Zehra Husain

ZEHRA HUSAIN, then a graduate student at City University of New York Graduate Center, New York, New York, was awarded funding in October 2019 to aid research on “Race, Visibility, and Cosmopolitanism in a Pakistani Port Town,” supervised by Dr. Karen Strassler. This doctoral dissertation project studies the resonances of boxing, football, and rap music in Lyari Town, a working-class neighborhood located in Pakistan’s commercial port city Karachi. Based on six months of remote ethnographic fieldwork, it traces the circulation of iconographies of Blackness and global sports as they sediment in a port town on the Indian Ocean. Lyari has long been in the news for gang violence and urban strife, but is also noted for its talented boxers, footballers, and more recently rap musicians, some of whom are of Afro-Baluch descent. These “two faces” of Lyari Town informs its present-day marginalization and racialization. This project finds that people in Lyari take up and resonate with global sports and popular culture icons to rework their marginal status and racialization. It conceptualizes “iconic resonance” as the affective, aesthetic, and social processes of drawing similarities and resemblances between disparate contexts. Lyari’s youth, athletes, and artists fashion themselves as Pakistan’s local cosmopolitans, reimagining already existing cosmopolitanism in the Indian Ocean to incorporate iconographies of global Blackness.