| Summary: |
Pir Muhammad Karwan’s 2000 poetry collection Da Xāperey Werghowey traces a history of materiality, emotion, and imagination across human-environmental systems as they are militarized over twenty years in Afghanistan. At the same as it is a unique narration of the wars, this project is a cosmopolitical one. In dialog with other essays in this issue that point to the life of the immaterial in present-day traditions, I show how Kārwān’s bottom-up psycho-history draws on Persianate-classical, Pashto-popular, and embodied knowledges to critique both imperial and Islamist modernity on ontological grounds. It aims to undermine the borders of self and other that geopolitical violence embeds everywhere: barriers between human and other beings, humans and other humans, imagination and material. |
