"The book is a remarkable contribution on how sovereignty is maintained by the Pakistani state and challenged by the Taliban through the performativity of Islamo-masculinity, kinship metaphors and memory in the public culture of Pakistan."
“An interesting and engaging treatise, this book will interest scholars of Islam, gender, politics, and Pakistan.”
"Khoja-Moolji’s work is an engaging and well-organized piece of literature that is remarkably relevant to not only understanding Pakistan’s current political landscape, but also today’s international relationships."
"Such a masterful takedown of Pakistani visions of masculinity — both state and non-state — makes Khoja-Moolji one of the clearest and most original scholarly voices working at the intersection of politics, South Asia, Islam and cultural and gender studies. . . .An essential read for anyone interested in imagining more hopeful and generous futures."
"Scholars in numerous other fields—postcolonialism, gender, media, and so forth—can benefit from Khoja-Moolji’s game-changing re-theorization of sovereignty and deep investigation."
"Khoja-Moolji’s work. . . . makes a significant contribution to the understanding of gender and the contestation of sovereignty in Pakistan and more broadly, Muslim majority contexts."
"Those who want to better understand the delicate but resolute efforts employed by the [Pakistani State] and other actors for nurturing consent for violence should grab a copy of Sovereign Attachments."
— Strategic Analysis
"This ability to simultaneously show the strong hold of the ideas hitherto discussed as well as their fragility, while also ensuring lucid prose and cutting-edge analysis spotlights Shenila Khoja-Moolji as one of the most clear and original scholarly voices working at the intersection of politics, Islam, and cultural and gender studies today."
— Gender, Place & Culture
“Sovereign Attachments marks a major leap in our understanding of the performative character of sovereignty itself. The book will be an indispensable guide for graduate students and researchers working on questions of gender, religion, and sovereignty in South Asia and beyond.”
— Journal of the American Academy of Religion
"This study of international relations in a cultural-affective register offers great potential to better understand concepts and the work they do in the world."
— Millennium
“Shenila Khoja-Moolji’s Sovereign Attachments…analyzes Pakistan’s political and cultural realities in conversation with the affective turn.”
— Millennium
"Shenila Khoja-Moolji’s Sovereign Attachments is a landmark monograph in the study of Islam in South Asia."
— Millennium
"At its core, Khoja-Moojli’s work explores the Pakistani culture wars and the affective attachments they elicit in the public domain as a discursive clash between the Tahrik-e-Taliban (TTP) movement and the Pakistani state."
— Political Theology
"Sovereign Attachments is an unprecedented and towering book that through a breathtaking analysis of a dazzling range of previously untapped sources shows the intimate resemblance between the Pakistani state's and the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan's interlocking and juxtaposition of Muslimness and masculinity. This is an intellectually courageous and politically productive book that offers a profound critique of sovereignty while also laying bare the fragility of masculinity. A landmark publication in the study of Islam, South Asia, and gender."––SherAli Tareen, Associate Professor Religious Studies, Franklin and Marshall College, and author of Defending Muhammad in Modernity
"Khoja-Moolji has an incredible eye for the political significance of public cultural forms, and her virtuoso analyses of a stunning range of autobiographies, television shows, and print media in Pakistan confirm her counterintuitive core arguments: competing political groups share repertoires, sovereignty depends on affective attachments, and masculine sovereignty is performative and relies on deeply gendered scripts. A dazzling rethinking of the cultural dynamics of contemporary Pakistani politics that advances theorizing about the entwinement of politics and gender."––Lila Abu-Lughod, Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science, Columbia University
"This book is a superb feminist analysis of sovereignty. Khoja-Moolji breaks ground by showing that the Pakistani state and the Taliban’s competing claims to sovereignty are nonetheless girded by gender, sexuality, piety, and kinship. The turn to figurations such as the soldier, the daughter, the mourning mother, and militant women in the public sphere provides rich and often surprising insights into sovereignty’s empirical and iterative aspects. Postcolonial Pakistan becomes a site of theory-production in Khoja-Moolji’s expert hands."—Jyoti Puri, Professor of Sociology, Simmons University
"An extremely important book that convincingly demonstrates how the State and Islamic groups in Pakistan produce ostensibly distinct sovereign claims and affects through shared discourses of gender, kinship, religion and nation. "––Aisha Ghani, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies, University of Minnesota
"This ambitious book analyzes competing models of divine and human sovereignty in contemporary Pakistan and shows how multiple sovereign figures enact power over life and death. It should excite anyone interested in the question as to why sovereignty, despite Hobbes and Weber, has never been a monopoly of the state."––Milinda Banerjee, author of The Mortal God: Imagining the Sovereign in Colonial India
