Resisting Disappearance

"Powerful and poetic, this ethnography elucidates the effects of political violence on everyday life in Kashmir while presenting a profoundly original analysis of women's organizing and political expression. Zia deftly weaves women's intimate experiences of personal loss within a larger tapestry of history, politics, and culture. She reveals women as agents of change who challenge existing concepts of gender, sexuality, and rights even as they draw upon their identities as mothers and wives and their ritual roles in weddings and funerals. Beautifully written and moving, this book will have an effect on all who read it."—Victoria Bernal, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine

"Powerful and poetic, this ethnography elucidates the effects of political violence on everyday life in Kashmir while presenting a profoundly original analysis of women's organizing and political expression. Zia deftly weaves women's intimate experiences of personal loss within a larger tapestry of history, politics, and culture. She reveals women as agents of change who challenge existing concepts of gender, sexuality, and rights even as they draw upon their identities as mothers and wives and their ritual roles in weddings and funerals. Beautifully written and moving, this book will have an effect on all who read it."—Victoria Bernal, author of Nation as Network: Diaspora, Cyberspace and Citizenship

"This is a work that explores the upending violence in Kashmir with courage, composure, and uncompromising solidarity. In describing the human toll of the conflict upon "half-widows" and the families that continue to search for disappeared sons, brothers, fathers, and husbands, Ather Zia renders the brutality of the occupation of Kashmir without sentimentality. Yet poetry and poetic voice are also central to her ethnography in a way that underscores the layered histories of lament and women's deployment of it as a form of both protest and mourning. The stories Zia shares with her readers are a telling corrective to much of the academic literature on Kashmir which locates the region as a pawn in larger power politics, but rarely gives us a sense of how Kashmiris themselves confront multiple levels of violence by state security forces and militants on both sides of the border, movements for self-determination, and their own aspirations for azaadi, or freedom."—Kamala Visweswaran, author of Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Difference