Writing Alongside Those Who Stayed: Diasporic Worlds, Intellectual Labor and Underground Rap in Afghanistan
Following NATO’s evacuation from Afghanistan in August 2021, artists whose affiliations were cultivated within the cultural infrastructure in Afghanistan funded by institutions and organizations in NATO member states became eligible for evacuation. Artists and cultural workers categorized as “at risk” and placed in programming for “artists in exile” were relocated within this infrastructure to NATO member states. This reordering has shaped the dominance of aesthetic diasporic narratives about what it means to be from Afghanistan in the present and imaginaries of social, political and economic possibilities.
Against this backdrop, the talk takes the music of Soaban—a rapper, producer and physician born in Tehran and raised in Afghanistan from an early age—as an entry point to examine what it means to write as a scholar in diasporic worlds alongside those who stayed in Persian-speaking Afghanistan under the Taliban. Through rap-e zirzamini (underground rap), it introduces “writing alongside those who stayed” as an analytic that decenters Anglophone diaspora as the primary site of intellectual authority in studies of cultural production on Afghanistan and imperialism, while moving away from liberal framings that render interlocutors in Afghanistan as voices of resilience or resistance. Based on semi-structured interviews and conversations with Soaban and his music archive between 2021 and 2025, the paper analyzes one of the big “-isms,” the concept of imperialism, as a site of intellectual and political contestation.
Soaban's anti-imperialism builds on liberal capitalism and Islam, lived experiences and transmitted memories of concurrent and successive wars and political violence. The talk foregrounds a field of tension driven by the metamorphosis of war and inscriptions of carcerality on lives, lifeworlds and environments among those categorized politically and legally as “Afghan.” Within this epistemological field, it addresses the experience of gushe neshin shodan (to withdraw into seclusion) and the desire to move Persian-speaking listeners, examining rap-e zirzamini as a form of writing that seeks to articulate power dynamics in social and political life in Afghanistan.
The talk examines what the desire to locate clear opposition and legible forms of resistance in Afghanistan’s people-centered archives of art and culture reveals about Persian-speaking diasporic worlds connected to Afghanistan and Iran in the present. Opening space for debates on the methodological, political and ethical implications of researching cultural production under current Taliban rule and wars, whether digitally or in person, the talk situates these within the global economy of war. It concludes with a reflection on generative forms of intellectual labor in the age of fossil-fuels, artificial intelligence and surveillance technology that trace water, soil and oil.
SPEAKER
For her doctoral dissertation, she did research in urban Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. After her Ph.D. (SOAS, University of London), she worked as a consultant in policy fields relating to gender, migration, labor, mental health, and prisons in Afghanistan. Previously, she held postdoctoral fellowships at Duke University and the University of Pennsylvania.
She is currently a Research Associate at the University of Bern and is affiliated with the South Asia Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Paniz is working on her first book manuscript with the working title The War Mode of Production: Masculinities, Artistic Labor, and Race in Afghanistan.