If we leave aside the imperial histories of those powers for which Afghanistan has been a strategic concern, Afghan historiography has tended to follow a single trajectory: the history of the Pashtuns and their principal royal clan, the Durrani. The non-Pashtun part of the human ecology of the country tends to be summed up as “other groups,” as if that 60 percent of the population only has a history in relation to the royal clan and its state. As the other essays in this roundtable argue, there are many ways to approach Afghanistan's history more inclusively than through Kabul-centric, Pashtun-dominated, top-down narratives or those that focus on the strategic concerns of superpowers. Nile Green sees a half-century gap in the historiography, between the nation-building of the 1920s and the nation-demolishing of the 1990s and beyond, and proposes the study of “subnational and transnational groups” as one way to refine our understanding of the politics of the country during that middle era. James Caron traces an imagined bond with place reflected in rural oral imagery, while Amin Tarzi approaches Afghan historiography itself as a productive field of study. Other areas hardly touched in the existing scholarship are institutional histories (judicial, educational, and fiscal), for which there is a wealth of untapped documentation; the built environment (following the seminal works of Szabo and Barfield on domestic and rural architecture and Schinasi on urban architecture); labor history (including the interconnections of work specializations and industry with ethnic groups); and the history of human bondage in the country.

Over the last decade an approach to 19th-century visual culture that focuses on cross-cultural contact and exchange has begun to supplement an earlier model of Orientalist critique focused primarily on the iconographic analysis of European Orientalist tropes and stereotypes. In this essay I engage with these discussions by analyzing what I will call networked objects. Tracking the mobility of art works and artifacts across cultural boundaries and their differing signification in varying sites of reception impels a nuanced understanding of how visual culture has been implicated in these networks of power. Influenced by anthropological debates, my approach focuses on the circulation of images and objects across cultures and within the region, exploring their function at divergent sites. Social networks of artists and patrons facilitated the transplantation of ideas and images, but the meanings of networked objects morphed independently of authorship according to their displacement to new geographic locations. Networked objects were also entangled within patterns of misinterpretation, blockage, and rupture as visual forms were created, reshaped, or productively misinterpreted in the environments into which they were transplanted, thus provoking challenges from the peripheries and divergent forms of indigenous agency.

An important issue in considering violence at both the conceptual and empirical levels is the question of what counts as “violence” and how it is acknowledged. In many polities of the Middle East, including Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan, there is no clear boundary between war and peace. Conflicts have lasted over a long period and even the project of securing a future in which the struggle for decolonization and political autonomy can be kept alive faces enormous hurdles as everyday life is corroded by betrayals, accusations, and the sheer exhaustion of keeping political energies from waning. Most acute observers of prolonged conflicts recognize the corrosive effects of these conflicts on everyday life. In this brief thought piece, I want to reflect on one aspect of the problem: that of the relation between sexual violence as an aspect of dramatic and spectacular violence—in wars (including modern ones), pogroms against ethnic or religious minorities, or episodes of lethal riots between sectarian groups—and everyday forms of sexual violence that could be both part of the public domain and constitutive of domestic intimacy. Said otherwise, I am interested in how experience of violence travels from one threshold of life to another.

One can ignore neither the role of diasporas nor colonial and imperial discourses of modernity in the construction of normative sexual identities and practices in the Middle East, whether in the past or the present. This is not to dismiss “local” forms of regulation, disciplining, and normalization of queers, but to point to the way that “local” state and nonstate norms of sexuality are not detached from “global” trends and transnational relationships of power. My own work on gender and sexuality within Iranian diasporic contexts engages with scholarship that postulates sexuality as a form of transnational governmentality and with analyses of homonationalism and necropolitics. I examine the representational economy of queer deaths during the “war on terror” and suggest that the Iranian transgender refugee, who has become a highly representable subject as a victim of Iranian transphobia in the civilizational discourses of the “war on terror,” dies an unspeakable death if her death disrupts the promise of freedom after flight.

