Chris Moffat – författare

What do anti-colonial histories mean for politics in contemporary India? How can we understand a political terrain that appears crowded with the dead, heroic figures from past struggles who call the living to account and demand action? What role do these 'afterlives' play in the inauguration of new politics and the fashioning of possible futures? In this engaging and innovative analysis of anti-colonial afterlives in modern South Asia, Chris Moffat crafts a framework that takes the dead seriously - not as passive entities, ceremonially invoked, but as active interlocutors and instigators in the present. Focusing on the iconic revolutionary martyr Bhagat Singh (1907-1931), Moffat establishes the problem of inheritance as central to the forms and futures of democracy in this postcolonial polity. Tracing Bhagat Singh's revenant presence in India today, he demonstrates how living communities are animated by a sense of obligation, duty or debt to the dead.

What do anti-colonial histories mean for politics in contemporary India? How can we understand a political terrain that appears crowded with the dead, heroic figures from past struggles who call the living to account and demand action? What role do these 'afterlives' play in the inauguration of new politics and the fashioning of possible futures? In this engaging and innovative analysis of anti-colonial afterlives in modern South Asia, Chris Moffat crafts a framework that takes the dead seriously - not as passive entities, ceremonially invoked, but as active interlocutors and instigators in the present. Focusing on the iconic revolutionary martyr Bhagat Singh (1907-1931), Moffat establishes the problem of inheritance as central to the forms and futures of democracy in this postcolonial polity. Tracing Bhagat Singh's revenant presence in India today, he demonstrates how living communities are animated by a sense of obligation, duty or debt to the dead.

In the decades after independence in 1947, architects in Pakistan were enlisted to build a postcolonial future – a new world after empire. But the debris of the past could not be so easily swept aside. The recalcitrance of local and regional histories was fiercely evident in Lahore, the centuries-old capital of Punjab and a city scarred by the partition of British India. Studying its streets, neighborhoods and historic buildings, Pakistani architects came to challenge the global consensus around "development" and its close association with modernist architecture. Their designs and structures became opportunities for thinking anew about the power of history, the boundaries of the nation, and the constitution of community in a postcolonial polity.This book is a pioneering study of architecture and the politics of construction, destruction and conservation in urban Pakistan. Chris Moffat introduces Pakistan's first postcolonial generation of architects—figures born around the time of partition, who began practicing in the 1960s and whose early careers navigated popular rebellions, military coups and emergent, pan-Islamic alignments. Moving from housing schemes to monuments, shrines to shopping malls, Moffat forges a new conversation between histories of architecture and the history of ideas in South Asia, and locates Lahore at the center of debates around contemporary urbanization, postcolonial aesthetics, and the ethics of dwelling in the modern world.

In the decades after independence in 1947, architects in Pakistan were enlisted to build a postcolonial future – a new world after empire. But the debris of the past could not be so easily swept aside. The recalcitrance of local and regional histories was fiercely evident in Lahore, the centuries-old capital of Punjab and a city scarred by the partition of British India. Studying its streets, neighborhoods and historic buildings, Pakistani architects came to challenge the global consensus around "development" and its close association with modernist architecture. Their designs and structures became opportunities for thinking anew about the power of history, the boundaries of the nation, and the constitution of community in a postcolonial polity.This book is a pioneering study of architecture and the politics of construction, destruction and conservation in urban Pakistan. Chris Moffat introduces Pakistan's first postcolonial generation of architects – figures born around the time of partition, who began practicing in the 1960s and whose early careers navigated popular rebellions, military coups and emergent, pan-Islamic alignments. Moving from housing schemes to monuments, shrines to shopping malls, Moffat forges a new conversation between histories of architecture and the history of ideas in South Asia, and locates Lahore at the center of debates around contemporary urbanization, postcolonial aesthetics, and the ethics of dwelling in the modern world.