Save the Date: Depth and Belonging, Ijlal Muzaffar

Join us on February 24th at 5:00pm in Carpenter 201F for Ijlal Muzaffa's lecture, Depth and Belonging. 

In this talk, Muzaffar will examine the untenable project of growing cotton in the Sindh desert (now in Pakistan) started by the British colonial government in the late nineteenth century. Entire villages, including his family's own, were transplanted from the north to the desert along new canals to not only grow new crops but also to undercut the political power of local pirs (saints) by displacing their followers. In charting different claims of settlement and displacement that followed, he will argue that in theaters of belonging and displacement, it is not just the regimes of surface and visibility—maps, property, systems of taxation and water distribution—that determine legitimacy, but modes of giving meaning to depth.

Ijlal Muzaffar is Professor of Architectural History at the Rhode Island School of Design. He is the author of Modernism's Magic Hat: Architecture and the Illusion of Development without Capital (University of Texas Press, 2024).