Aspirational affects and boundary crossing: Ali Zafar, the Pakistani “Prince of Pop”

This discussion considers the celebrity text of actor and musician Ali Zafar. By looking at his performance in multiple films as well as two recent musical albums, I investigate how Zafar’s work challenges stereotypes about Pakistani and Muslim identity while engaging the politics of “border crossing” – whether geographical, religious, or cultural. Each film emphasizes the potential of transnational mobility, both economic and cultural, to overcome literal and figurative “borders.” By integrating Pakistani cultural references, imagery, and musical traditions within this larger globalized framework, Zafar’s work in cinema and music imagines India, Pakistan and the West as a culturally continuous ontology. His diegetic performance within cinematic narrative and the construction of his public persona in popular journalism is compared in supporting this argument.