Dissident Knowledge(s)
Those doing the work: I should have shown up more.
My paternal grandfather ran a small publishing press for anticolonial writing in British India, while my mother’s father worked as a medical doctor at a time when the profession was mostly reserved for white settlers or upper-caste Hindus. I never met either of them, but their stories have made their way to me, passed down from my parents and extended kin. An anecdote that has stayed with me is how, in an act of defiance, my grandfather, who was a doctor, named his dog after a British lord, the same colonial administrator who targeted and disappeared anticolonial agitators. Dogs have a suspect position in many Muslim households and are sometimes considered impure or unclean.
Both sets of grandparents fled India with their families during Partition. While departure was certain, it was not known then that ties with their ancestral homes would be permanently severed.1 Depending on individual circumstances, people made their way across the border differently. Some chose to move together as a caravan, others took the train, while those with means opted for air travel, arguably the safest choice at the time.
My dad arrived in Pakistan as a baby hidden aboard a train, while my mother’s family arrived via a chartered flight. Trains to Pakistan (or to India, for that matter), as poignantly captured in Khushwant Singh’s harrowing novel, were synonymous with certain death.2 My dad went on to become a noted physicist and worked for the national government till his retirement several years ago. He was headhunted while working for a power plant in southern Ontario (Canada). He felt moving back home was the right thing to do as his expertise was needed by the country his parents had fought so hard for. Patriotic sacrifice was a strong ruling affect for my parent’s generation. My mother took a very different route to make herself legible in the same climate. She relied on gut, grit, and intuition, not expert knowledge. She continues to run a very modest women’s support network in one of Islamabad’s so-called “informal settlements.”
My parents embody very different notions of what it means to devote yourself to people and place. Papa ([my] father) is regarded as an expert, a scientist, a true Pakistani patriot, and he has a list of state-issued awards to prove it. Ammi is simply known as baji (elder sister) to the women she works with. While writing this book, I had to continually ask myself: “How do I best devote myself to the people I have met in the places where they live?”
Expertise is such a strange word—how can one even claim expertise in the lives of others?
“Do You Even Want to Be in Academia?”
We are living in a time when the academy has colonized intellectual labor and the idea itself of what intellectual labor is, says Alexis Pauline Gumbs.3 At a recent workshop, a colleague, exasperated by our exchange on the epistemic and material harms of disciplinary knowledge and field formation, asked me point-blank: “Omer, do you even want to be in academia?”
What was being implied was that if I wanted to be a “legitimate academic,” I must put all my intellectual energies to the service of the discipline. Any other dedication to knowledge was suspect. I have been posed this question on numerous occasions but never with such bluntness. I could imagine a university administrator saying this, but the fact that this was coming from a colleague forced me to take a deep breath.
In his book Representations of the Intellectual, Edward Said establishes the academic’s role as holding the status quo in tension so that knowledge, solutions, theories, answers are never finished or complete or certain.4 He warns against the specialization of knowledge and the desire to establish oneself as an “expert,” gaining power and authority through disciplinary expertise. Choosing discipline building over world-building is a dangerous obsession. In our current institutional climate, where an intellectual is hired help in the military-industrial-academic complex, the harmful tendencies that Said identified are now commonplace standards of the “academic profession.”
Junyoung Verónica Kim writes that when we scholars are asked about our area of research—“What is it that you study?”—this question, a deeply violent one, is always rooted within a “certain historical context and disciplinary regime” that dictates the very answers to the question.5 She continues: “That is to say, we are not free to answer the question in any given way.”6 How can one think and write about Kashmir through the pahars amid such hyperprofessionalization and compartmentalization of knowledge?
