Afghanistan History: Past, Present and Future

February 1, 2019
At 12:00pm
Henry R. Luce Hall (LUCE ), 203
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511
Shah Mahmoud Hanifi is a Professor of History at James Madison University where he teaches courses on the Middle East and South Asia. Hanifi’s research and publications have addressed subjects including colonial political economy, the Pashto language, photography, cartography, animal and environmental studies, and Orientalism in Afghanistan. His dissertation formed the basis of a Gutenberg-e Prize from the American Historical Association that resulted in his first book, Connecting Histories in Afghanistan (Stanford
University Press, 2009, 2011).
This talk is organized as a critical self-reflection on Connecting Histories in Afghanistan, and secondarily as an attempt to locate the book in the relatively fast-changing field of Afghanistan Studies. In this conjoined way, the origins, structure and principal themes of the book and the larger field of Afghanistan Studies can be identified and interrogated, however unevenly. Revisiting how and why the book positioned Afghanistan in relation to British Indian colonialism, global capitalism and the power of writing will demonstrate this combination of concerns remains insufficient for generating a comprehensive understanding of far more complex historical terrain.

Speaker/Performer: Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, Associate Prof. of History, James Madison University

Funded by the The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund. Co-sponsored by Yale Program in Iranian Studies
 

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March 1, 2019
At 12:00pm
Henry R. Luce Hall (LUCE ), 202
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511
Historians have long neglected Afghanistan’s broader history when portraying the opium industry. In his talk, James Tharin Bradford will rebalance the discourse, showing that it is not the past forty years of lawlessness that makes the opium industry what it is, but the sheer breadth of the twentieth-century Afghanistan experience. Rather than byproducts of a failed contemporary system, drugs – especially opium – were critical components in the formation and failure of the Afghan state. Bradford will explore how the country moved from licit supply of the global opium trade to one of the major suppliers of hashish and opium through changes in drug control policy shaped largely by the United States. By weaving together a global history of the drug trade and drug policy with the formation of the Afghan state and issues within Afghan political culture, Bradford recasts the current Afghan, and global, drug trade.
 
James Tharin Bradford is Assistant Professor of History at Berklee College of Music, and Adjunct Lecturer at Babson College. His book, Poppies, Politics, and Power: Afghanistan and the Global History of Drugs and Diplomacy, will be released in June 2019 by Cornell University Press. He has published in the Journal of Iranian Studies, Oxford University Handbook of Drug History, and Illegal Cannabis Cultivation in the World. He teaches on the history of the global illicit drug trade and addiction, with an emphasis on Afghanistan and US foreign policy.

Speaker/Performer: James Bradford, Assistant Prof. of History, Berklee College

Funded by the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund. Co-sponsored by the Yale Program in Iranian Studies
 
April 3, 2019
At 12:00pm
ISPS, Room A001
77 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06511

Multilingual and culturally diverse adaptations – not doctrinal uniformity or Arabisation – have allowed Islam to dominate the eastern Islamic lands in what is today Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia. It remains unclear when and how such forms of adaptation arose. Previous research has argued that caliphal and sultanic authority determined local realities in the pre-Mongol Islamicate world. More recently, the material turn has brought into sharper focus documentary practices as a lens through which the medieval history of the western parts of the Islamic world are studied. The appearance of medieval documents from Afghanistan in recent years opens up new opportunities for research based on local sources that shed light on the social, economic and religio-legal history of medieval Afghanistan. In this talk, we will consider the historiography of medieval Afghanistan and the contributions that Afghan documents can make in understanding the daily realities of people.

Arezou Azad is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Birmingham. She was the founder and co-Director of the Balkh Art and Cultural Heritage project at the University of Oxford where she received her Ph.D. in 2010 in Oriental Studies. Her book, Sacred Landscape in Medieval Afghanistan, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013 and is based on a medieval local history of Balkh in northern Afghanistan called Faza’il-i Balkh. Her new book, a co-edited, two-volume revised critical edition and first-time translation into English of Faza’il-i Balkh, is currently in press with the Gibb Memorial Trust Series in Persian, Arabic and Turkish books. Arezou has published peer-reviewed articles on female Islamic scholars in medieval Khurasan, the local historiography of Khurasan, sacred landscape, and marriage practices. She is currently a Humboldt Fellow at the Freie University of Berlin, and her new project, starting later this year, will be a study of Islamisation and Muslim-Jewish relations in medieval Afghanistan’s Bamiyan region.

Speaker/Performer: Dr. Arezou Azad, Lecturer in Medieval History, University of Birmingham

Funded by the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund. Co-sponsored by the Yale Program in Iranian Studies
April 12, 2019
At 12:00pm
Henry R. Luce Hall (LUCE ), 203
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511
Louis Dupree, the famous American anthropologist, once apocryphally quipped that everything we know about Afghanistan is a mere footnote to the definitional work of Mountstuart Elphinstone. While knowledge of the country and its peoples owes much to, and in many ways remains trapped by the lines of inquiry laid down two centuries ago, the new scholarship is now breaking free of such restrictive bonds. This is an exciting time to be a student of Afghanistan as the last 15 years has witnessed a veritable explosion of serious and engaged research about the country. This new wave of scholarship, much of it produced by young Afghan scholars, promises to remake understandings of the place and its people for a generation to come. Yet this scholarship needs to be considered in its moment of knowledge production. It seems odd that the body of a national historiography is being enriched at the moment when a national frame of historical reference is being challenged within the academy. Further, the very idea of ‘Afghanistan’ studies carries with it certain implicit assumptions about the place, its people, and its past that are contested in contemporary politics. To explore these issues, this talk will critically consider the meaning of Afghanistan studies as well as how the new and forthcoming scholarship challenges, undermines and alternatively reinforces that meaning. Benjamin D. Hopkins is a specialist in modern South Asian history, in particular that of Afghanistan, as well as British imperialism. His research focuses on the role of the colonial state in creating the modern states inhabiting the region. His first book, The Making of Modern Afghanistan, examined the efforts of the British East India Company to construct an Afghan state in the early part of the nineteenth century and provides a corrective to the history of the so-called ‘Great Game.’ His second book, Fragments of the Afghan Frontier, co-authored with anthropologist Magnus Marsden, pairs a complex historical narrative with rich ethnographic detail to conceptualize the Afghan frontier as a collection of discrete fragments which create continually evolving collage of meaning. He has additionally co-edited Beyond Swat: History, Society and Economy along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier with Magnus Marsden. Professor Hopkins regularly teaches courses on South Asian history, the geopolitics of South and Central Asia, as well as World history.
 

Speaker/Performer: Ben Hopkins, Associate Prof. of History, George Washington University

Co-Sponsored by the Kemp Fund

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