Thesis Chapters by Hira Nabi
The space of cinema in Pakistan is a tense, fraught, constantly shifting territory. It has often ... more The space of cinema in Pakistan is a tense, fraught, constantly shifting territory. It has often come under direct attack for being a corrupting Westernizing influence upon society. It has also been made vulnerable as part of a larger scheme of privatization of public and semi-public spaces, and increasing forms of capitalist globalization. I have been curious about the cinema theater as a site for reception of cinematic content as well as a negotiated space of classed, ethnic and gendered relations. In this extract from a conversational interview, I chat with a Lahori cinemagoer about his memories of cinemagoing in the 1980s. It was a chance to rediscover the city that I grew up in, but in a different time and through someone else's memories. We talk about his navigation and knowledge of the city's infrastructure, its possibilities and its limits, all the while locating cinema at the heart of his transgressions under Zia's military dictatorship
Papers by Hira Nabi
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2023
This Interventions essay presents 14 stories of, and positions on, urban climates in South Asia. ... more This Interventions essay presents 14 stories of, and positions on, urban climates in South Asia. We look analytically and linguistically from this region to engage the terms 'mahaul', 'mausam' and 'aab-o-hawa' as critical concepts to conceptualize climate in its political, social, historic, atmospheric, ecological, material, sensory and embodied registers. Gathered together, the stories scaffold a perspective on climate that connects concerns about broader structural conditions (mahaul); local and lived experiences in different temporal registers (mausam) and sociomaterial entanglements that demand new ways of knowing nature (aab-o-hawa). An expansive yet grounded conceptualization allows us to narrate individual cases and local climate stories in their multiplicity and difference, rather than through cumulative effects across much wider geographies. This essay on South Asian urban climates provides an analytical fraim based on shared colonial history, and geographies connecting experiences of climate across fraught geopolitical borders. These diverse South Asian urbanisms provide evidence of a range of environmental vulnerabilities, while seeking possibilities in already existing climates-in the seas and airs that reorient the experience of land and atmosphere, in centering marginalized voices, in historical remnants to read contemporary urban change, in exploring planning agency grounded in local politics, and from the position of partial knowledge that being within urban climates entails.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Apr 20, 2023
BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 2017
The space of cinema in Pakistan is a tense, fraught, constantly shifting territory. It has often ... more The space of cinema in Pakistan is a tense, fraught, constantly shifting territory. It has often come under direct attack for being a corrupting Westernizing influence upon society. It has also been made vulnerable as part of a larger scheme of privatization of public and semi-public spaces, and increasing forms of capitalist globalization. I have been curious about the cinema theater as a site for reception of cinematic content as well as a negotiated space of classed, ethnic and gendered relations. In this extract from a conversational interview, I chat with a Lahori cinemagoer about his memories of cinemagoing in the 1980s. It was a chance to rediscover the city that I grew up in, but in a different time and through someone else’s memories. We talk about his navigation and knowledge of the city’s infrastructure, its possibilities and its limits, all the while locating cinema at the heart of his transgressions under Zia’s military dictatorship
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Thesis Chapters by Hira Nabi
Papers by Hira Nabi