Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2023

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Anthropology

Advisor

Karen Strassler

Committee Members

Leo Coleman

Mandana Limbert

Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan

Subject Categories

Critical and Cultural Studies | Other Film and Media Studies | Social and Cultural Anthropology

Keywords

icon/iconicity, resonance, visibility, Global Blackness, Indian Ocean, South Asia

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation studies the resonances of boxing, football, and rap music in Lyari Town, a working-class neighborhood located in Pakistan’s commercial port city Karachi. Based on 12 months of in-person and remote ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation traces the circulation of iconographies of Blackness and global sports as they sediment in a port town on the Indian Ocean. Lyari has long been in the news for gang violence and urban strife, but is also noted for its talented boxers, footballers and more recently rap musicians, some of whom are of Afro-Baluch descent. These “two faces” of Lyari Town informs its present-day marginalization and racialization. This dissertation argues that people in Lyari take up and resonate with global sports and popular culture icons to rework their marginal status and racialization. It conceptualizes “iconic resonance” as the affective, aesthetic, and social processes of drawing similairites and sensuous resemblances between disparate contexts. Through embodied and visual emulation of global Black icons and sports, people produce a more positively affirming media visibility. In so doing, Lyari’s youth, athletes, and artists fashion their identities as Pakistan’s local cosmopolitans, reinscribing and reimagining already existing cosmopolitanism in the Indian Ocean to incorporate iconographies of global Blackness.

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