Forthcoming in Bina D’Costa (ed), Children and Violence: Politics of Conflict in South Asia, Cambridge University Press, 2014. (Feedback: syedraza@hawaii.edu) 1 The Kite Runner: Children, Violence, and the Ethnic Imaginary in Afghanistan Syed Sami Raza Abstract: In the backdrop of the War on Terror, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner became a national best seller in the US. But interestingly it was not welcomed in Afghanistan. While in the US its depiction of the violent face of the Taliban resonated with the official war discourse, in Afghanistan it almost stirred an ethnic and sectarian controversy. Both in the US and Afghanistan, however, the novel has was taken on its literal level, while its substance of style that aims to problematize the imaginary of ethnicity and sectarianism went unnoticed. This chapter focuses on how Hosseini uses his children characters as aesthetic subjects who in the complex urban spaces of Kabul negotiate and displace the predominant ethnic imaginary mixed with sectarianism. I On September 16, 2007, Marc Forster’s film The Kite Runner, based on Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 novel by the same name, goes for its official debut in the White House. It is screened for President George W. Bush, his defense team, and few other invited guests. Given the War on Terror still raging in Afghanistan at the time, it is not difficult to guess this small audience expected the film to serve the strategic and propaganda interests. Among the invited guests also sat Hosseini. His participation in the screening event, and a photo-op with the President and the First Lady, apparently gave the impression as to the centrality of the strategic dimension of his novel. Hosseini’s participation in the perverse screening event caused some disadvantage of its creative and critical dimensions. I wish the novel and film wrenched back from the strategic and instrumental appropriation, and restored as work of creative and critical art. Accordingly, in this chapter, I make a preliminary effort by focusing on one of the critical dimensions, that is the ethnic and sectarian imaginary in Afghanistan, and demonstrate how the novel and film register an intervention in the violence entailed by the imaginary. In so doing, the chapter will break somewhat from the approach in the bulk of chapters that tend to plug local cases into macro level narratives about enforcement of, or compliance with international standards on children’s rights. It however utilizes more of a literary and film studies approach to reading Afghan audience’s reception of The Kite Runner in Afghanistan. 1 While in the U.S. the film gets its highest attention at the White House, in Afghanistan the government places ban on it. Given several street protests in Kabul, the government claims that the film presents the ethnic groups in “a bad light,” and therefore could trigger an ethnic and sectarian controversy. Din Mohammad Rashed Mubarez, the then deputy 1 I am thankful to the anonymous reviewer who suggested that I should flag at the very outset the break of approach that this chapter makes with the rest of chapters. Accordingly, the last few lines of the paragraph are framed almost verbatim on her comments.