ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DO NOT REPRODUCE IN ANY FORM OR QUOTE WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 1 2 Tactical Cities: Negotiating Violence in Karachi, Pakistan by Huma Yusuf A.B. English and American Literature and Language Harvard University, 2002 SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE IN COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES AT THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY JUNE 2008 © Huma Yusuf. All rights reserved. The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. Thesis Supervisor: ________________________________________________________ Henry Jenkins Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Literature Thesis Supervisor: ________________________________________________________ Shankar Raman Associate Professor of Literature Thesis Supervisor: ________________________________________________________ William Charles Uricchio Professor of Comparative Media Studies 3 4 Tactical Cities: Negotiating Violence in Karachi, Pakistan by Huma Yusuf Submitted to the Department of Comparative Media Studies on May 9, 2008, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master in Science in Comparative Media Studies. ABSTRACT This thesis examines the relationship between violence and urbanity. Using Karachi, Pakistan, as a case study, it asks how violent cities are imagined and experienced by their residents. The thesis draws on a variety of theoretical and epistemological frameworks from urban studies to analyze the social and historical processes of urbanization that have led to the perception of Karachi as a city of violence. It then uses the distinction that Michel de Certeau draws between strategy and tactic in his seminal work The Practice of Everyday Life to analyze how Karachiites inhabit, imagine, and invent their city in the midst of – and in spite of – ongoing urban violence. Using de Certeau’s argument to contextualize ethnographic research, media analysis, and personal narrative, this thesis argues that the everyday practices of Karachiites such as remembering, driving, and blogging are ‘tactics’ aimed at creating representational spaces that are symbolically free of violence. Through such tactics, this thesis concludes, cities with an urban imaginary of violence nonetheless boast a vibrant city culture. 5 6 Table of Contents 1. Karachi: City of Tactics 9 1.1. Imagining Karachi: The Urban Imaginary of a Violent City 20 1.2. Monumental Failures: A City Lacks Consensus 25 1.3. The Built Environment: A City Seeks a Theme 33 1.4. Economic Vibrancy: A City, Not a Node 38 1.5. Strategy and Tactic: Composing Karachi’s Culture 46 2. Dancing in the Dark: Remembering the (Anti-) City 53 2.1. Now and Then: Being Present in the Past 61 2.2. Selecting Fragments 69 2.3. Inauthentic Longings: Nostalgia as an Act of Reclamation 75 3. Tacticians and Traffic Jams: The City Becomes A “Different World” 83 3.1. Streets of Fire 88 3.2. The Great Escape: Mythological Topographies and Mediaspaces 92 3.3. The Soundtrack of Safety 98 3.4. Car Talk: The Urban Text as Comedy 104 3.5. Tactical Cities: Turning Nowhere into Somewhere 106 3.6. Representing Mobilities: Karachi’s Manifold Story on Film 110 3.7. Altering Space: Sites of Violence, Sites of Play 115 3.8. An Anti-Text for Sale 121 4. Clicking to Safety: The Virtual City as Strategy 127 4.1. Metroblogging Karachi: Producing the Virtual City 130 4.2. Tactic as Strategy 140 4.3. Virtual Karachi: Tactical, Strategic, and Violent 144 5. Bibliography 150 7 8 1. Karachi: City of Tactics I have been looking for Karachi as long as I’ve been living in it. One of the first things I can remember my father telling me about the city that I was getting to know was that it had, until recently, been under water. He described how the waves used to lap against the columns of the nearby Clifton Bridge – which at the time felt like a far away spot, the edge of the complacent universe I inhabited as a member of Pakistan’s English- speaking elite and a resident of the posh Defence Housing Authority. Initially, my reaction to this news was one of relief – I was happy that there was no chance of being haunted by disgruntled corpses buried beneath our house. But a few years later, my delight that the corner of Karachi in which my life unfolded was built entirely on reclaimed land came to be tinged with anxiety: I realized that the very ground beneath my feet was no more than a veneer, a man-made cosmetic change to Karachi’s shoreline. Even as I was excited that our home and practices would form the first, and thus most profound imprint on the landfill, I