Politics and Poetics of Survival: Environmental Crisis and Hydrosocial Assemblage in Pakistan
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Keywords: Environmental Crisis, Hydrosocial Assemblage, Survival, Punjab, Pastoral Futures
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
Abdul Aijaz, Indiana University Bloomington
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Abstract
In the prevalent scientific discourses and popular literary imagination, climate change is framed as a coming crisis that needs human attention to avoid a planetary catastrophe. The implications of the temporal distance from the crisis implicit in this framing are very significant. It gives us time to think, plan and prepare the right response to a crisis that is shaping up but still could be averted. The literary portrayals of this “coming crisis” have led to an increase in the narratives of deluge and dystopian futures. Scholars have emphasized the need to think about and portray slowly unfolding climate catastrophes in ways that do not sound distant and dystopian. In this essay, I ask and respond to a rhetorical question, what if the climate change has already happened and we no more have the privilege to crunch our data and plot a predictable future? My response to this question is based on my ethnographic and archival research on a pastoral-nomadic Baloch tribe of camel herders in the canal colonies of Punjab and my reading of recent eco-fiction in Urdu literature. I argue that a) the narratives of climate change and the worlds imagined, threatened, and preserved in and through them are Eurocentric and partial, b) the material and aesthetic responses to a rapidly transforming world in the zones of ecoscarcity could pluralize the global imaginaries of climate change and the worlds that survive despite the environmental crises.
Politics and Poetics of Survival: Environmental Crisis and Hydrosocial Assemblage in Pakistan
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Paper Abstract