In narrating Afghanistan's 21st century, future historians might bracket the first decade with the two Bonn conferences of 2001 and 2011: great-power delegates and handpicked elite Afghans meeting to plot Afghanistan's transitional place in the international system. In contrast, Afghan popular and intellectual cultures alike have often voiced alternate histories. For example, Malang Kohistani, a contemporary working-class singer of Kabul's hinterland, sees top-down Afghan integrations into globality not as a fundamentally new construction of institutions that promise prosperity for a nation-state and its people but rather as one more intrusive disruption—in a chain of similar events beginning over 2,000 years ago with Alexander—in everyday people's continuous, bottom-up efforts to ensure their livelihoods, in part through developing horizontally organized trade networks. And indeed it is not only post-2001 statist intervention that has attracted such popular responses, but this is also a longstanding critique among both urban and rural Afghan intellectuals. In some ways Malang Kohistani echoes Malang Jan, the renowned 1950s sharecropper-poet of Jalalabad, as well as various more elite authors.

In his final lecture, Freud and the Non-European, Edward Said drew our attention to a fundamental contribution of psychoanalysis to political life. Through a reading of Moses and Monotheism, Said showed how Freud's “unresolved sense of identity” is revealed by his desire that Moses be Egyptian. When Said finds Freud haunted by the trace of Egypt at the origin of Jewish identity, he locates a spectral effect of alterity in a text purporting to expose a norm of identity; instead of establishing the grounds of that norm, Said's Freud symptomatically exposes a desire to be other. This in turn inspires Said's hope that textual moments like this can become sites of affinity and relation that undo the certainties of enmity.

Violence is a word seemingly meant for theorizing, being as abstract and thus as capacious as any category can be. And indeed the history of its use has only confirmed the all-encompassing character of violence, which can now name almost any kind of action or affect: physical, psychological, and even ideological. And yet this term is also deployed to name the most distinctive and visceral forms of cruelty and suffering, such that it is difficult to treat it merely as another abstract category. Shifting uncomfortably between the particularity of pain and the generality of an intellectual category, violence has until recently been ill served by scholarship. The necessities of justice, for example, have meant that violence is rarely the subject of law in its own right, but used only as a euphemism for some degree of murder or charge of battery. And since historians are especially seduced by legal terminology, perhaps because they have traditionally described and justified power, their efforts to mimic the law by finding some party responsible for something have tended not to deal productively with violence.

Because the ideological landscape of the present does not match the ideological configurations of the past, the past and present of national monuments often collide in ways that complicate their utility as “patrimony” and “heritage.” In Spain, Islamic monuments such as the Alhambra Palace (built in Granada by Nasrid monarchs in the 13th and 14th centuries) exist in the present as popular tourism sites and points of entry for an imaginative encounter with the Iberian peninsula's Andalusi past. The past evoked is a recognized part of Iberian history and yet, as patrimony, it is simultaneously admired as something that distinguishes Spain from the rest of Europe and resisted as something belonging to an exiled people who left long ago for places like Fez and Istanbul. Under Franco's dictatorship (1947–73), Spain was adamantly Catholic and, despite a small wave of conversions to Islam and the recent immigration of Muslims from northern Africa, it remains predominantly Christian.

Students of Afghan history come up against two sets of academic demarcations and appropriations. First, as Nile Green points out in his introduction to this roundtable, Afghanistan as a field of study tends to fall off the edge of the scholarly traditions associated with the regional denominations of the Middle East, South Asia, and Central Asia. Second, the tendency to view history through the lens of present-day national entities presents an impediment to historical inquiry and not only in Afghanistan. The attempt to streamline the past to fit a consistent narrative of state-building may serve to foster a national identity, yet it is of little use in gaining a deeper understanding of the political, social, and economic processes at work in a given period.

The dislocations associated with modernity have driven scholarly, literary, and philosophical inquiries in various directions since the 19th century: Marx's materialist critique, Ranke's historical empiricism, Baudelaire's flâneur, Simmel's studies of urban anomie and alienation, Durkheim and Weber's sociology, and so on into the 20th and 21st centuries, and now reflected in this issue of IJMES on queer studies. Although there are vast differences among them, they share a compulsion to explain what appeared as massive reconfigurations of time and space. The proliferation of subjective possibilities was pegged to an acceleration of the former and compression of the latter; accordingly, on our radar appear the bourgeois, middle class, and worker in the long 19th century and gay, lesbian, and transgender in the late 20th, two moments of rapid globalization and subject proliferation. We are to believe that in the fullness of time all will be free and all will be good. However, in the here and now some must be unfree and some bad. The modern distinction between free and unfree, good and bad, subjects relies heavily on uninterrogated assumptions about the spatial origins, temporality, and trajectory of modernity.

