Dams, Development, and Racialised Internal Peripheries: Hydraulic Imaginaries as Hegemonic Strategy in Pakistan

Dams and other large water infrastructures are more than mere technical projects in Pakistan. They carry a special symbolic burden understood by the state as vectors of modernisation. This paper interrogates making statist hydraulic imaginary Pakistan 1960s its continued relevance today. posits technocratic protagonist national narrative hydro-modernisation. I argue that production dissemination an racialised internal peripheries places developmental backwardness is central to Pakistani state’s infrastructural interventions. analyse images narratives from produced magazines videos contextualising them with respect cultural politics hegemony. The advances debates critical infrastructure studies via reading Antonio Gramsci’s incomplete essay on “Southern Question”. It develops tradition historical materialism—largely neglected geographers—attuned articulation geographic unevenness, hegemony, racial difference.