Q&A Ghani Schäfer (original) (raw)

Contested Frames. Short Histories of Afghan Films

Forum/Forum Expanded, Berlinale , 2019

Filmmaker Siddiq Barmak described the short and varied history of Afghan cinema as one in which “each historical and political change engendered its own speci c lms.”1 He was referring to the nu- merous political changes in his country and the censorship these brought with them, forcing lm- makers to work around the limitations ...

War in Afghanistan: Europe and America, between Films and Documentaries. 1979-2014

Asian Culture and History, 2017

This research looks at the Afghanistan War from the Soviet invasion of 1979 until the withdrawal of North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 2014 through films chosen. This research demonstrates how the Soviets, supported by the USA and the Muslim world, operated on misconceptions during an insurrectional conflict against the Mujahedin. After September 11, the Bush-Cheney administration invaded Afghanistan, restricting the informative role of the corporate media system. According to Kellner, this action triggered a creative revolution in American cinema. Turning to the production of documentaries, directors abandoned large-scale productions, preferring highly dramatically charged narratives of real soldiers and real action. The Afghan war, a fragmented, relentless, and unremitting struggle, is portrayed in 9th Company (Rus), Restrepo (USA). And Armadillo (Denmark); and Kajaki (UK), films that narrates the conflict from the NATO perspective, can not be won.

The Cinema in Afghanistan / Afghanistan in the Cinema: A Review Article

New Cinemas, 2013

The intervention in Afghanistan by US-led coalition forces has now become the longest in Afghanistan's history, exceeding even the Soviet Union's occupation of the country from 1979-1989. While much journalistic and academic ink has been spilt in attempts to untangle the complex social and political dimensions of the country, its cultural production and institutions remain relatively little studied or understood.

[PhD Thesis] Afghan theatres since 9/11: from and beyond Kabul

The two most visible representations of Afghanistan are arguably Steve McCurry’s ‘Afghan Girl’ on the cover of National Geographic (June 1985) and Khaled Hosseini’s award-wining novel 'The Kite Runner' (2004). These two products laid the basic premise that images and ideas about Afghanistan have been circulated and commodified worldwide, especially qualities of the exotic, oppressed, and weak. Since print photography and literary works belong to the culture industry, this research seeks to enquire if performing arts, more specifically theatre, projected Afghanistan in similar ways. More precisely, this research asks how Afghan cultures and identities have been represented in the post-9/11 period. Borrowing the circuit of culture model (1997) from Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, this research then examines ten specific theatre performances within Afghanistan and outside Afghanistan in a spatio-temporal framework illustrating dynamic tensions from, and beyond, Kabul. Case studies from Kabul illustrate that Afghan cultures can be owned and regulated by competing stakeholders, including the Taliban, within its geopolitical boundaries. Case studies from/beyond Kabul show the export of Afghan cultures and performances outside Afghanistan, underscoring tropes of impoverishment and suffering while inviting or inciting international interventions and conciliations. Case studies beyond Kabul tend to imagine ‘Afghanistan’ by offering an ambivalent, and sometimes, contradictory response to the war on terror. This thesis argues that projective closure – the act of filling in absences and gaps to make sense of an Afghan narrative – often circulates and entrenches Afghans in victimhood tropes. Because there are constant fluctuations and contestations at what ‘Afghanistan’ was, is, and should be, Afghanistan as an imagined entity – or a global cultural commodity – becomes more evident. Derek Gregory was right to observe in 'The Colonial Present' (2004) that Afghanistan has been an object of international geopolitical manoeuvrings since the nineteenth century, and, as this thesis will show, even early twenty-first century. But the claw of the “colonial present” does not stem from hostilities enacted by imperial power, but a series of intimate engagements with non-government organisations, government agencies, embassies, foreign theatre directors, and even global audiences who uncritically celebrate narratives of Afghan heroism. This is further complicated by the readiness of local Afghan practitioners to consume and project themselves as victims of war who are in ‘need’ of foreign help. As such, the value that is being demanded and supplied in the global culture industry is still victimhood. Afghan cultures and identities are deeply embedded in contexts – situational, cultural, global – and unless these contexts are collocated and layered upon each other to add nuance to interrogate cultural practices, cultural workers and theatre practitioners continue to run the risks of reproducing conflicts, even if they are beyond the geographical space of Kabul – because the locations of the ‘local’ and ‘global’ are becoming increasingly intertwined.

