Dreams as Counter-Archives: Decolonial World-Building in Kashmir

Abstract (English)

Dreams are self-surpassing, imbued with decolonial potentiality. They offer productive crisis and interruption and are invitations to the realm of relation and affective reverberation. Set in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, the dream ethnography weaves together ordinary dreamers connected to Kashmir —a disputed territory— in extraordinary ways. A tapestry emerges, which connects the wistful to the wishful, the woeful to the willful. These dreamscapes offer surreal thickness, their exuberance is permeated with potentiality for a Kashmir yet to come, offering vivid appraisals on its forms and futures. Dreams are as much part of history as any “official” document, testimony, or narrative. In this counter-archive of dreams, Kashmiri desire, nostalgia, and aspiration are foregrounded to insist on the imaginative and fantastical in political work. Dreams can offer clarity on the complex negotiations of everyday life under the opaque conditions of coloniality. They are not socially or politically irrelevant, but rather socially and politically irreverent. An engagement with dreamers and their dreams can help dislodge decades of Indian-centric and colonial scholarship on Kashmir, putting in motion an unlearning procedure allowing Kashmiris to reemerge as storytellers and narrative weavers of their own subjectivity.

Occupation confiscates and cancels everything, including dreams. But Kashmiris persist in their dreaming; they teach life even as they sleep. The paper demonstrates that dreams, visions, and visitations— assertions of the intimate—are vital for decolonial world-building. They provide room to breathe in the colonial present.