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Queer Companions Omar Kasmani

Queer Companions By Omar Kasmani

Queer Companions by Omar Kasmani


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Summary

Omar Kasmani theorizes the construction of queer social relations at Pakistan's most important Sufi site by examining the affective and intimate relationship between the site's pilgrims and its patron saint.

Queer Companions Summary

Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan by Omar Kasmani

In Queer Companions Omar Kasmani theorizes saintly intimacy and the construction of queer social relations at Pakistan's most important site of Sufi pilgrimage. Conjoining queer theory and the anthropology of Islam, Kasmani outlines the felt and enfleshed ways in which saintly affections bind individuals, society, and the state in Pakistan through a public architecture of intimacy. Islamic saints become lovers and queer companions just as a religious universe is made valuable to critical and queer forms of thinking. Focusing on the lives of ascetics known as fakirs in Pakistan, Kasmani shows how the affective bonds with the place's patron saint, a thirteenth-century antinomian mystic, foster unstraight modes of living in the present. In a national context where religious shrines are entangled in the state's infrastructures of governance, coming close to saints further entails a drawing near to more-than-official histories and public forms of affect. Through various fakir life stories, Kasmani contends that this intimacy offers a form of queer world making with saints.

Queer Companions Reviews

A lyrical and moving meditation on Islamic saints, Sufi intimacies, and affective histories of contemporary Pakistan. Through encounters with fakir life stories, Omar Kasmani offers us an exquisitely written ethnography on the queerness of religion, region, and belonging. Queer Companions pulls us in, moving us toward more radical modes of the social life of the intimate. -- Anjali Arondekar, author of * For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India *
Queer Companions presents the reader with perceptive observations that illustrate how desire not only works, but worlds. How striving for saintly companionship puts certain futures within your reach, while this orientation alienates you from other normative ways of life. -- Max Schnepf * Hypotheses *

About Omar Kasmani

Omar Kasmani is Postdoctoral Research Associate in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the CRC 1171 Affective Societies at Freie Universitat Berlin and coeditor of Muslim Matter: Photographs, Objects, Essays.

Table of Contents

Note on Orthography ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction. On Coming Close 1
1. Infrastructures of the Imaginal 36
2. Her Stories in His Durbar 60
3. In Other Guises, Other Futures 84
4. Love in a Time of Celibacy 107
5. Worlding Fakirs, Fairies and the Dead 130
Coda. Queer Forward Slash Religion 152
Notes 165
Glossary 181
References 185
Index 201

Additional information

NGR9781478018032
9781478018032
1478018038
Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan by Omar Kasmani
New
Paperback
Duke University Press
20220513
224
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
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