Book Talk | Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir

The Moynihan Institute and the South Asia Center welcome Omer Aijazi from the University of Manchester, U.K. 

Atmospheric Violence explores how people in the militarized, ecologically fragile borderlands of Kashmir attempt to flourish in an environment where violence is everywhere, or atmospheric. Omer Aijazi takes us to remote mountainous valleys in the portion of Kashmir under Pakistan’s control, where life has been shaped by recurring environmental disasters and by the violence of the contested India/Pakistan border. 

Through a series of interconnected scenes, Aijazi explores what it means to theorize from the standpoint of those who do not subscribe to the rules by which most others have come to know the world. In conversation with a radical humanist anthropology and affect theory, held accountable to Black and Indigenous studies, Aijazi offers a decolonial approach to disaster studies centering not on trauma and rupture but rather on repair—the social labor of creating and maintaining viable life, even amidst constant diminishment and world-annihilation.

This event is generously co-sponsored by the Department of Geography and the Environment

Omer Aijazi is a critical disaster studies scholar and decolonial ethnographer of borderland South Asia. He teaches at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester.