A big thank you @zfn.bsky.social @pankegallery.bsky.social for hosting my reading last night. I had the fortune of sharing my writing on Berlin as it shifts from a project of be/longing to that of un/loving, that is, not the absence or opposite of love, rather its conscious withholding.
Omar Kasmani is a transdisciplinary thinker and writer based in Berlin. Across fields of cultural anthropology, affect theory, and queer-of-color critique, his research and writing tackle ideas of intimacy, post-migrant be/longing, and queer worldmaking. He is the author of Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy and Saintly Affects in Pakistan published in 2022 by Duke University Press. His current book project turns to the self as a public archive of daily loves and migrant un/feeling in Berlin.
The metaphor of the city creates the fantasy of a physical place online where people can meet, giving the illusion that the internet will help to bring us together—if not online, then at least offline while navigating through the actual city. In conversation with Omar Kasmani we will retrace how moving in the city is closely interwoven with the internet. It is the blend of social media, messengers, and dating apps with actual distances and places that is characteristic of our city lives and loves. At the intersection of the urban and the virtual, where the pleasure and the drama of intimacy, love, politics and anything in between unfolds, Kasmani takes us on a personal journey through Berlin, a city that is at once a love-like relationship, a break-up, and an old companion who betrays.
Love is a City in Anguish ~ reading and talk with Omar Kasmani @kasmanio.bsky.social
netzkunst.berlin/metaphors/#e...
Tuesday, 3 December 2024 at 7 pm
📍 @pankegallery.bsky.social
From Net, City, World to Cloud, Market, Sea
Curatorial concept: Tereza Havlíková, Julia Kochanek, Anneliese Ostertag
DM for pdf. Happy to share!
“It is 2024 and Berlin feels like a heartbreak” #justout my essay on the minor/ felt ways in which urban-political turmoil corresponds with matters of the heart. About digital intimacies, migrant heartache and boy-trouble, or “when home fails to inhabit you the way you inhabit it” @zfn.bsky.social
Refusing to award a prize named after an SA & NSDAP member, intimately tied to Nazi socialites, to a non-German artist who called for a boycott of Israeli institutions in light of what the UN calls genocide might just set a new benchmark for hypocrisy in Germany.
www.theguardian.com/world/2024/n...
I hereby announce that I shall henceforth expect hearts in my intro - thank you @mxschnepf.bsky.social @unibremen.bsky.social
Not sure what’s broken can be sutured, or if we can knit ourselves out of German horrors, but I know that “Thin Attachments” my Berlin book project on migrant loves & be/longing now qualifies as anthropology of/with a broken heart (riffing off Behar). Bani captures a shared landscape of un/feeling.
My book is out! Yes! "Breathing Hearts: Sufism, Healing, and Anti-Muslim Racism in Germany" published by @berghahnbooks
50% discount on print copies if you buy it directly from the Berghahn website with the discount code "SELI1982". Affordable ebook version: www.berghahnbooks.com/title/SelimB...
Diaspora is negotiating the terms of betrayal / You are alive here because they’re not / Over there
- Momtaza Mehri in Bad Diaspora Poems (2023, 95)
Cover of Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City by Darren Byler. Cover features a piece from Maxime Matthys's 2019 art project, 2091: The Ministry of Privacy. The image depicts a man by a building, with facial recognition software homing in on his face.
Cover of Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan by Omar Kasmani. Cover shows a blurry photo of human silhouettes in motion, one dressed in orange, the other in white.
Congratulations to all our authors whose books have won awards since July 2023, including @darrenbyler.bsky.social, @kasmanio.bsky.social, and more!
dukeupress.wordpress.com/2023/12/27/f...
Readings, samosas, conversations + discounted copies 🥳 Join us this evening in Berlin-Neukölln as we introduce and celebrate “Pakistan Desires: Queer Futures Elsewhere” @dukepress.bsky.social
On affective postures of the state and the companionable histories we sense and feel in the queer-affective weave of the sacred in Pakistan - read my invited entry in the Contending Modernities series “Enlivening the Nation” - contendingmodernities.nd.edu/theorizing-m...
The lovely Hajra Haider Karrar and I met this afternoon to co-conspire for a-soon-to-be-coming deliciously abundant berlin-mehfil for this darling-of-a-book. Stay tuned and save the date: 15 December. Oh and it’s currently 50% off, so get your copy now @dukepress.bsky.social
Cover of Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan by Omar Kasmani. Cover shows a blurry photo of human silhouettes in motion, one dressed in orange, the other in white.
Congratulations to @kasmanio.bsky.social, whose book "Queer Companions" has won the 2023 Ruth Benedict Book Prize for Outstanding Single-Authored Monograph from The Association for Queer Anthropology! ow.ly/O38i50Q9swl
On how to properly react to an amazing edited volume: Cutie Queer Companion @mxschnepf.bsky.social meets Pakistan Desires @dukepress.bsky.social - goes (rightfully) bonkers!
On enduring, if not surviving, the thickness, mastery and violence of European history and its cruel manifestations in the present.
From this day forward, following the great German example, I shall only work with those White-German academics who have publicly denounced or distanced themselves from Habermas. Punkt.
Thank you so much!
Darling indeed!
Thanks so much, dear Henrike!
Queer Companions @dukepress.bsky.social wins the 2023 Ruth Benedict Prize 💕 In her email, the chair of the prize committee (AQA, Association for Queer Anthropology) noted, “the book took our breath away.” What an absolute honor this is; thank you for the love and recognition!
A desire comes to world, a dream made real. So incredibly proud, over the moon really. To all those who came on board, believed in the vision, made it happen, especially the incredible @lizault.bsky.social - I say: pyar, shukriya + desire mubarak 💕 Pakistan Desires is out now @dukepress.bsky.social
EASA statement
"We call for an immediate ceasefire and immediate humanitarian relief for the people of Gaza, and a commitment from Israel and all governments to a peace process that deals with the historic inequalities, injustice and structural violence in the region."
easaonline.org/outputs/supp...
If one is to go by Jesus’ example, at 20 something followers, there’s still hope for me. Hello bluesky-beauties. I’ve arrived!