RUINS AND REMAINS: URBAN WASTE, DECAY, AND SUBALTERN MEMORY IN PAKISTANI ANGLOPHONE FICTION

Abstract

The focus of this study is on the tropes of urban waste, material decay and infrastructural ruin in Pakistani Anglophone fiction, where the detritus serves as a material unconscious that encodes colonial extraction, postcolonial developmental failure and the subaltern survival. However, postcolonial critical engagement with the category of waste as a source of text material in South Asian urban contexts is limited and needs to be developed in the Pakistani context. This study aims to fill this void by examining the ways in which the relics of garbage, decaying architecture and body-waste are used to describe the affective and political economy of urban exclusion in the city of Karachi, Lahore and urban Punjab. The theoretical framework brings together the concepts theorized by Timothy Morton (hyper-object theory), Achille Mbembe (necro-politics) and Asef Bayat (quiet encroachment of the ordinary). Thematically, the study draws on material culture analysis and ecocritical close reading that focus on the process of colonial and postcolonial dispossession as temporal palimpsest of the text, classed boundary-marker that segregates formal and informal urban spaces, and subaltern resource that is reconceived by the waste-picker as economic and mnemonic capital. The analysis shows how Pakistani urban fiction not only presents an agentive force that speaks from the margin, but also acts as a witness to structural violence, and an agent of local resistance, making it a poetics of remainder that speaks after planned obsolescence and postcolonial ecocriticism.