Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir

Atmospheric Violence explores the afterlife of environmental disasters and armed conflict, examining how people attempt to flourish despite and alongside continuing violence. It offers a decolonial approach to disaster studies centering on repair and the social labor of communities living with disaster.

Format: Hardback
Length: 296 pages
Publication date: 04 June 2024
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Atmospheric Violence delves into the aftermath of environmental disasters and armed conflicts, exploring how individuals strive to thrive amidst ongoing violence. It departs from traditional approaches to disaster and conflict studies, which have primarily focused on Kashmir. Instead, Omer Aijazi's ethnography of life in the borderlands presents a unique perspective, envisioning life differently in an environment permeated by violence. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the portion of Kashmir under Pakistan's control and its surrounding mountainous regions, the book takes us to two remote valleys shaped by recurring environmental disasters and the landscape of no-go zones, army barracks, and security checkpoints along 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 boundaries 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. Aijazi's approach brings together critical disaster studies, radical humanist anthropology, and the expansive realm of affect theory, while also being accountable to Black studies and Indigenous studies. It offers a decolonial approach to disaster studies, focusing not on trauma and rupture but rather on repair—the social labor that is necessary to heal and rebuild.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781512823615