became anxious that my world had no past. To counter this unexpected rootlessness, I began to seek Karachi, to uncover its historical context and fraught chronicles. As a young girl, I remember obsessively watching Raiders of the Lost Ark, reveling in an early moment in the film when a red line superimposed on a map of South Asia traced the arc of Indiana Jones’s flight from London to Khatmandu, touching down en route in Karachi, the briefest of bounces. To see Karachi on a map, projected to the world, and to know that it mattered enough for Jones to visit was strangely reassuring. The same impulse led me to spend my teenage years driving around the city, well beyond the Clifton Bridge, with successive boyfriends. I never thought of myself as an explorer, but I was certainly on a quest to find that one 9 spot – or view, or taste, or smell, or symbol – that clarified Karachi for me. Through the years, I have discovered mosques and markets, churches and colonial architecture, moonshine and masalas, but none of these has quite captured the essence of the city. Indeed, the urge to crack the code that is Karachi probably led to my career as a city reporter and motivated me to edit a photography collection on the city’s colonial architecture. It also fueled incessant drives along each new mile of reclaimed land, exploring the newest incarnations of a carnivorous city that extends infinitely into the Arabian Sea, impossible to name because it is ever evolving. Kalachi-jo ghote, Kolachi, Kurrachee, Karachi. The tango of slipping vowels that has kept the city’s name elusive to itself has also made it impossible for me to baptize my hometown. In all these years, there has only been one instance in which I felt a sudden truth about Karachi dawn on me. It was my senior year in college, and my roommates Matt, Brenna, and I were reading in our sixth-floor dormitory common room with an enviable view of Boston’s Charles River. Suddenly, we heard a loud, crashing sound. In response, Matt rushed to the window, Brenna stood upright and leaned against the closest wall, while I dove to the floor and covered my head with my arms. After we’d had a minute to recover, we tried to unpack our different reactions to the noise. Matt, who had grown up in Orlando, Florida – a ten-minute drive away from Disney World – instinctively assumed that the noise was that of fireworks, and headed to the window to catch a glimpse of the pyrotechnics. Meanwhile, Brenna, whose childhood had been spent in Indian Lake, New York (a small town in the Adirondack Mountains), assumed the noise heralded an avalanche, and so flattened herself up against a wall. For me, having spent the first 18 years of my life in Karachi, sharp sounds have long been associated with the 10 echoing detonation of a bomb or gunfire. I ducked to avoid being caught in crossfire or injured by flying debris from a fatal blast. We never determined what the noise was, but I learnt something about Karachi that night. I realized then that the one characteristic of the city that has molded my impression of it is violence—brutal and multifaceted yet persistent and pervasive enough to seem almost ordinary. There was no chance that I would have mistaken the noise for a crashing of waves, the flaring of a tandoor, the low growl of a traffic jam, the thumping beat of a danceable track, or the blow horn of a cargo ship. Beyond acoustics, the fact that Karachi is violent is expressed in every bullet-ridden alleyway, gated mansion, speeding car, riot-insured factory, barricaded petrol pump, and news report on the city. This thesis is a response to that sudden insight. It aims to tackle the fact that Karachi is violent by articulating the city’s distinct culture in the midst of – and in spite of – the violence, thinking meaningfully about the city without penning a straight history of urban violence, and making sense of the city’s residents who go on living in the thrall of bullets, blasts, and blood. But what exactly do I mean by violence? Certainly, on one level, violence needs to be understood in the most literal manner, along the lines of George Gerbner, who defines it as an “overt physical action that hurts or kills or threatens to do so.”1 But to be adequate to the complexities of Karachi, this notion of violence needs to be expanded beyond physical harm to encompass, in Sophie Body-Gendrot’s terms, ‘the Other’s 1 George Gerbner, Violence and Terror in the Mass Media (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1988), 7. 11 body’, a “body” which includes “integrity, affects, mind, goods.”2 Violence occurs when a person’s sense of inviolability is compromised.