Ishq/Love, a Defiant Affair
The Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen has the pleasure of hosting a book discussion with Dr Qais Munhazim, Assistant Professor of Global Studies at Jefferson University.
Over the past three decades, the necropolitical projects and violent gaze of the U.S. empire and its Western allies have rendered Afghans and Afghanistan as a people and landscape devoid of love and life. In these Western imperialist and orientalist depictions, Afghans in Afghanistan and in exile have remained a people of perpetual despair and melancholy. Afghan men – like Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, and racialised immigrant men more broadly – have been dehumanised and turned into monsters, undeserving of life, dignity, and love.
Ishq/Love, a Defiant Affair turns to ishq as both a method and an intervention to offer a tender lens for engaging with the everyday lives of Afghan men. It seeks to situate the Afghan man within the registers of desire: under the gaze of love, on the beds of lovers, within the affective worlds of friendship, and within the tender circles of kinship. In doing so, this discussion attempts to pull the Afghan man out of the monster’s mouth, out of the empire’s terrorist representations, and invite readers on a poetic, visual and ethnographic journey into the love lives of Afghan men from Kabul to Nangarhar, Dublin, California and Toronto.
This is not a mission of “saving” the Afghan man. Rather, it is an attempt to articulate an alternative reading – one that insists on tenderness, and centres love, joy, desire, and more.
