Love, War, and Other Longings Essays on Cinema in Pakistan

Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar is associate professor of History at Brown University, and works on twentieth century histories of decolonization, displacement, war, non-violence, the visual archive, and contemporary art. She is most well-known for her book The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (2007), and is presently completing a manuscript entitled The Ruin Archive: Art and War at the Ends of Empire, that interrogates colonial films and photographs from the north-west frontier for the writing of an anti-colonial history. She co-organized with Asad Ali the two Brown-Harvard Pakistani film festivals in 2014 and 2015.

Asad Ali is a sociocultural anthropologist whose work focuses on the relationship of the political and the religious, as mediated by language and law. He is particularly interested in rethinking the historical formation and contemporary possibilities of liberalism, secularism, and religion in postcolonial Pakistan. His current interests and projects include work on censorship and populist language of the Pakistan Peoples Party. Before becoming an anthropologist, he worked as a journalist and documentary film-maker, and then taught at Harvard for some years where he, along with Vazira Zamindar, organized the two Brown-Harvard Pakistani film festivals.