Visual Culture and Politics from Socialism to Military Dictatorship in Pakistan, 1971-1988

My current research, based in Pakistan and supported by SSHRC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Connaught New Researcher Award, explores the relationship between art and politics from 1971 to 1988. Pakistan’s 1977 military coup, backed by the Reagan Administration to counter Soviet influence in Afghanistan, reshaped possibilities for cultural resistance. Before the coup, male artists inspired by the Chinese Cultural Revolution depicted labor and peasant struggles, and younger artists engaged in the ‘Poster Wars of 1971–72,’ when Maoist and Islamist groups plastered Lahore with competing posters. After General Zia ul-Haq’s 1977 coup, Pakistan was transformed into an Islamist military dictatorship that sought to remove women from public life. Continuing the visual culture of earlier leftist movements, feminist artists resisted authoritarianism. So much so, that while researching at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Museum and Library, I uncovered CIA reports expressing concern that feminist artists exhibiting in New York and London swayed global public opinion against the military dictatorship, and thereby threatened US strategic interests in the region. Despite the visibility of female artists during this period, no academic monograph has yet examined their movement. My book in-progress, based on 13 archives and private papers in 7 countries across 3 continents, collections research at 5 sites in 3 countries, memoirs, and more than 30 oral histories, will be the first to analyze how feminist visual art became the most globally resonant form of opposition to Zia’s regime—a timely study amid current authoritarian threats to women’s rights worldwide and continuities in the role of Pakistan in supporting US interests in the region.