA Response from the Author2026-01-222026TWOProject MUSE®118162026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-22