Exhausted Geographies Vol.II

cover of Exhausted Geographies Vol.II

Exhausted Geographies is a collaborative publishing practice by Shahana Rajani, Zahra Malkani, and Abeera Kamran, based in Karachi, Pakistan. It is a series of publications exploring image, text, and the city. Each volume of Exhausted Geographies mobilises a crucial, cross-disciplinary political imaginary to rethink current representations of Karachi and includes a wide range of topics that provide new insights into the social, spatial and discursive fabric of the city.

Exhausted Geographies II engages with landscapes at the intersection of infrastructure, war and ecological crisis in Karachi. We map the city through a new road named Jinnah Avenue, through the rusting remnants of railways, in the debris of what was once a mountain, in disappearing bodies of water, and against the ubiquitous borders proliferating across its landscape. These neo-colonial transformations, influenced by transnational networks of power, finance, and capital, are entangled with the military apparatus and take place in spaces of constructed invisibility. We look at the ways in which war and development manifest in these invisible landscapes and are sustained through environmental violence in the name of the nation-state.

Reading the city through emergent and decaying infrastructures, disappearing ecologies, and architectures of militarisation, this collection of texts and images draws on collective research undertaken for the Gadap Sessions – a course organized by Karachi LaJamia in collaboration with the Karachi Indigenous Rights Alliance in 2016. The Gadap Sessions set out to study and document the historical township of Gadap at the outskirts of Karachi in light of contemporary processes of development, displacement and climate change.