Reading Afghanistan

Abstract

Contemporary representations of Afghanistan tend to follow meandering streams of earlier thought, specifically Victorian notions of the country and its people that emerged as the result of Britain’s nineteenth-century military encounters with the country; a strong Orientalist impulse; recourse to earlier travel writing, itself strongly imbued with outdated ethnographic study; as well as reliance on well-worn stereotypes and synedoches. The thesis examines how Afghanistan has been represented to the Western world since the 9/11 terrorist attacks brought renewed attention to the country, including how the voices of Afghan women, largely unheard due to prevailing cultural norms, have been appropriated as part of Western representations of the country. The thesis also gives attention to contemporary Afghan poetry (in translation) so as to present Afghan perspectives. Such exploration underscores how little new thought has been generated by the Western world about Afghanistan, thus reinforcing notions of the country’s fundamental alterity.