In a recently discovered photograph of German architect Bruno Taut's retrospective exhibition at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts, which opened on 4 June 1938, Taut in-exile stands with Erica Taut and his assistant Şinasi Lugal in front of a display (see Figure 1). What interests me in this image is not so much the frontal figures who posed for it as the documentary value of the exhibit in the background, the photographs inside the photograph. These images display Taut's Siedlungen (residential settlements/collective housing projects), designed and constructed as part of the Berlin Housing Program (1924–33) just before Taut was exiled from Germany due to the rise of National Socialism. After stays in Russia and Japan, Taut moved to Turkey, where he became head of the Architecture Department at the Istanbul Academy. Through a seminar and a studio he taught on Siedlung, he participated in a translation of the idea of collective housing that would shape the discursive space and practice of architecture in Turkey for decades to come. Most of the images in the exhibition were taken by the now-famous photographer Arthur Köster. The exhibit bears witness to the fact that Turkish architects were exposed not only to the influential Siedlungen of the Weimar period in Germany but also to their soon-to-be canonical photographs earlier than most of their colleagues around the world.

The first image that the question of violence in the Middle East conjures up, especially in the West, is that of the suicide bomber. This association, etched into the political imaginary particularly over the course of the last two decades, is due neither to the number of victims suicide bombing creates (more conventional weapons of war can claim as many or more victims), nor to the identity of its victims (conventional weapons are also often directed at civilians). Rather, the potency of the image of the suicide bomber is connected to the simultaneously self-destructive and other-directed form that this act of violence takes. If the Orientalist impulse that has raised the image of the suicide bomber to iconic status is deeply problematic, it nonetheless constitutes an involuted acknowledgement of a reality: the significant rise in self-destructive violence (and not just in the Middle East). I have in mind practices such as hunger striking, self-immolation, and fatal self-mutilation, which constitute an emergent repertoire of struggle that has come to mark a certain current of radical politics around the globe. Those modalities of self-destructive violence that are not directed at others are overshadowed by suicide bombing.

Critical citizenship studies have argued that researchers should not take the myth of the universal unmarked citizen to heart, but rather focus on the distance between the ideal of citizenship and its everyday embodied practices and on what the citizen and the state do rather than on the state's narration of itself. As Partha Chatterjee writes in his critique of Benedict Anderson, to endorse “unbound serialities” such as the universal and anonymous citizen is to imagine that nationalism and state practices can function without governmentality. In fact, the state's job is to organize and regulate the shared life of its structurally and practically unequal citizens and residents. Normative political theory of citizenship elides the ways that governmentality and biopower produce each citizen (as well as groups of citizens) as a particular derivation from the norm. It is with each iteration of these technologies that the state comes into view as a bounded entity.

Increased access to archival and other textual sources and the situating of “Afghan” history within wider theoretical, comparative, and interdisciplinary thinking have opened Afghanistan-related studies to new fields of research and analysis. This offers new opportunities to reimagine and move beyond established historical narratives and preoccupations. At a point when English-language archives have been comprehensively mined for the political histories of Afghan dynasties, intruding Western empires, and the dynamics of modernity and state-building, non-English-language primary-source material has become increasingly available, including in translation and in online digital archival formats. The recent English translation by M. Mehdi Khorrami and Robert D. McChesney of volume three of The History of Afghanistan by the Afghan Hazara historian Fayz Muhammad Katib (c. 1863–1931) offers new material with which to reconsider not only elite political careers but also ethnic identity and competition, the sociology of provincial political networks, and the creation of governing rules codified by ʿAbd al-Rahman and Habibullah.

As a student of politics whose primary research interest is in women's political participation in Turkey, my engagement with the study of violence is through the lens of gender. In gender studies, “violence” is arguably the most important critical concept for the articulation of the personal as the political. Women's recognition that violence in their personal lives and intimate relationships needed to be problematized in the political realm and transformed through public debate was a revolutionary development. Bringing this recognition into the canon of political thought has been a major contribution of feminist theorists.

