Imperialism, Art and Pedagogy: Notes on Knowledge Production at the Frontlines

The post-9/11 global political climate has seen an unprecedented escalation in demand for knowledge and cultural production from Pakistan. This article explores the ways in which this shift has shaped the current academic and cultural landscape in Pakistan, with a focus on the institutional space of the art school. The recent growth in these spheres has taken place alongside a simultaneous intensification in the policing and militarisation of spaces of knowledge and cultural production. We consider the possibilities of formulating a dissident art/academic practice in a sphere shaped and disciplined by the dual forces of militarisation and imperialist agendas. To this end, we explore the work of three non-institutional pedagogical/cultural/community spaces in Karachi as engaged, immersive and participatory forms of knowledge production. We find in these spaces a heightened visibility of how much is at stake in conflicts and contestations over knowledge and culture in contemporary Pakistan, as well as a realisation of the possibilities of disrupting institutionalised colonial modes of knowledge production, dissemination and circulation.

The post-9/11 global political climate has seen an unprecedented escalation in demand for knowledge and cultural production from Pakistan. This article explores the ways in which this shift has shaped the current academic and cultural landscape in Pakistan, with a focus on the institutional space of the art school. The recent growth in these spheres has taken place alongside a simultaneous intensification in the policing and militarisation of spaces of knowledge and cultural production. We consider the possibilities of formulating a dissident art/academic practice in a sphere shaped and disciplined by the dual forces of militarisation and imperialist agendas. To this end, we explore the work of three non-institutional pedagogical/cultural/community spaces in Karachi as engaged, immersive and participatory forms of knowledge production. We find in these spaces a heightened visibility of how much is at stake in conflicts and contestations over knowledge and culture in contemporary Pakistan, as well as a realisation of the possibilities of disrupting institutionalised colonial modes of knowledge production, dissemination and circulation.

Introduction
In the months of April-May 2015, Pakistan witnessed a series of repressive attempts by the military-state to police knowledge production in the university. One of the first widely known cases of censorship occurred at the Lahore University of Management This precarious moment served as a reminder for those of us in the academic community about the workings and consequences of the academic-military-industrial complex. The relentless silencing of academic discussions on Balochistan within university and cultural spaces was clear proof of how the state continues to regulate the boundaries of what is permissible and desirable to express and discuss in these intellectual spaces. The Unsilencing Balochistan seminars had become the focal point of censorship and academic containment precisely because they threatened to rupture national narratives. As charged sites of dissident knowledge production, they challenged the silence around illegal military operations and states of exception that routinely reduce Baloch citizens to 'bare life', to be monitored, contained, curtailed and, when need be, killed with impunity. This discussion exposed the military-state's nation-building project to be founded on, and sustained through, imperialism, war and violence. It became a matter of 'national security' to shut it down.
This policing of academic production extended to art schools and cultural spaces.
Our engagement with questions on the nature of this surveillance and censorship, and the possibilities of resistance was also informed by our own experiences with erasure in this period of time. A project mapping state-enforced disappearances in the Baloch community was supposed to go on exhibition at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVS) campus gallery in May. The show was cancelled and the administration made clear to us they would never be willing to show the work. It was during this time that we wrote a public statement that led to the establishment of the Karachi Art Anti-University (KAAU). This is an on-going experiment, through which we are exploring new possibilities and pedagogies for an anti-imperialist, nomadic space for radical knowledge production and the politicisation of art. This article is very much informed by our experiences thus far with this project and the work we have undertaken for it.
What follows is a montage of notes, thoughts and attempts at clarity emerging from the fear and uncertainty of this recent political moment. We attempt to make sense of the new military-state apparatus in neo-colonial times, and what it means to produce and disseminate knowledge within it, in order to better understand and imagine possibilities and strategies of resistance. We trace the trajectories of the academic-military-industrial complex in an attempt to uncover the mechanisms and consequences of the imperial university in Pakistan with specific regard to the art school, 1 as well as exploring cultural and pedagogical spaces at the margins. 1 Over the past two decades an increasing number of art schools have opened up in Pakistan. We are interested in the art school as an institutional space that has taken on a new, crucial significance in response to the growing imperial demands for knowledge and cultural production from Pakistan.

