Necrospace, (un)grievable lives, and colonial continuity in Nadeem Aslam’s Af-Pak Frontier

The Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier is often perceived and constructed as a violent geography through media projections, and academic and imaginative literature. Such constructions have become more apparent in the wake of 9/11 as if this pivotal moment was an event of rupture that radically carved out this “violent” region as a case study. Zooming in on this temporal marker reduces representations of the region to an offshoot of a singular event and disregards the colonial continuities for and grievability of the local Pashtun population. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics and Judith Butler’s framing of grievability, this article examines selected works by Rudyard Kipling and Nadeem Aslam to show how the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier — also known as the Pashtun belt — is framed in colonial and Pakistani anglophone fiction as a necrospace where lives of the local population are not apprehended as losable and hence preservable. This study establishes that this differential grievability, embedded in violent representations, produces cyclical violence through selectively desirable and undesirable bodies in the region.