Nichola Khan – Arc of the Journeyman

Describe your book

The context for the book is forty years of continuous war in Afghanistan since the Soviet Invasion of 1979, through to 9/11 and the NATO occupation that have made Afghans the second largest refugee group in the world. It about a community of Afghans who became British taxi-drivers living transnational lives between the UK, and Pakistan’s frontier city of Peshawar where their families live as refugees. Pakistan is largest host country for Afghan refugees, although not a signatory to the 1951 UN conventions. During Britain’s ‘open door’ asylum policy of the 90s—during the first Taliban regime—their families paid smuggling agents for their overland passage across Europe, investing in their sons to secure the dream of financial security through remittances. Over almost a decade of fieldwork in the English county of Sussex, and in Peshawar, the book tracks young men’s protracted overland journeys to Britain, their process of becoming asylum seekers, refugees, then food delivery drivers, taxi-drivers, and eventually citizens, and heads of household. It also focuses on those who do not settle their wives and children in England, but who remit everything they earn, and the deep predicaments of those who fail to achieve their dream of upward and onward mobility. 

Why did you decide to publish it with a university press?

Four decades of war has seen a near-embargo on conducting anthropological research in Afghanistan, and an over-reliance on studies from the 1970s, although new literature is emerging. Therefore we have a lack of contemporary in-depth knowledge combined with persistent colonial era stereotypes that were revived in the 2001-14 war- alongside excesses of compassion and the view of Afghan migrants as Europe’s immigration problem. We’ve seen some hackneyed arguments about tribalism, the burqa, and the cultural codes of the Pashtuns- who comprise the majority ethnic group in this study. While cultural codesdo still signify, they don’t determine people’s behavior—and also change in conditions of change (an argument the anthropologist Fredrik Barth made 60 years ago we’d do well to remember in challenging the colonial and Eurocentric record on Afghanistan. 

This book is a long-term ethnography, and a ‘slow cooking’ over many years. While the outputs of funding for example might depend on a quicker process of production, it’s important to retain traditional kinds of scholarship. 

I hope readers will understand something about the lives of the marginal refugee communities they may live alongside, but know very little about. 

Do you enjoy the writing process?

I am quite a writerly person and for me, the writing process is the most exciting part of the research endeavor. Having said that, I have to write many drafts in order to find the right connections between component elements of theory, data, and argument. Of course, writing can also be frustrating and maddening, and the old saying that it’s ‘90% hard work’ is true, but as I suppose I have spent a third of my life writing, it seems I must enjoy it!

What were your personal motivations in writing this book?

I’ve lived in Pakistan, conducted long-term research on migration in Karachi, travelled in Afghanistan, and am of mixed-race Eurasian heritage- so issues of racism and migration also speak to my own experience as a ‘out-of-place’ citizen in England (where I was born)- and an inheritor of the legacies of colonial wars, in a different part of Asia. For these reasons I’ve always identified with foreigners, exiles, outsiders- which Levi-Strauss describes as partly also the anthropologist’s position. The book’s stories speak not only to Afghanistan as the world’s second largest refugee producing county, but also more widely to all those living out minoritised, racialised lives in the aftermath of empire. 

What is the best piece of advice anyone has ever given to you?

My former mother-in-law in Karachi used to tell me to cultivate patience and gratitude. She could see I needed to slow down, to not follow every tangent, and to keep confidence through the great trials of life. She was the head of her household, and raised six children single-handedly including through periods of armed conflict and military crackdowns. I have great admiration for her wisdom and fortitude.

What piece of advice might you give to young academics looking to follow in your footsteps?

Protect your research time, keep the faith, keep writing, find the story that really inspires or compels you, tell it, and don’t compromise. And don’t waste time or get lost in departmental dynamics!

What’s next?

After almost 20 years, I’m still writing about war, empire and migration—this time in another (short) book which builds on some of the experimental and literary approaches I developed in Arc of the Journeyman. It’s autoethnographic in part, and reflects on some interactions of respiratory pandemic, state repression, and transgenerational trauma in the COVID era. I develop these connections through the concept of respiratory politics, moving historically between former British territories on the South China Sea (Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia) and post-war England through to the present. Insofar as it is a personal and family memoir, it also speaks to some personal ghosts that came to the fore during the pandemic and its lockdowns. 

Nichola Khan is a reader in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Brighton. She is author of Mohajir Militancy in Pakistan and Mental Disorder: Anthropological Insights, and editor of Cityscapes of Violence in Karachi: Publics and Counterpublics. She is the author of Arc of the Journeyman (2021), published by the University of Minnesota Press.