Shenila Khoja-Moolji - Sovereign Attachments

ON DECEMBER 16, 2014, SIX GUNMEN opened fire at the Army Public School (APS) in Peshawar. The gunmen were affiliated with the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (hereafter, TTP or Taliban), an umbrella organization that connects militant groups based primarily in the northwestern region of Pakistan. They killed 132 children, and nine teachers and staff. The attack is widely seen by the public as one of the deadliest in the countrys recent history: Pakistans 9/11, as some have remarked.

Sharif invoked the kinship attachment between a father and his children to harness permission for state action. He went on to remove a range of constitutional protections, including reviving the death penalty, advancing an amendment to establish military courts, and reforming laws in order to provide provincial intelligence agencies access to communication networks supposedly used by terrorists. His decisions had ample support from across the countrys political spectrum. Most significantly, this moment allowed for an intensification of the armys assault operations against the Taliban in northwestern Pakistan.

The Taliban, for their part, insisted that they had attacked the school because the army was killing their kin. Muhammad Umar Khorasani, a Taliban spokesperson, explained, We selected the armys school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and females. We want them to feel the pain.

Both the state and the Taliban thus mobilized kinship feelings to legitimize their violence and cultivate consent for their actions. Since violence is

These negotiations often unfold in public culture. Robert Hariman describes public culture as the domain where collective public opinion about governance and social welfare is formed through the means of cultural productions such as musicals, magazines, social media, art, advertisements, and memoirs. I, therefore, make them the object of my analysis, and build on recent scholarship that reexamines classic assumptions of sovereignty by moving it out of the exclusive domain of geopolitics and legality, and into cultural and affect studies.

Focusing on the postcolonial nation of Pakistan, I engage in a close reading and interpretation of the print and online cultural productions of two key Crucially, the post-9/11 Pakistani state has witnessed a shattering of the fantasy of absolute sovereignty and territorial wholeness due to the unilateral drone strikes by the United States and the occupation of territory by the Taliban. We therefore observe enhanced efforts by the state to perform sovereignty.

By juxtaposing the state and the Taliban I do not intend to dissolve their differences; nor do I want to give the impression that I endorse the Talibans brutal violence, or, for that matter, state violence. The books aim is not to draw an equivalence between the state and the Taliban. Instead, it seeks to describe and interrogate the discourses and affectivities of each performance of sovereignty to argue that our examination of sovereignty must account for its cultural and affective dimensions. It was Raymond Williams who pointed to the usefulness of juxtaposing hitherto separately considered activities for cultural analysis, as it may lead to the discovery of patterns and correspondences, as well as discontinuities.

My examination shows the entanglements and shared repertoire of these seemingly antagonistic entities. It unveils the complicated imbrication of sovereignty by highlighting how scripts of gender and Muslimness become the very means through which sovereignty is performatively iterated in Pakistan. Both the state and the Taliban recruit strangers into relationships of trust, protection, and fraternity by drawing on and reinforcing gendered hierarchies, kinship feelings, and normative understandings of Islam. Such relationships become the structure of feelings that permits the classic and everyday acts of sovereignty that we immediately recognize: violence and governance. Feminist scholars have long argued that constructions and What deserves scholarly attention is how these become the means through which the relationship of sovereignty is nurtured. Such an approach draws attention to affect and memory work, as well as the making of allied, counter- and ambivalent publics. It views political attachments as contingent and interacting with gender and religion, and also opens up the space for an exploration of political estrangements.