My latest writing on representations of Afghan masculinity in the British and later American imagination.
In popular Anglo-American imagination, Afghanistan has long been a site where masculinity, danger, and imperial desire converge. From the nineteenth century onward, Western travel writing about the region relied heavily on a repertoire of images: turbans, rifles, barren land, and “tribal warriors” that transformed Afghan men into hypermasculine archetypes rather than subjects. “American Turbanismo” is the term I use to describe this distinct US adaptation of British colonial mythmaking, which emerged through the writings of nineteenth-century and Cold War–era American travelers such as Josiah Harlan, Januarius MacGahan, Lowell Thomas, and, later, W T Vollmann.
Read the full post here on the Royal Society for Asian Affairs: https://rsaa.org.uk/blog/american-turbanismo-in-afghanistan-how-a-centuries-old-colonial-fantasy-keeps-reinventing-itself/
I had a great opportunity to share my collection of British and American ephemera on Afghanistan.
Zohra Saed 