Graduate Speaker Series

Sabbatical talk: Writing and Co-editing my first Edited Book, Decolonizing Afghanistan: Countering Imperial Knowledge and Power  

About the Talk

As the first comprehensive volume to explore the impact of empire on Afghanistan’s past and present, Decolonizing Afghanistan: Countering Imperial Knowledge and Power marks a decolonial turn in Afghanistan and American studies. The book features new scholarship that traces how the diverse communities that makeup Afghanistan and its diaspora have subverted, resisted, and participated in colonial projects from the early twentieth century to the present, with a particular focus on the US intervention that began in 2001. By interrogating the relationship between knowledge and power—and the nexus of academic and military knowledge production—we examine how knowledge about Afghanistan has framed and legitimated imperial governance.  

About the Speaker

Wazhmah Osman is an Afghan-American filmmaker and associate professor whose research is rooted in feminist media ethnographies focused on the political economy of global media industries and the regimes of representation and visual culture they produce. In her book Television and the Afghan Culture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists (University of Illinois Press, 2020), she analyzes the impact of international funding and cross-border media flows on the politics of Afghanistan, the region and beyond. She is also the co-director of the 2007 documentary Postcards from Tora Bora and co-author of the forthcoming book Afghanistan: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University). Osman regularly works with community and activist groups, and her commentary can be found in outlets including Democracy Now, NPR and Al Jazeera.