New Directions in Decolonizing US empire: Perspectives from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

In this roundtable, authors of new works on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya will offer their critical perspectives on decolonizing the US empire in conversation with scholars of critical theory, media studies, and transnational feminism. The first new work discussed is Decolonizing Afghanistan: Countering Imperial Knowledge and Power (edited by Wazhmah Osman and Robert Crews, Duke University Press 2025). This groundbreaking collection of essays offers the first comprehensive study exploring the impact of empire on Afghanistan’s past and present, featuring new scholarship that traces how the diverse communities that make up Afghanistan and its diaspora have subverted, resisted, and participated in colonial projects from the early twentieth century to the present. Wazhmah Osman critically tracks the transmutations of the US interventions and “forever” War in Afghanistan, highlighting its simultaneous deployment of a vast development and nation-building infrastructure with its propensity for incredible violence. In conversation with Puerto Rican and other decolonial scholars, she shows how US imperialism has been reified in developmental projects and selective inclusion of some Afghans into its project with promises of a good life and upward mobility. In her ethnographic work Morwari Zafar examines how Afghan-Americans and "Afghan Culture" are operationalized and mobilized in US military training. The second new work discussed is a special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East titled Decolonizing Research/Politicizing Ethics (Duke University Press, 2024). This volume offers a reflection on the politics of ethics in relation to the “decolonizing” move in knowledge production on and in the Middle East. Zahra Ali takes research on Iraq as a framework to raise essential questions about politics and geopolitics of knowledge production and analyze the structural, infrastructural, and political dimensions that led to Iraq being researched and theorized outside of its borders, particularly by scholars from institutions based in and tied to an imperial power that has destroyed the very possibility of the existence of a robust academic life in Iraq. Ali Ahmida reflects on the problems of cover-up and the persistence of silence in the social sciences and proposes an alternative view on decolonizing the social sciences and historiography through a history of fascist genocide in Libya and Italy based on the agency and a narrative of the Libyans who survived the concentration camps between 1929 and 1934. Featuring perspectives that are ground-up and of heritage scholars with cultural fluency who are under-represented, over-surveillanced, sidelined, and under-cited in academia, the roundtable panelists will also reflect on the state the field and open up space, discursive and otherwise, to imagine new decolonial futures. As discussant, Manijeh Moradian, who researches transnational Iranian leftist movements and feminist anti-imperialism, will draw key lessons from these cutting edge scholarly contributions to de-centering the US within scholarly and activist challenges to US empire. Also, as discussant and as the author of the Coda to Decolonizing Afghanistan, Paula Chakravartty asks what lessons do the authors of these volumes offer in contending with the colonial racial present in Palestine.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Manijeh Moradian, Barnard College, Columbia University

Panelists

• Ali Ahmida, University of New England

• Zahra Ali, Rutgers University-Newark

• Wazhmah Osman, Temple University

• Morwari Zafar, Georgetown University

Comment

• Paula Chakravartty, New York University

Biographical Information

Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, University of New England, aahmida@une.edu, is a professor and founding chair of the Department of Political Science, College of Arts and Sciences, at the University of New England, USA. His speciality is political theory, comparative politics, and historical sociology. His scholarship focuses on power, agency, and anti-colonial resistance in North Africa, especially modern Libya.

Zahra Ali, Rutgers University, z.ali@rutgers.edu, is associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University-Newark and the founder of Critical Studies of Iraq, an initiative dedicated to centering the work of scholars, feminists, and activists in Iraq. Ali is the author of Women and Gender in Iraq, and co-editor of Decolonial Pluriversalism. Her forthcoming book Intifada/Uprising explores the October 2019 uprising in Iraq.

Paula Chakravartty, New York University, puc1@nyu.edu, is an Associate Professor at the Gallatin School and the Department of Media, Culture and Communications of New York University. Her research and teaching interests span comparative political economy of media industries, postcolonial and critical race theory, and social movements and global governance. She is the co-editor of Race, Empire and the Crisis of the Subprime (with Denise Ferreira da Silva, Johns Hopkins Press, 2013), the co-author of Media Policy and Globalization (with Katharine Sarikakis, University of Edinburgh Press and Palgrave, 2006), and co-editor of Global Communications: Towards a Transcultural Political Economy (with Yuezhi Zhao, Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). Her writings have been published in a number of journals, including American Quarterly, International Journal of Communication, Media Culture and Society and Political Communication. Her current two main research projects include: a book manuscript on the politics of digital inclusion in Brazil and India; and a second collaborative research project funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) on mediated activism in India, China and the Middle East.

Manijeh Moradian, Barnard College, mmoradia@barnard.edu, is assistant professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received her PhD in American Studies from NYU and her MFA in creative nonfiction from Hunter College, City University of New York. She is the former co-director of the Association of Iranian American Writers. Her research focuses on political cultures of the Iranian diaspora in the U.S., tracing generational shifts in transnational activism and cultural production across the historical arc of U.S.-Iran relations. Her methodological approach takes seriously memory, affect and emotion as an archive of marginalized knowledges, gendered histories and diasporic identity formations that can disrupt assimilation and produce alternatives to heteronormative model minority subjectivity. Her book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States (Duke University Press, 2022) won the 2024 Hamid Naficy Book Award for the best book in Iranian Diaspora Studies from the Association of Iranian Studies and the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies. The book also received an Honorable Mention for the 2023 Middle East Studies Association Nikki Keddie Book Award. She has published widely including in American Quarterly, Journal of Asian American Studies, Radical History Review, Scholar & Feminist online, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She is a founding member of the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective and a member of Feminists for Jina, a global network which formed in fall 2022 to support the women, life, freedom uprising in Iran.

Wazhmah Osman, Temple University, w.osman@temple.edu, is a filmmaker and Associate Professor in the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. Her research is rooted in feminist media ethnographies that focus on the political economy of global media industries and the regimes of representation and visual culture they produce. In her book Television and the Afghan Culture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists (University of Illinois Press, 2020), she analyzes the impact of international funding and cross-border media flows on the politics of Afghanistan, the region, and beyond. She is also the co-director of the 2007 documentary Postcards from Tora Bora and co-author of the forthcoming book Afghanistan: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press). Osman has appeared as a commentator on Democracy Now, NPR and Al Jazeera, among other news outlets.

Morwari Zafar, Georgetown University, morwari@gmail.com, is an applied anthropologist and the founder of The Sentient Group, a research, education, and training consulting firm. She has worked in both the international development and defense sectors, focusing on the use of cultural knowledge in U.S. security force trainings. Her research is concentrated on American militarism, which extends to U.S. foreign policy as well as domestic militias. Morwari is an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program.