This project analyzes left, feminist, and anticaste literatures produced by progressive intellectuals from Punjab, a border region split between India and Pakistan. Titled Ante/ Anti-Border: Writing Resistance in India and Pakistan, the monograph shows how Punjabi writers drew on regional precolonial oral, musical, and performative practices to critique caste, patriarchy, and authoritarianism in postcolonial South Asia. Dr. Kazmi argues that by interpreting and referencing key genres embedded in performative cultures that pre-date the national divide, these authors constituted a border-crossing literary culture that traversed, and indeed, actively challenged the colonially-drawn boundary between the two nation-states.

Ante/ Anti-Border is a multi-modal project that brings together Dr. Kazmi's scholarship with her creative practice as a performer and translator. The monograph will be accompanied by a curated playlist of musical and performative texts analyzed in the book. This playlist will feature original recordings that Dr. Kazmi is working on as part of a Sachs Foundation grant, and original footage of performances by activist and artist communities she has engaged with over the past fifteen years in Pakistan. Weaving together musical and poetic archives, the project shows how contemporary literature in India and Pakistan engages and reworks popular performance and vernacular practice.