Histories of Academic Policing
The letter issued by the Punjab Government to all public and private universities in Punjab during the Unsilencing Balochistan campaign clearly demarcated boundaries of discourse that were acceptable to the state (Fig. 1). It censured all critical and political discussions as 'anti-Pakistan' and 'anti-cultural', and demanded that academic institutions comply with a patriotic responsibility to nurture 'nationalism'. Use of such rhetoric shows how the university is a key arena for the produc- To better understand our own precarious positionalities within the academicmilitary-industrial complex, we must trace out longer genealogies through which the age-old alliance between the academy and state power can become clear. Tracing earlier instances of state regulation in the academy makes visible the historical continuities between crisis and the boundaries of containment, revealing the many thresholds of academic repression. From its early years, the state was invested in the production and policing of foundational truths about the nation-state and its apparatus of imperial violence. It had inherited from the British regime, and carried forward, a system of higher education that was embedded in colonial structures of repression and militarism. One of the earliest instances in Pakistan of violent policing on campus was during the language movement protest at Dhaka University on 21 February 1952. Students were gathered to protest against the state and demand for Bangla to be made the national language. Police opened fire at this peaceful protest, killing several students. The number of deaths was never confirmed. Less than a year later, on 8-9 January 1953, students protesting for state funding at DJ Science College in Karachi suffered a similar fate.
To legitimise these acts of police brutality, student activism was invariably cast as ' anti-Pakistani' by the state. It viewed the university with suspicion, as a dangerous breeding ground for anti-national dissent, in need of strict control and surveillance in order to contain threats from ' destabilising forces'. The Central Safety Public Ordinance, passed after the events of 1952 in Dhaka University, allowed for preventive detention of students and the arbitrary imposition of Section 144 that banned public assembly. This colonial law was resurrected in the name of ' safeguarding and protecting the freedom of Pakistan' (Toor, 2009). Using the fiction of freedom, the colonial machinery of repression leftist student groups were banned on campuses and democratic expression was criminalised. In 1959, when students planned to organise a peaceful protest against the visit of President Eisenhower, the military pre-emptively arrested student leaders of the left, who were incarcerated for over a year. In 1961, following a mass student demonstration, hundreds were arrested and twelve students were put under trial in military courts for the first time (Gayer, 2014).
It is important to remember this early role of military courts in oppressing students, because these same military courts have recently been re-established in Pakistan in 2015 and are executing prisoners with impunity. In 1977, when the next military dictator, Zia-ul-Haq, came to power, he had witnessed the 1968-9 student uprising that had overthrown Ayub. He realised that banning student organisations and incarceration were not enough to mitigate the dangerous threat posed by students to his regime. He attempted to contain the influence of left-wing forces on campuses by patronising the opponent faction of Islamist student activists and providing them with firearms (Gayer, 2014). The Zia regime facilitated the militarisation of student politics as a strategy to silence left-wing students. However, with the US-sponsored Afghan jihad on-going, other students were also able to acquire arms in response. The arrival of weapons on campuses at Pakistani universities resulted in persistent student warfare in the 1980s, which conveniently distracted students from earlier intellectual traditions of political critique and protest against the mili- These knowledge factories fostered the anti-intellectualism that divorced knowledge from broader socio-political contexts and historical debates, alongside 'a natural affinity for cultural conservative agendas' (Saltman, 2014: 253). As Saltman explains, neoliberal privatisation of education sees 'education not as a public good ideally serving a democratic society but a private good primarily used for prepping workers and consumers for the economy' (Saltman, 2014: 251 (Halai, 2013). Under the pretence of academic freedom and safety, these private institutions continued to closely monitor and regulate their students. As higher education became transformed into a corporate business, profit became the driving factor for curtailing student freedoms.
Under no circumstances did these institutions want students and teachers unionising and protesting against tuition fee hikes or demanding higher faculty salaries.
Formation of student and teacher unions was strictly prohibited, with the universities often using tactics of intimidation and silencing; and in the cases where such unions did exist, they functioned merely as perfunctory bodies.

The Art School: Colonialism, Culture and A Comprador Class
The 1990s  against local English manufacturing and were highly celebrated by visitors to the exhibition; meanwhile, manufacturing in India was disappearing as Indian labour was primarily being mobilised towards producing raw materials for Europe. There was now a heightened interest in, and desire for, the preservation of Indian craft (Khan, 1983).
The successful reception of Indian art at the Great Exhibition led to a burgeoning of art schools and government funding in colonial India as both private and public entrepreneurs realised the commercial potential of such institutions.
However, alongside this commercial interest in works of Indian art, art schools were also driven by a desire to 'humanise' Indian sensibility. Schools became a vehicle for disseminating European taste, as part of 'the grand design for bringing progress to the colonies' (Mitter, 1994: 32). Western techniques were introduced not only to improve Indian arts, but also to 'rectify some of their mental faults' and 'instil reasoning habits' -intended to provide moral edification to the artists themselves (Mitter, 1994: 29).
