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Abstract
The cold war in East Pakistan was intimately connected with nationalism and nation-building. One of the central aspects of such nation-building was the articulation of a new sense of national territoriality. Technology was central to these attempts to radically reimagine space. This is what I call technospatiality. Material, political and symbolic resources of the cold war were mobilized in the production of these new technospatialities. Popular cold war geopolitics engendered in cultural productions such as the James Bond films were creatively vernacularized to produce new, nationally useful technospatial imaginaries. In this article I look at how Kazi Anwar Hussain’s hugely successful spy-thrillers articulated this new technospatial imaginaries by drawing upon and reworking contemporary technopolitical objects, projects and anxieties.
Acknowledgements
I had presented previous versions of this paper at the SHOT conference in Copenhagen in October 2012 as well as the Dark Matters II conference at UBC in 2014. I am grateful for all the suggestions I received on both occasions. I would particularly like to thank Itty Abraham, Suzanne Moon, Carla Nappi and Rahul Mukherjee for their suggestions. The guidance from John Krige and Jessica Wang has also been immensely helpful in preparing this article for publication.
Notes
1. Kackman, Citizen Spy.
2. Sharp, Condensing; Dodds, “Screening”; Wharton, Building; Mitter and Major eds. Across the Blocs.
3. McMahon, “Cultural Bias”.
4. Anderson, Imagined Communities.
5. Chatterjee, “Whose Imagined Community?”
6. For good historical overviews of Pakistan’s postcolonial history see, Talbot, Pakistan and Jalal, The State of Martial Rule.
7. Hecht ed. Entangled Geographies.
8. Dodds, Geopolitics, 4–5.
9. Ibid., 5.
10. Sharp, Condensing, 24.
11. Hecht ed. Entangled Geographies, 3.
12. Abraham, “Rare Earths”.
13. Chakrabarty, “An Alternative”.
14. Hussain, Dhongsho, 22.
15. Sengupta, The Land, 497–574.
16. Hussain, Bharatnatyam, 93–5.
17. Cootes, “The Locusts”, 100.
18. Hart, Report, 9.
19. Andrus and Mohammed, The Economy, 33.
20. Ibid., 43.
21. Freeman, “Memorandum”, 1230.
22. Bose, “The Pakistan Economy”, 1005.
23. Ibid., 1020.
24. Hussain, Bharatnatyam, 89–90.
25. Dando, Bioterror, 117.
26. Ibid., 29.
27. Sneddon and Fox, “The Cold War”.
28. Parveen and Faisal, “People”.
29. Hussain, Dhongsho, 57.
30. Kibria, “Kajida Rahasya”.
31. Hussain, Dhongsho, 56.
32. Rhodes, The Twilight, 175.
33. Niemi, History in the Media, 88–9.
34. Hussain, Duhshahoshik, 10.
35. Jenkins, Nuclear Terrorism, 6.
36. Kurve, “Mystery of Uranium Smuggling”.
37. Kumar, India and the Nuclear Non-proliferation Regime.
38. Abraham, “Introduction”, 2.
39. Mian, “Fevered with Dreams”, 28.
40. Ibid., 35.
41. See note 38 above.
42. Mian, “Fevered with Dreams”, 34–5.
43. Dadi, “Nuclearization and Pakistani Popular Culture”, 186.
44. See note 38 above.
45. Hussain, Duhshahoshik, 6.
46. See for instance, Fair, Fighting, 159–61.
47. Anon., Lok Sabha, 6682–3.