Imagining Afghanistan: Global Fiction and Film of the 9/11 Wars

2019

I am deeply grateful to family members, friends, and colleagues for their ongoing support during the entire time I have been working on this project. The cover image shows graffiti painted inside the ruins of the Russian Cultural Center by an Afghan artist named Shamsia Hassani. The words on the ravaged brick read, "The water will come back to the dried river, but what about the dead fish." The photo was taken in 2011 by photographer David Gill (shot2bits.com). Having been based in Kabul for seven years, Gill was the force behind many art and multimedia projects, including social documentary films Kabul at Work and Afghanistan at Work. My many thanks to these two for allowing me to use this image. My home institution, Hobart and William Smith Colleges provided funding for trips to the archives and travel funds to disseminate my work at professional conferences. Students in my courses "Representing the 9/11 Wars" and "Imagining the Middle East" helped me grapple with many of the intellectual questions this book addresses. I am especially thankful to the Fisher Center for the Study of Gender and Justice at Hobart and William Smith Colleges that awarded me two fellowships, in 2015-16 and 2017-18. Conversations with other Fisher Center fellows, among them

Review of "Imagining Afghanistan: Global Fiction and Film of the 9/11 Wars"

Iranian Studies, 2022

Imagining Afghanistan: Global Fiction and Film of the 9/11 Wars analyzes the written and visual forms of cultural production that take Afghanistan as their object after the US-led intervention in 2001. Alla Ivanchikova describes Afghanistan, having been cast onto the world stage in the 2000s as a "bright object," in line with the work of the object-oriented philosopher Levi R. Bryant. By contrast, Ivanchikova writes, Afghanistan was a "dim object" from 1989 to 2001, when it did not receive the attention of the international community after the Soviet withdrawal. By "dim object," the author refers to the idea that Afghanistan "emitted no light, attracted no attention, and the eyes of the world were not on it" (1). Ivanchikova's case studies involve fiction and nonfiction cultural production produced during the post-9/11 period, most of which was created for an Anglophone global audience to satisfy a high demand for knowledge about Afghanistan. Ivanchikova maintains that these two decades saw a proliferation of cultural texts that made Afghanistan visible to a global audience, which required a reckoning with its recent past and a discussion of humanitarianism, Afghan women, and transnational terrorism. Imagining Afghanistan attempts to uncover the place of Afghanistan in the global imaginary. The book gathers around six thematically organized chapters to illustrate three waves of cultural production. The first wave, around the start of the millennium, centered around the humanitarian crises in Afghanistan, which, as Ivanchikova contends, highlighted Soviet barbarity and relied on British colonial imagery. The second wave of cultural production, toward the end of the same decade, moved beyond these representations and offered more nuanced and multidimensional representations of Afghanistan. The third wave, encompassing the second decade of the US-led intervention in Afghanistan in the 2010s, consists of cultural production that moved beyond clichés about the country and its people as timeless, backward, and in a state of isolation. Instead, it made visible its "transnational history and transcontinental connections" (4). Ivanchikova starts the first chapter by discussing Kandahar (dir. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 2001), Homebody/Kabul (dir. Tony Kushner, 2002), and the French novel The Swallows of Kabul (Les Hirondelles de Kaboul; written by Yasmina Khadra, 2002; translated from the French by John Cullen, 2004). All were produced prior to 9/11 but were propelled into global attention to fill the void in knowledge of Afghanistan at the onset of Operation Enduring Freedom. Although they are selectively silent about Afghanistan's socialist past, Ivanchikova argues, these three cultural texts show Afghanistan as an object of distant and long-lasting humanitarian crisis-with its people, especially women, in need of saving. These texts became part of a moral assemblage framing the United States' military operation in Afghanistan as a humanitarian endeavor. Ivanchikova extends the critique of anti-Soviet sentiment in post-2001 cultural texts in the second and third chapters of her book. In the second chapter, Ivanchikova extensively