Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

This paper takes two approaches to analyze the Pakistani-U.S. politico-military transnational assemblages and entanglements and layers them over one another: concepts of militarism (e.g. Liebknecht, Lenin, Ahmad) and Pakistani literary production as adopting those frames of militarism. The airplane serves as a symbol for this entanglement, for American liberal empire and for the national forms of militarism that it entangles itself in and gives wings to. The paradoxical nature of the airplane is a symbol itself for American liberal empire (and its relationship to Pakistan)—the promise of freedom, of flight rendered only a technology of capital, “million-dollar fighting machines.” Finally, militarism says something about justice and injustice. And, therefore, the forms anti-militarism and justice can take. While thinkers like Liebknecht and Ahmad have prolific writing about countering militarism, I also locate this in the use of imagination—through literature, and parody—if not a less material form of anti-militarism, nevertheless a means to battling the collaborative transmilitarism from above.