Pleasure Gardens: Blackouts and the Logic of Crisis in Kashmir takes a 213-day communications blackout in 2019 as its entry point into the military occupation, land appropriation, and constitutional dismantling that defines life in Kashmir.
About This Book
This two-part publication by Skye Arundhati Thomas and Izabella Scott assembles hundreds of sources to reconstruct fifteen days under siege — a period in which Kashmiri constitutional rights were revoked, the state partitioned, and its special status stripped. The first part maps the blackout from Srinagar to the remote Himalayan valleys along the Line of Control, constructing a documentary log from the fragments that survive enforced silence. The second turns to the infrastructure of surveillance itself, tracing the ways India's occupation of Kashmir draws from Israel's occupation of Palestine. A work of political urgency and formal invention, it asks what writing and image can do when communication is weaponised.
Key Features
- 96 pages of documentary prose, archival source compilation, and photo essays
- Authors: Skye Arundhati Thomas and Izabella Scott; photo essays by Ufaq Fatima, Nawal Ali, and Zainab
- Published by MACK, 2019
What You'll Discover
- How a 213-day communications blackout was deployed as an instrument of political control, and the methods used to document what it obscured
- The constitutional and territorial transformation of Kashmir — the revocation of rights, the partition of the state, and the removal of special statehood — reconstructed through hundreds of gathered sources
- The comparative logic connecting India's surveillance and occupation infrastructure in Kashmir to Israel's occupation of Palestine
- A new register of writing and image that makes legible the protracted, everyday violence of occupation along the Line of Control
About the Author
Skye Arundhati Thomas and Izabella Scott are the co-authors of this project, which draws together documentary research, source compilation, and critical writing to address the conditions of military occupation in Kashmir. Photo essays contributing to the volume are by Ufaq Fatima, Nawal Ali, and Zainab.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 96
- Dimensions: 125 × 195 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781915743237
- Publisher: MACK
- Publication Date: 2019
Perfect For: Readers working at the intersection of political geography, documentary practice, and postcolonial studies; those engaged with questions of surveillance, occupation, and the politics of communication.