Current cover illustration by Amar Raza, “A Prayer for Protection”

There is a new online journal for anyone interested in Pakistan studies. The first issue of the second volume is now available. Here is the journal description of focus:

Pakistaniaat is a refereed, multidisciplinary, open-access academic journal offering a forum for a serious scholarly and creative engagement with various aspects of Pakistani history, culture, literature, and politics.

Though several existing journals do pay a fair degree of attention to the issues of South Asia and Postcoloniality, we feel that under the current climate of high capital and war on terror, Pakistan, often subsumed under the larger registers of South Asia or Postcolonial Studies, needs a particular space of its own in our academic and creative undertakings. Thus, Pakistaniaat aims to provide a public space on the Internet to introduce and discuss hitherto neglected aspects of Pakistani cultural and literary production and to make this knowledge available to a worldwide audience.

While we welcome Pakistan-related works from the metropolitan scholars and writers, we especially encourage scholars and writers from Pakistan and Pakistani diaspora to contribute their works so that we can also serve the important purpose of showcasing the quality and intellectual vigor of scholarly and literary works by Pakistanis.

 Pakistaniaat, thus, aims to provide an inclusive venue for all those interested in Pakistan’s history, culture, and politics, and Pakistan’s place in the region as well as in the world.

We define Pakistan not only as a cultural and political entity but also as a fluid concept. We, therefore, believe that Pakistan deserves a sensitive and compassionate synchronic and diachronic scholarly and artistic attention. We aim to accomplish this important mission of “covering Pakistan” by publishing scholarly articles, creative works, translations, and reviews of books about Pakistan.