Imagining Afghanistan
The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge

An innovative exploration of how colonial interventions in Afghanistan have been made possible through representations of the country as 'backward'.

Nivi Manchanda (Author)

9781108811767, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 15 December 2022

263 pages, 11 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.387 kg

'… it allows us to look at the historical, political, and social processes around Afghanistan from a new perspective ...' Georgi Asatryan, Pacific Affairs

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 imagination: 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.

Introduction
1. The construction of Afghanistan as a discursive regime
2. A space contested or the 'state' of Afghanistan
3. The emergency episteme of the 'tribe' in Afghanistan
4. Framed: portrayals of Afghan women in the popular imaginary
5. Subversive identities: Afghan masculinities as societal threat
Coda.

Subject Areas: International relations [JPS], Middle Eastern history [HBJF1], Asian history [HBJF]