The poetics of violence

Updating earlier works on violence in the city, this book elaborates on a key question: “After almost three decades of violent conflict and repeated sequences of escalation, how was Karachi spared a full-grown, free-for-all conflagration?” Taking the city at large as his analytic framework, Gayer tracks “patterns and routines of ordered disorder” through eight months of fieldwork conducted over twelve years with activists, political representatives, social workers, poets and militants across the city, including in its most volatile areas. The book complements its rich theoretical interpretation with a meticulously researched analysis of party literature, 20 years of local press coverage, Urdu poetry, and a wealth of photographs, including those from the Dawn newspaper’s archives