The Western academy's growing interest in the contemporary arts in the Arab world illustrates the desire to map “Islam”—problematic as this term is—within the global history of cultures and to integrate it into “Western” models of the writing and documenting of the past. As positive and corrective as these academic approaches may seem, the notion of recording time—that is, writing history—is still firmly bound at the beginning of the 21st century to the idea of continuity, and the pattern of “Western”-centric thinking imposes that notion upon contemporary artists and art historians. Yet the political changes and spontaneous eruptions that the Middle East and North Africa are experiencing, especially since the beginning of 2011, defy and resist conventional interpretations of historical processes and therefore demand a rethinking of the configuration of the past.

Appearing on the back pages of the Cairo daily newspaper al-Muʾayyad in September 1891 and December 1889, respectively, these brief reports, juxtaposed, encapsulate some central arguments of the books under review. They exemplify everyday resort to state apparatuses for individual or collective ends, and invoke consumption practices viewed as inimical to national health and reputation at a time when the new nationalist press was beginning to voice senses of collective pride, political unease, and anticolonial antagonism. They entail perceptions of transgressed boundaries, wayward actions, or gender-inappropriate behaviors impervious to commonly recognized moral and political authority. They illustrate blurrings of “public” and “private” actions and spaces, whether in the name of public good or for ill, that might have threatened Egyptians’ felt values of moral propriety—the disciplining pull of “respectability”—in urban Egyptian society at that time. And the reportage, publication, and circulation of such stories illustrate (and make) an emerging “public sphere” of narrative, commentary, and reader consumption, simultaneously constructing and interrogating an emerging nationalist master-narrative that placed gender-marked acts and sexual practices, transgressive or not, at the center of national/ist efficacy and perceived threats to it.

On 2 November 2010, the voters of Oklahoma passed the so-called “Save Our State Amendment.” This amendment to Oklahoma's constitution prohibited Oklahoma courts from “look[ing] to the legal precepts of other nations or cultures. Specifically,” it asserted, “the courts shall not consider international law or Sharia Law.” This legislative moment in middle America passed quickly. Commentators both inside and outside the United States responded to the amendment with bewilderment—and in 2012, a federal appeals court ruled the amendment unconstitutional. “Save Our State” died before it could have any far-reaching effect.

The Venetian nobleman Ambrosio Bembo (1652–1705) included this panorama of Aleppo by the French artist G.J. Grélot (see Figure 1), as one of the fifty-one carefully observed line drawings of cities, buildings, and people integral to his travelogue, proudly entitled Travels and Journal through Part of Asia during about Four Years Undertaken by Me, Ambrosio Bembo, Venetian Noble. During his visits to Aleppo between 1672 and 1675, Bembo may have crossed paths with the great Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi (1611–82?), who included his own description of that commercial capital of the eastern Mediterranean in his monumental Seyahatname (Book of Travels). Evliya's book does not include a single illustration. This divergence is emblematic of the distinct ways in which early modern societies (in this case, Middle Eastern and European) visualized cities and architecture, and highlights a major challenge to writing the architectural and urban history of the Middle East before the 19th century: the almost complete absence of images that represent architecture.

Studies of violence relating to the Middle East have sometimes done more harm than they have explained. Like the intended effects of the U.S. military's doctrine of “rapid dominance,” compared by its proponents to “tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes . . . famine and disease,” violence in the Middle East would appear to be “incomprehensible,” though less to “the people at large” who are affected by it than to its prolific theoreticians. Over the past two decades, much of the literature on the region as a “cauldron of war”—generating five times its share (by population size) of total global conflict since the mid-20th century—has tended to update and propagate well-known mythologies of primitivism, authoritarian personalities, and ancient hatreds. The significance of such mythopoeia has been its capacity to realize, at least in part, the conditions of its own truthfulness by shaping perception and policy, framing and enabling the infliction of a new wave of warfare on the region. Much contemporary writing on post–Cold War global crisis, the geopolitics of instability, regional conflict, and the future of warfare has not only signally failed to understand the dynamics of the Middle East but has actively contributed to the spread of violence in the region.