Audra Simpson encourages us to think about “ethnographic refusal.”7 That is to acknowledge the asymmetrical power relations that inform our research and refuse to operate in ways that compromise a community’s hard-earned gains for sovereignty. But what happens when established norms of knowledge creation do not allow for this? Is it even possible in the current climate to redirect scholarly accountability to the very bodies from whom knowledge is extracted, or to whom concepts are applied, as opposed to abandoning them altogether? This requires creating room for breathing within our discursive and intellectual practices and experimenting with both content and form. Françoise Lionnet believes that “developing bridges across disciplines, identities, and epistemologies” is intentional work, and in that process, attention must be paid to the “means of production of knowledge and the forms it must take in order to be legitimized as knowledge.”8
Thinking about my own legibility as a scholar and how I have sought to resist my placement within disciplines while seeking citizenship within the institution, I am reminded of my desire to make my interlocutors legible within the folds of my book and the “discipline of anthropology.” I wonder: does knowledge matter only when it fills in “gaps” in the literature when “no subject lives their life along disciplinary lines”?9 Keguro Macharia notes that “so much knowledge exists as songs and dances, as gossip and rumor, as barely decipherable markings on trees and stone floors, as disturbed earth and invasive plants but, yes, [we] keep insisting knowledge is only credible as peer-reviewed articles and monographs.”10
“Discipline is empire,”11 Katherine McKittrick warns. Disciplinary work involves practices of “relentless categorization”12 that sanction epistemic ignorance and erasure that “enable the continued exclusion of other than dominant Western epistemic and intellectual traditions.”13 Disciplinary power works in tandem with biopower. The roots of disciplinary knowledge lie in the mechanisms of control in the prison,14 the factory, the slave ship,15 and the plantation.16 Colonial discipline for extraction gave way to colonial disciplines of extraction.
The same imagination that goes into the formation of the nation-state informs the production of disciplines. Audra Simpson tells us that the “state is not only repressive; it is also educative—shaping common sense through ideological state apparatuses (such as the academy) that normalize the rule of settler colonialism.”17 Nation-states do not disappear from our analysis and future imaginaries because disciplines do not. Kashmir remains stuck in the drama of nation-states because it has been forced into the disciplinary formation of South Asian studies, a state-centric project. I return to this thought in “Who Can Stand with Kashmir?”
There Is Power and Humility in Refusing Disciplines
Anthropology’s commitment to (liberal) humanism is facing increasing scrutiny and skepticism. There have been calls for letting anthropology burn,18 alongside efforts to (re)build the discipline from within, notably from the margins to make the margins more central.19 There have also been calls for locating the canon in alternate theory-making sites and bodies20—while, at the same time, keeping in mind the exhaustion and collateral damage incurred along the way. Zoe Todd wonders: “When your body exceeds the limits of the body of work you contribute to, what do you become? Waste? Collateral damage?”21 After all, “disciplines do not like unruly bodies or bodies that permeate and puncture the walls of their cells.”22
Is it possible to decolonize “the discipline,” and that too from within the academy? And who is best positioned to do this work? Those from within, those seeking to get in and willing to do whatever it takes to gain entry, or those who will never be allowed in because they are exceeding and excessive? The Circle’s Conspiracy of Writers is an anticolonial collective that writes about borders. They recall the story of a Belgian farmer who accidentally shifted the French border to drive his tractor across farmlands between both countries. But nothing happens to the farmer, a white European man. No one feels threatened, and the “transgression” is dismissed as an amusing story. They ask: “What happens when brown, queer, feminist, and decolonial movements try to shift lines and borders?”23 “The discipline,” too, is a colonial border. It is important to note who is allowed to rework the border.
