Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies

Introduction: Critical Kashmir Studies: Settler Occupations and the Persistence of Resistance

Section IV: Religion, History, Politics　　　　　

Biography

Mona Bhan is Ford Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Syracuse University, USA. She has authored Counterinsurgency, Development, and the Politics of Identity: From Warfare to Welfare? (Routledge, 2014); co-authored Climate Without Nature: A Critical Anthropology of the Anthropocene (with A. Bauer, 2018); and co-edited Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (with H. Duschinski, A. Zia, and C. Mahmood, 2018). Bhan is on the editorial board of Cultural Anthropology, Critical Disaster Studies and AGITATE. Her writings and interviews have appeared in various forums, including the BBC, Al Jazeera, Scholars Circle, CGTN, Indus TV, TRT, and Open Democracy.

Haley Duschinski is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Ohio University, USA. She is a legal and political anthropologist with research specializations in law and society; violence, war, and power; human rights and international justice; and militarization and impunity. She co-edited Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (with M. Bhan, A. Zia, and C. Mahmood, 2018) as well as special issues of Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law (2018), Critique of Anthropology (2020), and Himalaya (2020). She has published her research in Social & Legal Studies, Political & Legal Anthropology Review, Cultural Studies, Race & Class, Memory Studies, Anthropology Today, Interventions, and Anthropological Quarterly, among others.

Deepti Misri is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. She is the author of Beyond Partition: Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India (2014) and the co-editor of a special issue on  “Protest” in WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly (2018). Her recent scholarship has focused on visual culture, gender, disability, and militarization in Kashmir and appeared in the journals Cultural Studies, Feminist Studies, Biography, and Public Culture.

"This crucial, timely volume not only explicates the political situation of Kashmir; it offers a paradigm-shifting example of place as relational praxis. From the critique of area studies and state-centric analytics to the attention to the ethics of knowledge production, the editors and contributors make a trenchant case for why Kashmir both illuminates and connects with numerous other liberation movements around the world. As such, The Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies is a brilliant envisioning of scholarship as solidarity that draws together and transforms indigenous, decolonial, intersectional and transnational thought."

- Jasbir K. Puar, Professor and Graduate Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University; author of 'Terrorist Assemblages' and 'The Right to Maim.'

"This pathbreaking interdisciplinary volume – grounded in feminist principles that are at once anti-colonial, anti-occupation, and anti-caste – brilliantly speaks to the urgency of self-determination for Kashmir. Challenging statist and area studies frameworks that typically privilege international relations and security studies, this rich collection features crucial epistemological interventions that enable the decolonial knowledge production necessary for political liberation – the best in Critical Kashmir Studies."

- J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Professor of American Studies and an affiliate faculty member in Anthropology at Wesleyan University; author of 'Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism.'

"This handbook is a vital intellectual contribution to Kashmir studies. It provides essential space for the radical thinking, the Kashmiri voices, the feminist approaches, the anti-colonial critiques that have been decisively breaking apart dominant assumptions in mainstream scholarship on Kashmir. It will prompt us to think fundamentally differently about Kashmir, as well as more broadly about colonial occupation, about technologies of repression, about land, place, transnational solidarities, resistance, and more. And at a time when reactionary Hindu nationalism continues to take on more fascistic and Islamophobic forms, this handbook is also a crucial political contribution to knowledge and knowledge production.'

- John Reynolds, Associate Professor, National University of Ireland, Maynooth; author of 'Empire, Emergency and International Law.'