As Mahrukh Tarapor notes, the early schools ' operated largely as vehicles for a kind of cultural imperialism in which curiously misplaced models of western academic art were imposed on Indian students to the detriment of any training whatsoever in native techniques' (Tarapor, 1980: 62). Despite their putative interest in preserving Indian craft traditions such as jewellery, carpet weaving and pottery, the art schools thus embodied a contradiction in their simultaneous desire to impose Victorian aesthetic tastes and traditions upon artists, and to train Indian labour in the production of goods suited to European needs: What was produced at the Mayo School of Arts under Kipling was something quite different from traditional craft… the stated purpose of his school, i.e., "to improve the taste of native public as regards beauty of form and finish in the articles of daily use among them", particularly since, by his own admission, he was at the same time addressing the task of enabling the local craftsmen "to fashion his ware[s] to European uses". That he did this with restraint and with a respect for the creative aspect of craft production is beyond any doubt. Yet he was open to the idea of change and adaptation of Indian crafts.
In this and in the unconcealed purpose of his presence in Lahore -that of creating a version of local craftsmanship more attuned to Victorian taste, he was successful. (Khan, 1983: 56) In Ella Shohat and Robert Stam's Narrativising Visual Culture (1998) they speak of how western chronologies of art history were violently imposed upon the global South. The countries of the global South, they argue, were denied any historical trajectory that described the development of their own artistic practices. Instead, indigenous art was narrativised within a 'progressivist history' in which narratives that privileged European art took central place: A single, local perspective has been presented as "central" and "universal", while the productions of what is patronizingly called "the rest of the world", when discussed at all, are assumed to be pale copies of European originals… This view prolongs the colonial trope which projected colonized people as body rather than mind much as the colonized world was seen as a source of raw material rather than of mental activity or manufacture… Such a view bears the traces of the infantilizing trope, which projects colonized people as embodying an earlier stage of individual human or broad cultural development, a trope which posits the cultural immaturity of colonized or formerly colonized peoples. (Shohat & Stam, 1998: 38) The art school played a key role within this colonisation of concepts of time, development and growth within the cultural sphere, as local crafts and traditions with their own pedagogical methodologies and practices were absorbed into a European pedagogical system. Art forms that required lifetimes to evolve across generations of learning, development and apprenticeship -like calligraphy or miniature paintingwere now reconstituted into new formulations of knowledge, pedagogy and temporality. These absorptions and appropriations not only functioned as a form of cultural imperialism and anthropophagy but also worked to create bodies of labour trained to manufacture in the service of colonial needs. The major mechanism instituted to perform this disciplining was thus the art institution.

Contemporary art schools continue to perform a similar function. The Indus Valley
School of Art and Architecture (full disclosure: where we both work as adjunct faculty) in Karachi was founded in 1989 during a growing culture of neoliberal privatisation. Its founders explain that the idea for this school emerged in part as a response to the growing urban violence where they felt ' an urgent need to introduce positive energy to the strifetorn city' (Bilgrami, 2003: n. pag.) IVS was envisioned as a private institution that could provide ' an environment to nurture the young, become an oasis in the parched city and help reduce the fragmentation of society' (Bilgrami, 2003: n. pag.) This oasis is today an elite, neoliberal campus-enclave; safe, secure and separate from the violence and volatilities of the city. In this privatised space, art education is framed as a consumable commodity.
Alongside this neoliberal turn, local art institutions have also been organised by the neo-colonial configurations of the global art economy and its cultural sphere (Toukan, 2010). In the years following 9/11 and the war on terror, the neoliberal turn of the local art market has intersected with, and taken place alongside, an unprecedented growth in global demand for, and fascination with, cultural and knowledge production from Pakistan. Art schools like IVS have played an integral role in preparing students for this wartime boom in demand for cultural production from Pakistan.
In its most recent phase this neo-colonial relationship has taken the form of a huge influx of US and European aid to the cultural sector. This aid comes with its own wartime agendas and aesthetic presuppositions, and in recent years has flooded and saturated the cultural field in Karachi. Art schools have enthusiastically tapped into this new aid infrastructure, collaborating widely across art and design departments with these aid organisations. was a much-lauded project for which both KYI and IVS received rave reviews in the local and international press, and which covered an overwhelming number of walls in the city. Part of USAID's CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) stream, the project set out to cover over supposedly rampant 'hate graffiti' in Karachi by replacing it with aesthetically pleasing imagery. In this discourse, graffiti was framed in entirely negative terms as religiously motivated and hate mongering -while Karachi, as was often the case with KYI projects, was framed as a terror-ridden city in which the potentiality of violence lurked at every corner and was inscribed onto every surface. The goal was to fight extremism by painting over the 'hate graffiti', which was often little more than advertisements for small businesses, such as barbers or homeopaths (graf-  our politicians continued to make promises they had no intention of fulfilling, and the country lurched from one military dictatorship to another. (Mahmud, 2013: n. pag.) The immensity of the gap within artistic discourse that Mahmud (Mahmud, 2013: n. pag.). At that time Karachi was a city under occupation from its own military, which its people were leaving in droves.
