Imagining Afghanistan: Global Fiction and Film of the 9/11 Wars. Alla Ivanchikova (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2019). 259 pp. ISBN 9781557538468

Abstract

Imagining Afghanistan: Global Fiction and Film of the 9/11 Wars analyzes the written and visual forms of cultural production that take Afghanistan as their object after the US-led intervention in 2001. Alla Ivanchikova describes Afghanistan, having been cast onto the world stage in the 2000s as a “bright object,” in line with the work of the object-oriented philosopher Levi R. Bryant. By contrast, Ivanchikova writes, Afghanistan was a “dim object” from 1989 to 2001, when it did not receive the attention of the international community after the Soviet withdrawal. By “dim object,” the author refers to the idea that Afghanistan “emitted no light, attracted no attention, and the eyes of the world were not on it” (1). Ivanchikova’s case studies involve fiction and nonfiction cultural production produced during the post-9/11 period, most of which was created for an Anglophone global audience to satisfy a high demand for knowledge about Afghanistan. Ivanchikova maintains that these two decades saw a proliferation of cultural texts that made Afghanistan visible to a global audience, which required a reckoning with its recent past and a discussion of humanitarianism, Afghan women, and transnational terrorism. Imagining Afghanistan attempts to uncover the place of Afghanistan in the global imaginary. The book gathers around six thematically organized chapters to illustrate three waves of cultural production. The first wave, around the start of the millennium, centered around the humanitarian crises in Afghanistan, which, as Ivanchikova contends, highlighted Soviet barbarity and relied on British colonial imagery. The second wave of cultural production, toward the end of the same decade, moved beyond these representations and offered more nuanced and multidimensional representations of Afghanistan. The third wave, encompassing the second decade of the US-led intervention in Afghanistan in the 2010s, consists of cultural production that moved beyond clichés about the country and its people as timeless, backward, and in a state of isolation. Instead, it made visible its “transnational history and transcontinental connections” (4). Ivanchikova starts the first chapter by discussing Kandahar (dir. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 2001), Homebody/Kabul (dir. Tony Kushner, 2002), and the French novel The Swallows of Kabul (Les Hirondelles de Kaboul; written by Yasmina Khadra, 2002; translated from the French by John Cullen, 2004). All were produced prior to 9/11 but were propelled into global attention to fill the void in knowledge of Afghanistan at the onset of Operation Enduring Freedom. Although they are selectively silent about Afghanistan’s socialist past, Ivanchikova argues, these three cultural texts show Afghanistan as an object of distant and long-lasting humanitarian crisis—with its people, especially women, in need of saving. These texts became part of a moral assemblage framing the United States’ military operation in Afghanistan as a humanitarian endeavor. Ivanchikova extends the critique of anti-Soviet sentiment in post-2001 cultural texts in the second and third chapters of her book. In the second chapter, Ivanchikova extensively examines The Kite Runner (2003), a widely read novel by the Afghan American author Khaled Hosseini. She maintains that The Kite Runner distorts Afghanistan’s recent history by representing the Soviet