Karachi in/and Sindh: Articulations, Disarticulations, and the Eternal Reciprocity of Tears

Keywords: Karachi, Pakistan, Urban Question, Articulation, Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper mobilises a Gramscian sensitivity – stretched through Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall – to historical-geographical specificity, popular articulations, and (sub-)national groundings for addressing recharged urban and national questions in Pakistan. The separations and linkages between Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city, and wider Sindh province animate intense debate and divisions. Indeed, in the crucial decade of the 1980s (and beyond), these faultlines fed into articulations of “ethnicity” concretised through (intensely violent) partitions of space, practice, and consciousness. Today, politics and society in Karachi (and Pakistan) have moved to a new conjuncture marked by shifting patterns of accumulation, migration, dispossession, and crisis. Here, the travails of (post-)colonial economic and imaginary geographies continue to simultaneously affirm and efface socio-spatial faultlines and related co-constitutions of class and ethnicity. What are the articulations of meaning and practice generated by this recharged urban question in Karachi? How are networks and meanings of land, labour, loss, and ethnicity being mobilised in contemporary struggles of the damned and the dispossessed? What prospects may they hold for resolving our (post-)colonial “muck of all ages” i.e. the palimpsest of inherited and intensifying national and urban questions in Karachi, Sindh, and beyond? This paper tries to answer these questions in the spirit of Gramsci, Fanon, and Hall i.e. through thinking with and alongside ongoing struggles against dispossession and articulations of popular culture in Karachi and beyond.