Watson Events

A People's History and the Cold War: Historicizing the Left in Pakistan

A People's History and the Cold War: Historicizing the Left in Pakistan

This panel discussion will bring together scholars working on the history of the Communist Party of Pakistan, Progressive Writers Movement and Pakistan People's Party in the 1950s and 1960s. If 1968 labor and student protests could bring down a dictatorship, what happened to the left? What are the implications of recovering these lost histories of the left in the global south? 

Speakers include Kamran Asdar Ali (Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin); Sadia Toor (Author of The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan); and Asad Ahmad (Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University).

Discussants are Asef Bayat (Aga Khan Visiting Professor of Islamic Humanities at Brown), and James Green, (Professor of Latin American History, Brown).

Location: Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.