Imagining Afghanistan with author Nivi Manchanda
Date and time: Thursday, July 23, 2020, 2 to 3:30 pm Eastern Daylight Time (UTC-4)
Register here.
In the second edition of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies’ latest series, New Books in Asian Studies, we will host Queen Mary, University of London Professor Nivi Manchanda for the US book launch of Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge.
Over time and across different genres, Afghanistan has been presented to the world as a 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. Nivi Manchanda and Sigur Center Director Benjamin D. Hopkins will lead a lively discussion and Q&A on Manchanda’s innovative postcolonial theory that is grounded in the empirically rich “case” of Afghanistan.
In this book, Manchanda argues that Afghanistan occupies a distinctive place in the imperial imagination that is over-determined and under-theorized, owing largely to the particular history of imperial intervention in the region. She shares a new narrative and removes the myths surrounding the study of Afghanistan by focusing on representations of gender, state, and tribes, while providing a sustained critique of colonial forms of knowing. Manchanda utilizes a methodologically diverse toolkit to demonstrate how the development of pervasive tropes in Western conceptions of Afghanistan has enabled Western intervention, invasion, and bombing in the region from the 19th century to the present. Overall, the book provides an interdisciplinary framework through which to study modern Afghanistan.
We are pleased to announce a book giveaway to send a free English copy of the book to an attendee. Simply register for an Eventbrite ticket, attend with the name you registered as, subscribe to the Sigur Center’s weekly Asia on E Street Digest (webinar, job, fellowships & grants, etc), and a winner will be randomly selected from attendees who subscribed to the Digest. The Sigur Center will purchase the book from a local DC bookstore and pay for shipping. The contest is open to US addresses only.
Registered guests will receive an email with instructions for joining Webex 24 hours prior to the event. Registration closes at 2pm EDT on July 22. This event is on the record, open to the public, and will be recorded. Advance questions can be sent to gsigur@gwu.edu with subject “NBAS: Nivi Manchanda” or directly posted in the live Q&A.
Media inquiries must be sent to Jason Shevrin, jshevrin@gwu.edu in advance. If you need specific accommodations, please contact gsigur@gwu.edu with at least 3 business days’ notice.
Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge was just published via Cambridge University Press and is available at Bookshop.org (Kramerbooks & Afterwords and Solid State) and Politics & Prose. Use “IMAF2020” on Cambridge University Press, 20% will be applied with you click “Proceed to Payment.”
Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @GWUSigurCenter!
NIVI MANCHANDA (left) is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) of International Politics at Queen Mary, University of London. She is interested in questions of race, empire, and gender and has published in, among other journals, Security Dialogue, Millennium, Current Sociology, and Third World Quarterly. She is the co-editor of Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (Routledge: 2014) Manchanda is currently the co-convenor of the British International Studies’ Colonial, Postcolonial, Decolonial Working Group and the co-editor of the journal Politics. Imagining Afghanistan is her first single-authored monograph. @ManchandaNivi
BENJAMIN D. HOPKINS (right) is a historian of modern South Asia, specializing in the history of Afghanistan and British imperialism on the Indian subcontinent. He has authored, co-authored, and co-edited numerous books on the region, including The Making of Modern Afghanistan, Fragments of the Afghan Frontier, and Beyond Swat: History, Society and Economy along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier. His new book, Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State, presents a global history of how the limits of today’s state-based political order were organized in the late 19th century, with lasting effects to the present day. He is currently working on A Concise History of Afghanistan for Cambridge University Press, as well as a manuscript about the continuing war in Afghanistan, provisionally titled The War that Destroyed America.
Professor Hopkins’ research has been funded by Trinity College, Cambridge, the Nuffield Foundation (UK), the British Academy, the American Institute of Iranian Studies, as well as the Leverhulme Trust. He has received fellowships from the Council on Foreign Relations, the National University of Singapore, the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington DC. Writing for the public, Professor Hopkins has been featured in The New York Times, The National Interest, and the BBC. He regularly teaches courses on South Asian history, the geopolitics of South and Central Asia, as well as world history and the legacies of violence and memory in Asia. Professor Hopkins has directed the Sigur Center for Asian Studies since 2016. @GWUSigurCenter
