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Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) grapples with the afterlife of
environmental disasters and armed conflict and examines how people
attempt to flourish despite and alongside continuing violence. Departing
from conventional approaches to the study of disaster and conflict that
have dominated academic studies of Kashmir, Omer Aijazi’s ethnography
of life in the borderlands instead explores possibilities for imagining
life otherwise, in an environment where violence is everywhere, or atmospheric.
Drawing
on extensive fieldwork in the portion of Kashmir under Pakistan’s
control and its surrounding mountainscapes, the book takes us to two
remote mountainous valleys that have been shaped by recurring
environmental disasters, as well as by the landscape of no-go zones,
army barracks, and security checkpoints of the contested India/Pakistan
border. Through a series of interconnected scenes from the lives of five
protagonists, all of whom are precariously situated within their
families or societies and rarely enjoy the expected protections of state
or community, Aijazi reveals the movements, flows, and intimacies
sustained by a landscape that enables alternative modes of life.
Blurring the distinctions between story, theory, and activism, he
explores what emerges when theory becomes a project of seeing and
feeling from the non-normative standpoint of those who, like the book’s
protagonists, do not subscribe to the rules by which most others have
come to know the world.
Bringing the critical study of disaster
into conversation with a radical humanist anthropology and the
capaciousness of affect theory, held accountable to Black studies and
Indigenous studies, Aijazi offers a decolonial approach to disaster
studies centering not on trauma and rupture but rather on repair—the
social labor through which communities living with disaster refuse the
conditions of death imposed upon them and create viable lives for
themselves, even amidst constant diminishment and world-annihilation.
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