Anila Daulatzai

The proposed workshop will bring scholars together working on imperialism, carcerality, permanent war and refugee regimes, Muslim lifeworlds, and global racial capitalism. The workshop aims to queer Black alongside Afghan lived experience, geographies and cosmologies. Broadly, the workshop aspires to build collective ways of thinking, writing and envisioning with scholars struggling to render lives, and the manifold places they inhabit, visible. As a scholar of Afghanistan who studies the serial subjectivation of Afghans to these racializing processes, I am compelled by the thought that centering Afghan lifeworlds will allow for more expansive ways to understand imperialism, carcerality, war, global racial capitalism, and global Blackness. This workshop is being proposed from a place of intellectual kinship, solidarity and commitment to being in conversation with scholars of racialization and carcerality, yet also grievance. My grievance is rooted in the long-standing erasure of Afghanistan and Afghans from discussions on imperialism, carcerality, global racial capitalism, and racialization. I center Afghans as a way to attend to Afghanistan as oversight. What may be enabled in our work when we place Afghans alongside Blackness? What, if anything, may be disabled when we do this?