In fact, T2F was conceived in the days Sabeen spent waiting for a visa to arrive that would allow her to move to India -in that zone of non-being, or transition, or perhaps that moment when you feel the most grounded, the most surrendered to your nation state, this particular space emerged. Sabeen's T2F is located unequivocally in Karachi: it is of Karachi, and could not have been established anywhere else.
T2F emerged in the post-9/11 period during the 'war on terror', at a time when a voracious desire for knowledge and cultural production from Pakistan was surging in Western art and academic spheres. Yet the context in which Sabeen understands the founding of T2F is unequivocally local -as was the work of T2F and its audience, the local community that it served. T2F established itself at a time when Pakistani art and knowledge was in flight, being exported to the metropoles of other countries -but Sabeen stayed and T2F grew its roots deep. This was not a space of native informants: rather it presented itself as the first space that native informants would stop off at on their trips back to Pakistan, which made them feel both relevant and at home.
T2F's programming was diverse, perhaps directly in proportion to the discursive gap its artistic community space was intended to fill; and it was rare to hear Sabeen shut down any ideas. Looking back, those of us in the Left who often dismissed T2F as liberal in its politics, its collaborations and its lack of curation, arguably mistook the radical openness of the space for a liberal openness.
It should be noted, however, that T2F was not the first of such projects in Karachi. The precedent for critically engaged radical, intellectual and cultural work has existed at the margins of this city (as well as at the margins of academia) for decades. In spaces like OPP-RTI and the Syed Hashmi Reference Library, research and the production of knowledge is undertaken directly in the service of autonomy and self-determination. Here the project of knowledge production becomes inextricably linked to a larger project of liberation and community building. installations of images commemorating army 'martyrs' through the many years of war (Fig. 4). In this way, art education and art production is co-opted for visualising dominant state narratives that sustain existing colonial orders within the militarised nation of Pakistan.
Art schools and other universities thus continue to be mobilised for the production of discourses and subjectivities that maintain first colonial, and subsequently neo-colonial, configurations of global power. However, in the same way that sites of knowledge production, especially when institutionalised, can become sites for the perpetuation of systems and structures of governance, surveillance, colonialism, class rule, and alienation, they can also be turned into sites of refusal, sites for the reappropriation of the tools of ideology, and sites for the production of counter discourses, subversion of knowledges and the production of new radical subjectivities. These sites of knowledge (counter-)production are spaces of struggle, forged in conflict and demanding high stakes for all who participate within them (Caffentzis & Federici, 2009).
Alternative pedagogical spaces in the city exist not as a withdrawal from the university project, but as spaces that directly intervene and disrupt the institutionalised colonial modes of knowledge production, dissemination and circulation. They provide us with alternate pedagogical environments and critical methodologies that often situate these spaces in direct opposition to the state. As the neoliberalised universities continue to barricade themselves in from the dangers of the city's volatile streets and public spaces, giving in to surveillance and policing, these alternative pedagogical spaces are visibly becoming the battlegrounds of ideology. As arts educators, our own investment in exploring the politics of these spaces should not position us as bystanders but as practitioners deeply entrenched in the university project and seeking a fugitive path.
We started the Karachi Art Anti-University in a moment when the entanglements of the art school and military-state were laid bare to us. In a country where the national art school is undertaking the PR campaign for the military's latest armed intervention on its own people, and where the cultural field is saturated with imperialist war money, we felt an urgent need to disrupt these imperial modes of knowledge production. Through KAAU, we seek to politicise art education and create new radical pedagogies and art practices. KAAU functions as a nomadic and non-hierarchical space for shared learning, where our open sessions shift between different public spaces to allow relative freedom to engage in political critique and collectively explore possibilities for the politicisation of art in the institution and the city. Radical pedagogies that were formulated and practised in the alternative spaces of community organisations such as T2F, OPP-RTI and SHRL have been crucial for our project, to equip us with strategies that help us to address the chronic erasures at the heart of the imperial university project. As global knowledge and culture infrastructures make ever stronger demands on us to speak, to produce, and to render our populations transparent -we must look in different directions beyond the gated walls of the university apparatus. We must formulate new languages, new