Omar Kasmani
Biographic Data
| ID | 571710 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Omar Kasmani |
| GIVEN NAMES | Omar |
| FAMILY NAME | Kasmani |
| SIGNATURE | KASMANI O |
| AFFILIATIONS | Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Free University, Berlin, Germany |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 11 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 9 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Pakistan Desires
Drawing on history, anthropology, literature, law, art, film, and performance studies, the contributors to Pakistan Desires invite reflection on what meanings adhere to queerness in Pakistan. They illustrate how amid conditions of straightness, desire can serve as a mode of queer future-making. Among other topics, the contributors analyze gender transgressive performances in Pakistani film, piety in the transgender rights movement, the use of Gri…
From Elsewhere
Queer Companions
In Queer Companions Omar Kasmani theorizes saintly intimacy and the construction of queer social relations at Pakistan’s most important site of Sufi pilgrimage. Conjoining queer theory and the anthropology of Islam, Kasmani outlines the felt and enfleshed ways in which saintly affections bind individuals, society, and the state in Pakistan through a public architecture of intimacy. Islamic saints become lovers and queer companions just as a relig…
Futuring Trans* in Pakistan
Futuring trans* is a deliberation on the emergence of transgender alongside khwajasara, both newer terms in Pakistan that acquire distinctly temporal agencies insofar as these untether individuals from difficult histories and offer new affective means for future making. Not the same as the identity transgender, trans* in Pakistan, this article proposes, is a baggy and emergent ground where not only locally specific meanings around gender variabil…
Critical Thin
This article delves into the spectral and affective reserves of Zikr , the Sufi exercise of godly remembrance. It explores how performances of religious longing broaden the moral experience of a post-migrant Berlin by offering contemporary believers critically thin zones of hypersocial contact with Islamic holy figures. Zikr emerges as a key interface of felt and material worlds: through acts of remembrance, subliminal figures and migrant inherit…
Traversing Fields
This article, a reflection on collaborative fieldwork involving a Sufi Muslim and a Pentecostal Christian setting in Berlin, examines whether distinct and diverse religious groups can be brought into a meaningful relation with one another. It considers the methodological possibilities that might become possible or foreclose when two researchers, working in different prayer settings in the same city, use affect as a common frame of reference while…
Thin Attachments
Thin Attachments brings personal memoir to bear on an affective geography of Berlin. In scenes of daily loves, the city’s queers and Sufis, saints and strangers, lovers and research-partners cross paths at work, in cafes, at mosques, online, and in bed. Queer, migrant, and the religious are returning figures that coagulate in private rituals of be/longing and scenes of public intimacy. Insofar as thin stands for spectral depth and emotional traff…
No Laughing Matter
ooee-ooeeThe opening scene is a scene of an opening. The cafe at Berlin's Gropius Bau is thick with people. It is less than two hours since Bani Abidi opened her exhibition, They Died Laughing.1 Jo
Grounds of becoming
This ethnographic portrait of a graveyard in Sehwan Sharif, Pakistan, illustrates the spatial and intercorporeal ways in which fakir becoming resists autonomous conceptions of the self. It explores how fakir perception of and participation in richly structured environments involves a masterful engagement with manifold beings, places and temporalities; is characterised by gendered struggles over corporeality and place; and intervenes in local and …
Of Discontinuity And Difference
Of Discontinuity And Difference
Futuring Trans* in Pakistan
Futuring trans* is a deliberation on the emergence of transgender alongside khwajasara, both newer terms in Pakistan that acquire distinctly temporal agencies insofar as these untether individuals from difficult histories and offer new affective means for future making. Not the same as the identity transgender, trans* in Pakistan, this article proposes, is a baggy and emergent ground where not only locally specific meanings around gender variabil…
Grounds of becoming
This ethnographic portrait of a graveyard in Sehwan Sharif, Pakistan, illustrates the spatial and intercorporeal ways in which fakir becoming resists autonomous conceptions of the self. It explores how fakir perception of and participation in richly structured environments involves a masterful engagement with manifold beings, places and temporalities; is characterised by gendered struggles over corporeality and place; and intervenes in local and …
From Elsewhere
Of Discontinuity And Difference
Grounds of becoming
This ethnographic portrait of a graveyard in Sehwan Sharif, Pakistan, illustrates the spatial and intercorporeal ways in which fakir becoming resists autonomous conceptions of the self. It explores how fakir perception of and participation in richly structured environments involves a masterful engagement with manifold beings, places and temporalities; is characterised by gendered struggles over corporeality and place; and intervenes in local and …
Thin Attachments
Thin Attachments brings personal memoir to bear on an affective geography of Berlin. In scenes of daily loves, the city’s queers and Sufis, saints and strangers, lovers and research-partners cross paths at work, in cafes, at mosques, online, and in bed. Queer, migrant, and the religious are returning figures that coagulate in private rituals of be/longing and scenes of public intimacy. Insofar as thin stands for spectral depth and emotional traff…
No Laughing Matter
ooee-ooeeThe opening scene is a scene of an opening. The cafe at Berlin's Gropius Bau is thick with people. It is less than two hours since Bani Abidi opened her exhibition, They Died Laughing.1 Jo
Traversing Fields
This article, a reflection on collaborative fieldwork involving a Sufi Muslim and a Pentecostal Christian setting in Berlin, examines whether distinct and diverse religious groups can be brought into a meaningful relation with one another. It considers the methodological possibilities that might become possible or foreclose when two researchers, working in different prayer settings in the same city, use affect as a common frame of reference while…
Futuring Trans* in Pakistan
Futuring trans* is a deliberation on the emergence of transgender alongside khwajasara, both newer terms in Pakistan that acquire distinctly temporal agencies insofar as these untether individuals from difficult histories and offer new affective means for future making. Not the same as the identity transgender, trans* in Pakistan, this article proposes, is a baggy and emergent ground where not only locally specific meanings around gender variabil…
Critical Thin
This article delves into the spectral and affective reserves of Zikr , the Sufi exercise of godly remembrance. It explores how performances of religious longing broaden the moral experience of a post-migrant Berlin by offering contemporary believers critically thin zones of hypersocial contact with Islamic holy figures. Zikr emerges as a key interface of felt and material worlds: through acts of remembrance, subliminal figures and migrant inherit…
Queer Companions
In Queer Companions Omar Kasmani theorizes saintly intimacy and the construction of queer social relations at Pakistan’s most important site of Sufi pilgrimage. Conjoining queer theory and the anthropology of Islam, Kasmani outlines the felt and enfleshed ways in which saintly affections bind individuals, society, and the state in Pakistan through a public architecture of intimacy. Islamic saints become lovers and queer companions just as a relig…
Pakistan Desires
Drawing on history, anthropology, literature, law, art, film, and performance studies, the contributors to Pakistan Desires invite reflection on what meanings adhere to queerness in Pakistan. They illustrate how amid conditions of straightness, desire can serve as a mode of queer future-making. Among other topics, the contributors analyze gender transgressive performances in Pakistani film, piety in the transgender rights movement, the use of Gri…
From Elsewhere
Sociology (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Art (6 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · History (4 works) · Islamic Studies and History (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East (4 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (3 works) · Archaeology (3 works)