In my experience, any scholarly stance that stands outside disciplinary proclivities, such as a devotion to the community over “the discipline,” is quickly dismissed and delegitimized in the face of elite (capital A) Anthropology. This leads to the scholar’s automatic placement outside of citational infrastructure and other frames of legibility that many seek. It turns out that speaking “from” (rather than for) community is not a defensible position against disciplinary certitude and its violent empiricisms. To be welcomed into the discipline means becoming part of a genealogy, Leandros Kyriakopoulos notes.24 Turning against your inheritance is considered an act of disloyalty and self-destruction, not a careful offer of love. I take comfort in Eve Tuck’s gentle reminder that it is sometimes necessary to bite the institution (or discipline) that feeds us.25 Or refuse it altogether.26 To make room for “undisciplined” forms of care and repair, which embrace the “poetry of being human” over “empirical concepts of human being,” as Delande Justinvil writes.27
Like the institution, the discipline is plastic. An incredibly harmful text can sit undisturbed next to a life-affirming one. Tying this to the scholarship on Kashmir, take the book Occupied Clinic, whose publication by Duke University Press presented a difficult learning moment. The monograph examines trauma among patients in a psychiatric hospital in Indian-administered Kashmir. The work came under critical scrutiny by scholars and activists alike after an anonymous Twitter user leaked the author’s intimate familial links with the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s premier intelligence agency.28
In a self-published response, the book’s author notes that she did share these details about her background, but only with some “trusted Kashmiri interlocutors.”29 The author chose these select scholars, journalists, and advisors at will. Selective transparency is an escape route for evading nuanced questions about who gets to be an interlocutor in the first place, and who is legitimatized as an intellectual partner worthy of kinship and accountability. Notably, the author did not disclose her familial links with the Research and Analysis Wing to the psychiatric patients or the broader intellectual and activist community in her orbit. Nor was this crucial information revealed to the reader as one would expect in the book.
This is a betrayal, and the omission is serious. Non-Kashmiri researchers, including myself, rely on local networks of trust to vouch for us. Ethnographic intimacy demands honesty and transparency as a precondition of engagement, a relatively modest expectation for conducting research in contexts of occupation and settler colonialism. It is difficult to imagine that opportunities for disclosure were not numerous or forthcoming. Transparency is ultimately a stance of humility; it holds the researcher in a constant and tense relation of accountability, raising the possibility that perhaps I should not be doing this work at this moment, or that I may not be suitable to do the work at all. We want to know so much about those we write about: what is it that they also might want to know about us?
The Research and Analysis Wing is the architect of brutal counterinsurgency policies in Kashmir that sanction torture, sexual violence, abduction, and other human rights abuses in the region and beyond. The terror the organization evokes in the lives of ordinary Kashmiris should not be underestimated, particularly in a climate of state surveillance and social manipulation strategically designed to dismantle local efforts for self-determination. A few anthropologists and non-anthropologists voiced concerns about the author’s outrageous breach of ethics, yet the book won an award and continues to circulate unabated.30 The author was not confronted with any tangible calls for accountability from the discipline, the profession, or the institution, despite the life-and-death stakes of the concerns raised. The book’s scholarly merits were too readily and far too easily separated from the means of its production. A violence was normalized in the guise of academic excellence, with no recourse. This, to me, is a salient and enduring feature of imperial knowledge production, which Black and Indigenous scholars have repeatedly called out. While some scholars have argued that anthropology has long emerged from its colonial heritage, extractivist ethnographic practices continue to permeate the discipline. Some have cautioned against criticizing the discipline altogether lest the critique be weaponized in the neoliberal university’s ongoing assault on the social sciences and humanities. But surely the stakes are much higher than our own self-preservation?
Deborah Cowen asks: “Discipline gets a bad rap. But can we make it a love song?”31 On this question, I am ambivalent—as someone drawn to the many openings anthropology provides but also simultaneously disconcerted by its ready absorption into regimes of imperial knowledge production, where ethics can be intellectualized to the point of no accountability. I do not fault those who are trying; in fact, I almost admire them, given the enormous challenge at hand. Sometimes I try too. Other times I am just too exhausted. Sara Ahmed reminds us that the institution’s walls appear only for those trying to transform the institution or who do not quite inhabit its norms.32 For all others, there is the illusion of freedom (and rest).
