Pashto Border Literature as Geopolitical Knowledge

ABSTRACT

In this article I read a selection of Pashto literatures against the grain of world history, as critical thought about geopolitics. Drawing on Michael Shapiro’s concept of aesthetic subjects, as well as on border theory, I argue that the authors, the content, and the literary networks of these works all critically comment on global relations of power, ranging from the local bordering effects of geopolitics, to systems of knowledge embedded in the spatiality and temporality of empire. I argue that past and current imperial processes have led to fragmenting effects in Afghan society, and literature both reflects and analyses this. More than that, though, I argue – using the lives of authors as well as their work – that literary activity in Pashto has actively negotiated such processes throughout its recent history, and offers strategies for different notions of global connectivity. The decentralized and multiperspective images of life in these works sit in counterpoint not only to the systems-oriented views that drive military and other policy in Afghanistan during the on-going US moment, but also to universalist perspectives upon which disciplines like world history and geopolitics have traditionally relied. This contributes to the aesthetic turn in IR by arguing that it is not only the aesthetic vision in works that can challenge dominant forms of knowledge: the shape of the Pashto literary formation itself, organic with its contents, is an alternate form of knowledge-in-practice about the contemporary world.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for Geopolitics and to Amna Chaudhry for their careful reading of this article, and their extensive guidance on improving it.

Notes

1. One illustration to this effect is contained in Caron 2016; see particularly the discussion of the oral poetic formation. This conceptualization of Pashto literature as a whole is the narrative of my monograph in progress.

2. It is perhaps emblematic of this that Pashto literary culture itself is highly developed, while critical commentary on it, including in Pashto, has been almost non-existent: much Pashto literary work, as this article highlights, already contains a comment on its own social existence as cultural-political and aesthetic intervention.

3. I should note that I have worked, in the case of Sulamal, from electronic files of these stories that the author himself provided me. In cases where I have not given citation information for individual stories, we have been unable to locate full bibliographic details; most of the older collections are not available outside South Asia.

4. Darmesteter (1888) discusses the provenance of his sources in passing, throughout various sections of this work.