The (Un)tenable Flaneuse: An inquiry into the politics of women walking in war-entrenched Kabul
Overview
The article will trace the interrelations between Kabul’s constructed spatiality and the implications of women’s walks through the landscape in two primary texts – Taran Khan’s Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul and Samira Makhmalbaf’s At Five in the Afternoon – to trace the unique discourse and modalities of women’s resistance that they generate against oppressive state-sponsored narratives of history. The first part of this article will attempt to delineate the changes in the spatio-geographical landscape of post-2001 Kabul, which I argue was a twofold project of both architectural and epistemic violence. The subsequent sections will interrogate how the walks of the female protagonist in the texts become an agential assertion of resistance against this project of cultural effacement, as they attempt to reinscribe the history of Kabul in manifold different ways which radically challenge state-sponsored authoritarian narratives. Finally, I will argue how both these women, through their urban presence and walks, inhabit as well as set into motion a ‘third space’, after Bhabha’s theorisation of the same, which repurposes existing spatio-ideological markers and multiplies them with new meaning and radical potentialities.
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/13552074.2024.2348386ISBN
1355-2074How to cite this resource
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