Refusing disciplines is power and humility. The power and humility to put pressure on the concepts and categories through which we render the world legible. The power and humility to mix genres, styles, and theories unapologetically. The power and humility to work toward the decomposition of knowledge boundaries, making room for intellectual formations and ethical practices that center community, decolonization, and self-determination at the heart of knowledge production. The power and humility to imagine a relation to knowledge that is not that of extraction or theft. The power and humility to be in “rebellious transformation in how we conduct research, whom we cite as experts, and how our thinking is framed and ultimately takes place.”33 Sylvia Wynter encourages us to dream of a world and ethics beyond disciplinary dedication: “Think of the dazzling creativity of the alternative challenge that would be opened up!”34
Locating the “Undercommons”
Sarah Ihmoud and Shanya Cordis ask, “What keeps us tethered to each other, both as human and more-than-human life and as an ethical community of scholars?”35 In an essay on building alliances between Native and queer studies, Qwo-Li Driskill reminds us of the importance of remaining accountable and accessible to those outside the academy.36 My engagements in and relationships from Kashmir have led me into the world of activism. This has been an enormous privilege, and my intention is not to deepen the separation between activists and scholars but rather to suggest that “the work” that Audre Lorde prompted us to do can take such varied forms.
I have noted a disjuncture between academic time and activist time. Academic time is technocratic and “official,” stagnant and slow; things take months and years to move. For those writing petitions, drafting reports, contacting legislators, holding teach-ins, putting together public-facing debates and dialogues, organizing protests, time feels different. It is rapid; action is swifter. With fast time comes fast work. There are emails to write, signatures to collect, meetings to attend. In fact, I often cannot keep up with these demands. I skip meetings, do not volunteer for the many required tasks, and do not respond in a timely manner to an avalanche of emails from my colleagues who are trying to get things done. It feels there is never enough time.
There is friction. Those who are more centrally situated in the university sometimes dismiss “activist tasks” for being too unintellectual or tedious, hoping “someone else” will take them on. Of course, there is never a “someone else,” and the work just falls through the cracks. At the same time, it is challenging to keep up with the passion, dedication, and energy that some of my colleagues bring to the work. The stakes are much higher for them. They and their close relations directly bear the brunt of the occupation in Kashmir; their bodies are in the line of fire. Sometimes what they bring to the work looks different than the skills of writing, research, and argumentation. But they bring grit, intuition, and lived experience that outmatch and outperform the savviest of writers or thinkers. A collaborator who is far removed from the academy noted that academics are selfish, concerned only about self-credentialing to enhance their CVs. There is some truth in this observation.
For the most part, I have been unable to reconcile this duality—not knowing where to step in or where to stop. Somewhere? Everywhere? Nowhere? Elsewhere? Stefano Harney and Fred Moten suggest that the answers we seek are unlikely to emerge from the institution. Drawing from Black radical tradition, they present the “undercommons,”37 a zone that “exists in the present.”38 They describe it as a “space and time which is always here,” yet it exceeds us.39 It is a “wild place that continuously produces its own unregulated wildness”40—a “wild beyond to the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us.”41
Where is the undercommons for doing “the work” on Kashmir? Perhaps it is the perilous and hotly contested bridge between academic and activist intervention. Perhaps it is not location, but just the work and effort itself, the outcome of which is secondary or not imminent and from which an uncertain practice emerges. Perhaps it is the certainty of the uncertainty of not having answers. This, to me, is also a form of accountability and being in relation.
“What Is Your Theory of Change These Days?”
In my time within the institution, I have come across people who believe that doing and speaking the right thing will lead to something better. If one’s life story has led some to believe this tale sincerely, I think that has been a privilege. I am slightly envious; my own story so far has been that of pushback and derailment. This has forced me to think more carefully about who is given the podium, the terms of agreement that govern their presence, and the unremarkable safety of the routes to change they wish on the world.
Eve Tuck contends that “the default theory of change in settler colonial racial capitalism is that if we document the damage, get enough people to pay attention to it, then together our voices will convince so and so (who is in charge) to give up power and resources.”42 Such a theory of change, she argues, compels us to “over-invest in spectacle and empathy as an emotion that leads to change, in the innocence of the powerful, in the rationality of the powerful, and in their power to wield their power over us”—without actually disturbing the centers of power.43
Tuck asks: “What is your theory of change these days?”44 Giving us encouragement, first, to have a theory of change and, second, to allow it to waver. “Let this be the way we know and love one another.”45