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This Palgrave Pivot combines anthropological, biographical and autoethnographic perspectives onto imperial intimacies, the transgenerational transmission of colonial and familial trauma, and violence in two kinds of household: the Chinese family in British Hong Kong and wider imperial Asia, and the Anglo-Chinese family in England. Conjoining approaches from literary anthropology, the historiography of Anglo-Chinese relations, and perspectives on colonial trauma, it highlights the relative neglect of womens stories in customary Chinese readings, colonial accounts, and an ancestral family record from 1800 to the present. Offering an alternative view of family history, this book links the body as a dwelling for assaults on the ability to breathethrough tuberculosis, opium smoking, asthma, and panicwith the physical home that is assaulted in turn by bombs, killing, intimate betrayals, and fatal respiratory illness. The COVID-19 "pandemic of breathlessness" serves as mnemonic both for state repression, and for the reprisal of historical fears of suffocation and dying. These phenomena converge under an analytic concept the author calls respiratory politics. Nichola Khan is Reader in Anthropology and Psychology in the School of Humanities and Social Science and Co-Director of the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics at the University of Brighton, UK.

Cover Page -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Prelude: From the Red River to England's Shores -- Introduction: Life as a Moving Form -- Chapter 1. Lifelines: Transnational Labor Mobility on the Road -- Chapter 2. The Taste of Freedom and Return -- Chapter 3. Immobility Dreams: The Man Who Would Be King -- Chapter 4. Food, Water, and Wherewithal in the Time of Crossings -- Chapter 5. Barth in Sussex: Community, Feasting, and Immobility Revisited -- Endlines: An Aporia of Freedom and Suffering -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author.

Cover; Half-title; Title; Copyright; Contents; List of Images; Acknowledgements; Contributors; Preface: A Transformed Landscape; Introduction; 1. People All Around You: Locating Karachi in the Poetry of Azra Abbas; 2. 1994: Political Madness, Ethics, and Story-making in Liaquatabad district in Karachi; 3. Karachi: A Pashtun City?; 4. The Sunday Fighter: Doubts, Fears, and Little Secrets of an Intermittent Combatant; 5. Life in a 'No-go Area': Experiences of Marginalisation and Fear in Lyari; 6. 'Our Rule': The MQM, the Dawat-i-Islami, and Mohajir Religiosity; 7. Prohibition and 'Sharab' as Political Protest in Karachi; 8. The Cost of Free Speech: the Media in the Battlefields of Karachi; 9. From the Demise of Cosmopolitanism to its Revival: Trends and Repercussions for Karachi; 10. Four 'Ordinary' Deaths; Afterword I; Afterword II; Select Bibliography; Index

Synthesizing political, anthropological and psychological perspectives, this book addresses the everyday causes and appeal of long-term involvement in extreme political violence in urban Pakistan. Taking Pakistan's ethno nationalist Mohajir party, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) as a case study, it explores how certain men from the ethnic community of Mohajirs are recruited to the roles and statuses of political killers, and sustain violence as a primary social identity and lifestyle over a period of some years. By drawing on detailed fieldwork in areas involved in the Karachi conflict, the author contributes to understandings of violence, tracing the development of violent aspects of Mohajir nationalism via an exploration of political and cultural contexts of Pakistan's history, and highlighting the repetitive homology of the conflict with the earlier violence of Partition. Through a local comparison of ethnic and religious militancy she also updates the current situation of social and cultural change in Karachi, which is dominantly framed in terms of Islamist radicalization and modernization. In her examination, governance and civil society issues are integrated with the political and psychological dimensions of mobilization processes and violence at micro-, meso- and macro- levels. This book injects a critical and innovative voice into the ongoing debates about the nature and meaning of radicalization and violence, as well as the specific implications it has for similar, contemporary conflicts in Pakistan and the developing world.

A new book by a journalist follows five interlocutors through Karachi's recent history of rapid expansion, corruption, violence, and civil society efforts.

Abstract
The article draws on biographical, autoethnographic and experimental forms of writing in order to reflect on the intergenerational transmission of war and displacement in the late colonial period of British rule in Hong Kong, and Japanese occupation. Intimate histories across three generations reveal experiences typically neglected by customary Chinese or colonial readings of the period. Specifically, the article privileges breathing as a site for analysing the interplay between body and home, dwelling and displacement, and the corporeal and psychic transmission of Chinese patriarchy and Anglo-Chinese intra-familial relations. It links the body as a dwelling for assaults on the ability to breathe—through tuberculosis, opium smoking, asthma and panic—with the physical home that is, in turn, assaulted by bombs, killing, intimate betrayals and fatal illness. Aptly, the Covid-19 "pandemic of breathlessness," during which the research was conducted, serves as a mnemonic for the reprisal of fears of suffocation and dying.

From imperial 'unhappy valley', to decapitated province, commercial capital, and 21st century megacity, this article reflects on relations of separateness and connectivity between Sindh and its capital city Karachi. These culminated in Pakistan's post-Independence years, in official and political language, governances of national, provincial and city division, and political rhetoric and violence. The article asks what else might be uncovered about their relationship other than customary alignments and partitions between an alien urban behemoth and a provincial periphery. It develops a topographical view to refer to the physical arrangement of environments but also people's profane, spiritual and political connections and losses involving place and dwelling. This is expanded through examples of land appropriations involving urban real-estate development, environmental migrations and displacement, the idiom of the hijra and Sufistic devotion, and ethnic nationalist and religious extremism. The article questions ways losses of ground and attachment might unite people across provincial divides in an alternative, forward motion of cohabitation. It reveals a multi-layered historical tracing of ways that Sindh, as it is lived in Karachi and vice versa, digresses and wanders through deep cross-regional dynamics and developments. These create new departures from self and place, and rebuff the tendency to centre 'other' knowledges as the starting-point and epistemology for studies of Karachi and Sindh. Last, Karachi is a useful optic for thinking about continuities of colonialism and postcolonialism, crisis and fracture in South Asia; ways these are infused with planetary urbanization dynamics, and local, regional and national developments that resist easy universalism.

This study follows UK Afghan migrants on a return visit to Northwest Pakistan. Combining theorizations of mobility, liminality, and commensality, it takes the picnic trip (chakar) as a little‐explored cultural lens through which to analyse symbolic formations of freedom, the shaping of Pakhtun transnational labour, and social hierarchies constituted through migration and return. As potent imaginary sites of remembering and forgetting, chakar map destinations left and not‐yet arrived at, routes of flight and return, and the burden of multi‐levelled constellations of political and economic insecurity on refugees living between the UK and Pakistan. The article argues that chakar are at once therapeutic and reproductive of ways in which personal and systemic realities combine features of hierarchy, exploitation, and patriarchy. They sustain participants in a tension between desires to preserve the hierarchies they conceal, and desires for more freedom. These contradictory experiences are usefully analysed through the emblematic arc of the 'round trip'.