"Powerful and poetic, this ethnography elucidates the effects of political violence on everyday life in Kashmir while presenting a profoundly original analysis of women's organizing and political expression. Zia deftly weaves women's intimate experiences of personal loss within a larger tapestry of history, politics, and culture. She reveals women as agents of change who challenge existing concepts of gender, sexuality, and rights even as they draw upon their identities as mothers and wives and their ritual roles in weddings and funerals. Beautifully written and moving, this book will have an effect on all who read it."―Victoria Bernal, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine
"Extreme violence has disfigured life in Kashmir for over three decades. Ather Zia's Resisting Disappearance is an empathetic and deeply political demonstration of the many ways in which Kashmiri women suffer, mourn, and memorialize those they have lost. It is also, crucially, an account of the creativity with which these women have―within the constraints of state and local power―fought back."―Suvir Kaul, author of Of Gardens and Graves: Kashmir, Poetry, Politics
"Powerful and poetic, this ethnography elucidates the effects of political violence on everyday life in Kashmir while presenting a profoundly original analysis of women's organizing and political expression. Zia deftly weaves women's intimate experiences of personal loss within a larger tapestry of history, politics, and culture. She reveals women as agents of change who challenge existing concepts of gender, sexuality, and rights even as they draw upon their identities as mothers and wives and their ritual roles in weddings and funerals. Beautifully written and moving, this book will have an effect on all who read it."―Victoria Bernal, author of Nation as Network: Diaspora, Cyberspace and Citizenship
"This is a work that explores the upending violence in Kashmir with courage, composure, and uncompromising solidarity. In describing the human toll of the conflict upon "half-widows" and the families that continue to search for disappeared sons, brothers, fathers, and husbands, Ather Zia renders the brutality of the occupation of Kashmir without sentimentality. Yet poetry and poetic voice are also central to her ethnography in a way that underscores the layered histories of lament and women's deployment of it as a form of both protest and mourning. The stories Zia shares with her readers are a telling corrective to much of the academic literature on Kashmir which locates the region as a pawn in larger power politics, but rarely gives us a sense of how Kashmiris themselves confront multiple levels of violence by state security forces and militants on both sides of the border, movements for self-determination, and their own aspirations for azaadi, or freedom."―Kamala Visweswaran, author of Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Difference
"This theoretically sophisticated and politically powerful book marks a groundbreaking moment in the anthropological study of Kashmir and South Asia that will also make an excellent text in undergraduate and graduate seminar on various themes and topics."―New Books in Islamic Studies (NBN)
"By focusing on the embodiment of kinship ties and mobilization of ritual that sustain those left behind, Resisting Disappearance sensitively shows how the political reality of ongoing occupation transforms everyday lives. Ather Zia's compelling book will be of interest to students of militarization, occupation and colonization, gender politics and kinship, ritual, everyday life, and activism, at all levels."―Political and Legal Anthropology Review
"An indispensable text...Ather Zia weaves together a haunting, collective memoir of Muslim women's organizing in Kashmir."―South Asian History and Culture
"The depth and familiarity of Zia's analysis is inspiring...This is a truly marvellous book―it is a key contribution to anthropology and feminism."―South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies
"Resisting Disappearance is about what all of our society forgets: How Kashmiri women are continually resisting, striving every day and resisting the disappearances of family members,usually, sons, husbands or fathers...remarkable as it makes us understand the nuances and the multiple dynamics within Kashmir."―Feminism in India
"[A]n important and successful addition to both ethnographic works and works of feminist political theory on South and Central Asia."―Journal of Asian Studies
"[W]ith its engaging conversations on enforced disappearances... Zia's work goes beyond Kashmir and is a testimony to the thousands of lives left un-grieved in conflict zones."―The India Forum
"The work pushes the boundary of ethnographic writing by recovering the aesthetics of poetry in the context of doing fieldwork in violent sites."―Borderlines
"[A]m imperative and urgent text... very lucid in style and structure and stands as evidence of Zia's deeply reflective and introspective scholarship."―Doing Sociology
Ather Zia is assistant professor of anthropology and gender studies at the University of Northern Colorado. She is the founder-editor of Kashmir Lit, an online journal of Kashmiri and diaspora writing, and the cofounder of Critical Kashmir Studies, an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on the Kashmir region.
