Sovereign Attachments: Masculinity, Muslimness, and Affective Politics in Pakistan. By Shenila Khoja-Moolji. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. 288 pp. $85.00 (cloth), $34.95 (paper). ISBN: 9780520336803.

Abstract

In the aftermath of the December 2014 Tehrik-e-Taliban attack on the Army Public School (APS) in Peshawar, which killed 132 children and 9 teachers and staff, both the Taliban and the Pakistani state put forth their own claims and justifications of violence. To Shenila Khoja-Moolji, this tragic incident is emblematic of how the preexisting conceptualization of sovereignty—as the hegemonic, unified monopolization of violence by the state—inadequately explains the specifically postcolonial context of Pakistan. Using this observation as a point of departure, KhojaMoolji’s Sovereign Attachments: Masculinity, Muslimness, and Affective Politics in Pakistan thus interrogates the “entanglements and shared repertoire” (3) of the Taliban and the Pakistani state; examines various gendered performances and figurations in Pakistan; and posits a new theory of sovereignty, centered on its cultural, discursive, and affective dimensions. Sovereignty, to Khoja-Moolji, is more than an absolute politico-legal concept. Rather, she argues that it is a created and cultivated relationship, or an attachment, between the sovereign and an allied public. In otherwords, sovereignty is a discursive and affective (gendered) performance in which competing sovereigns engage. Applying this definition to her case study, Khoja-Moolji notes that when staking their claims to sovereignty, the Pakistani state and the Taliban extrapolate from the same cultural scripts of gender, sexuality, normative Islam, the family, and imaginations of past and future to foster attachments to their particular visions of the political, whether the Pakistani nation-state or the entire Muslim ummah, and to stipulate who belongs and who does not. Relatedly, another novel concept that Khoja-Moolji develops is “Islamomasculinity,” or the intertwined normative scripts of masculinity and Muslimness, by which authoritative sovereign power is primarily performed by both the Taliban and the Pakistani state. Other gendered figurations—the paternal father, the innocent child, the mourning mother, the brave soldier, the resolute believer, the perverse terrorist, and the dutiful daughter—figure in upholding