Ali Nobil Ahmad – författare

This volume is a carefully curated selection of recently published academic research, critical essays, translations, and interviews on Pakistani cinema. Indispensable for film enthusiasts, students, and scholars of cinema in Pakistan and beyond, it brings cutting edge works previously trapped behind paywalls together with neglected writings by figures such as Manto, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and Muhammad Hasan Askari. Certain to become a classic in the burgeoning field of South Asian film and media studies, its scope encompasses past and present complexities of filmmaking, distribution, and cinephilia in a country whose rich cinematic heritage is just beginning to be appreciated.

Masculinity, Sexuality and Illegal Migration makes use of extensive new empirical material to explore the phenomena of migration, human smuggling and illegal work, in order to develop a compelling account of international migration, linking it with irrational, risky economic behaviour and male sexual desire. Interviews conducted with successive waves of Pakistani immigrants in the UK and Italy, together with ethnographic fieldwork amongst local journalists, immigration officials and smugglers in Pakistan, serve as the basis for an interdisciplinary comparative analysis of illegal migration across time and space. Challenging the received idea that labour migration is driven purely by rational economic forces, Masculinity, Sexuality and Illegal Migration draws upon psychoanalytic social theory to examine the roles of masculinity and irrationality in the decision to migrate, thus stimulating a more complex debate about migration's causes and consequences. The arguments it makes raise wider questions about the folly of thinking about economic concerns in isolation from other aspects of human experience. As such, this book will appeal to those with research interests in economics, social theory, migration, gender and sexuality, and race and ethnicity.