Aroosa Kanwal - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Aroosa Kanwal
Routledge eBooks, Jul 31, 2023
Journal of contemporary poetics, Jun 1, 2022
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2020
This article discusses how the first-person genre, especially a Gazan wartime diary, allows both ... more This article discusses how the first-person genre, especially a Gazan wartime diary, allows both writer and reader to imagine new possibilities for understanding contemporary colonial drone warfare, which is instrumental in the strategic silencing and invisibilization of war victims. By creating this zone of invisibilization (one that I will name the “dronesphere”) through obfuscating loss of life, war perpetrators aim to drown out the voices of opposition and resistance in Gaza. This is precisely why an increasing autonomy of military technologies that I call the “anthropomorphizing of drones” has triggered fierce debates over the unaccountability for war crimes committed against those on the receiving end of such autonomous weaponry. One specific case that deserves serious attention in this regard is the deafening silence surrounding Israel’s use of lethal drones to assassinate people in Palestine, which has led to the strategic silencing and invisibility of Palestinian deaths and...
Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora, 2014
Her first monograph Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction: Beyond 9/11 (Basings... more Her first monograph Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction: Beyond 9/11 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015) received the KLF-Coca-Cola award for the best non-fiction book of the year 2015 written in English by the writer of Pakistani origin in 2016. Aroosa's second book The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing (UK: Routledge, 2018) (co-editor Saiyma Aslam) is the first companion to Pakistani anglophone literature. She teaches Global Muslim Narratives, Modern Drama, Postcolonial literatures, Pakistani Literature in English and Contemporary Short Fiction. Aroosa's research and teaching interests focus on post-9/11 constructions of Muslims and Islam in relation to Islamophobic discourse, politics of representation, and questions of migration, borders, identity and resistance in contemporary Pakistani Anglophone fiction and Muslim writing. Her chapters on these connections can be found in Claire Chambers and Caroline Herbert,
This paper discusses the ways in which Nadeem Aslam’s novels – Maps for Lost Lovers and The Waste... more This paper discusses the ways in which Nadeem Aslam’s novels – Maps for Lost Lovers and The Wasted Vigil – highlight the need for a reconceptualisation of immigrant identity, in post-9/11 world, by linking traumatic experiences of an individual to the collective memory of a community or nation. Taking cue from Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s concepts of mourning and melancholia, an interface between transnational movement and mourning will be investigated in order to emphasise how private grief becomes a metaphor for public grief. With reference to Aslam’s novels (that are set against the background of post-9/11 rhetoric of war on terrorism), I discuss how an endless process of diasporic nostalgia and mourning interacts with immigrants’ efforts to deal with different ‘others’ in their adopted homelands.
Journal of Gender Studies, 2020
This article explores the phenomenon of the de and rehumanization of khwaja siras in two Pakistan... more This article explores the phenomenon of the de and rehumanization of khwaja siras in two Pakistani national television plays: Alif Allah Aur Insaan (Alpha, Allah and Man) and Khuda Mera Bhi Hai (God is Mine too). I argue that these two plays made a significant contribution to the reimagining and reconstruction of khwaja sira subjectivities, which were later endorsed by Third gender legislation in 2009 and the Pakistan National Assembly's historic Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act of 2018. In order to understand the process of the reversal of dehumanization, namely rehumanization, I discuss how violence (both physical and psychological) has been legitimized in Pakistan's patriarchal society by restricting the mobility of khwaja siras in both private and public spaces. Against the backdrop of processes of multilayered dehumanization and systemic violence, I argue that the pro-(gendered) minority narratives in these plays initiated a process of redefining the notions of home, belonging and relatedness for transgenders; in so doing, the newly-constructed multi-dimensional khwaja sira subjectivities gesture towards the (re)opening of gender restrictive spaces, enumerating the complex ways in which khwaja siras assert their agency and inclusion within mainstream society through resistance and collective action.
Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction, 2015
Whilst reflecting upon the diversity of Muslim writings in English in the conclusion of his book ... more Whilst reflecting upon the diversity of Muslim writings in English in the conclusion of his book Muslim Narratives and the Discourse of English, Amin Malak notes that “with no defining or definitive influences as yet interlinking the majority of them, they thus reflect the specificity of each writer’s sociohistorical milieu, intellectual progress, and artistic development … to an engagement with the world and the values of Islam” (151). This chapter also seeks to address first- and second-generation Pakistani writers’ intellectual and artistic engagement with the representation of Islam and Muslims in pre- and post-9/11 contexts. This was also necessary because “post-9/11 (Pakistani) fiction” has been seen as a de-historicised phenomenon; and what I have wanted to do is to contextualise the so-called boom in Pakistani post-9/11 fiction in relation to a rich literary tradition that has developed over more than three decades. By that I mean the first-generation fictional narratives concerned with the 1947 Partition and its aftermath as well as post-independence narratives written in the 1980s, with a particular focus on the Islamic reassertion during Zia-ul-Haq’s administration. This era is also foregrounded by many second-generation writers in their fictional works as a turning point in the political history of Pakistan. The post-9/11 situation of Pakistan indeed owes a great deal to Zia’s foreign policies and his ruthless Islamisation of the country, influencing the rise of Islamic extremism and jihadist culture in Pakistan and Afghanistan (discussed in Chapters 2 and 3).
Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction, 2015
Fictional representations of home and identity by second-generation writers of Pakistani origin h... more Fictional representations of home and identity by second-generation writers of Pakistani origin have received increasing attention, especially in the post-9/11 scenario, with its attendant reductive representations of Islamic fundamentalism. With an aim to rebut “9/11 fictional narratives” that reinforce public rhetoric in the West and thereby equating Islam with terrorism, Shamsie’s novels confront these negative international attitudes towards Muslims and Islam. By locating her characters in their ancestral homeland as well as abroad, Shamsie engages with issues related to identity and migration that began to change as a result of post-9/11 mainstream public narratives about suicide bombing, religious fanaticism, terrorism, jihad and Islamic fundamentalism. Linking these two foci (transnational movement and Muslim identity in the 9/11 context), I will be concerned here to highlight the wide range of experiences and dilemmas associated with Shamsie’s Pakistani and migrant characters’ sense of identity, their struggles with hyphenated identities, and the sometimes xenophobic imaginary of the white population abroad. I specifically address the ways in which stigmatisation on the basis of ethnicity has morphed into stigmatisation on the basis of faith, illustrating how xenophobia has taken the form of Islamophobia.
Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction, 2015
In Fear Of Small Numbers, Arjun Appadurai discusses the birth of Pakistan and draws our attention... more In Fear Of Small Numbers, Arjun Appadurai discusses the birth of Pakistan and draws our attention to “a huge and contentious scholarship surrounding the story of Partition, the politics that led to it, and the bizarre geographies it produced (with East and West Pakistan flanking an independent India from 1947–1973 when East Pakistan succeeded in seceding from West Pakistan, giving birth to Bangladesh, a new nation on India’s eastern borders)” (66). Appadurai’s concern over “the bizarre geographies” becomes the starting point for Uzma Aslam Khan’s engagement at a narrative level with her interpretation of issues of Muslim stereotyping and “war on terror” rhetoric. Rather than viewing 9/11 as the only marker of Muslim identity formations, Khan links the post-9/11 reframing of Pakistani identities to the upsurge of Islamic terrorist groups involved in sectarian conflicts within the subcontinent and the Middle East, as well as to the Islamisation of Pakistan from the 1970s onwards. In contrast to those second- generation writers who have focused for the most part on what has happened since 9/11, Khan’s oeuvre foregrounds pre-9/11 cultural, social, political and historical causes that underlie the recent global stereotyping of Muslims and Islam. This chapter explores Khan’s representations of South Asian political history of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, primarily in the novels Trespassing and The Geometry of God, which I describe as “retrospective prologues to post-9/11 fiction”, but also through her prolific journalistic writings.
Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction, 2015
Emphasising the centrality as well as the profound influence of “war on terror” discourses in the... more Emphasising the centrality as well as the profound influence of “war on terror” discourses in the reframing of Pakistani Muslim identities after 9/11, I have sought to present a big picture of “US realpolitik” in this book by looking beyond 9/11 contexts in fictional narratives by second-generation Pakistanis. My main contention has been that a post-9/11 paradigmatic shift in identity formation — from signifiers of race, gender, class and nationalism to the non-territorial global ummah — cannot be understood in its entirety without referring to 9/11 as a political construct rather than merely considering it a civilisational clash. Situating 9/11 within the parameters of cultural and political encounters as well as economic Manichaeism has enabled my challenge to the centrality of “culture talk” surrounding Islamophobic narratives after 9/11. The connection between increased Islamophobia and 9/11 necessarily engenders a particular kind of attention to historical events such as the “Rushdie Affair”, the Danish cartoon controversy, the Gulf Wars, the Cold War, the Soviet–Afghan war and the Iranian Revolution, which have contributed to radical perceptions about Islam and Muslims (particularly in relation to Pakistan). The present crises cannot be de-historicised; a series of recent events — including hysterical protests against the derogatory “Innocence of Muslims” YouTube video (2012), the persecution of religious minorities (particularly Shia Muslim Hazaras) in Quetta (2013) and the burning of Christians’ houses in the Badami Bagh area of Lahore (2013) over alleged blasphemy, all of which epitomise cultural and religious intolerance — are reminiscent of Muslims’ reactions towards offence in the past.
Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction, 2015
Post-9/11 culture plays a significant role in redefining diasporic Muslim identities due to an in... more Post-9/11 culture plays a significant role in redefining diasporic Muslim identities due to an inability or unwillingness of some diasporics to be fully accepted among host or home communities. This situation fosters feelings of alienation, exclusion, trauma and melancholy in such diasporics and deprives them of any sense of belonging. As a result of these pathologies of dislocation, diasporic identities are increasingly constructed on the basis of an imagined space that is not only geographically diverse, but also free from cultural artefacts of indigenousness. Since 9/11, Western public discourses have been raising questions over potential links between radical Islam, terrorism and Muslims, particularly because the terrorists who were involved in attacks on the World Trade Centre and the 7/7 London bombings were Western-educated Muslims. In this chapter I argue that it is largely due to the nature of emerging public narratives about the “war on terror” that second-generation diasporics in Britain — alienated from their cultures of origin and yet proud of their Muslim identities — are renegotiating their identities by affiliating with a global ummah.
Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction
Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction
Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction
Acknowledgements Introduction 1. How the World Changed: Narratives of Nationhood and Displaced Mu... more Acknowledgements Introduction 1. How the World Changed: Narratives of Nationhood and Displaced Muslim Identities 2. Responding to 9/11: Contextualising the Subcontinent and Beyond 3. Reimagining Home Spaces: Pre- and Post-9/11 Constructions of Home and Pakistani Muslim Identity 4. Global Ummah: Negotiating Transnational Muslim Identities Coda: Re-imagining Pakistan Notes Bibliography Index
NUML journal of critical inquiry, 2020
Following Edward Said’s theorization of filiation and affiliation, this paper maps transformative... more Following Edward Said’s theorization of filiation and affiliation, this paper maps transformative itineraries of second-generation Pakistani immigrants in Britain who negotiate their personal identities on the basis of choice and affiliation instead of filiation. I argue that, as a result of the changing relationships of migrant parents with their British-born children, either because of a clash between nostalgia for the culture of origin and the host culture, between racial discrimination or the changing social structures of multicultural Britain, familial bonds within Pakistani families in Britain are severely affected. In other words, public or “external debates” in the diaspora, that Ralph Grillo describes as migrants’ imagined cultural practices, interact with internal debates that occur within migrant families. Against this backdrop, I explore the tensions, informed by a filiation-affiliation dialectic, that exist between first and second generations and the way these affect t...
Journal of international women's studies, 2018
This survey paper focuses on Pakistani Anglophone literary narratives that examine the multiple i... more This survey paper focuses on Pakistani Anglophone literary narratives that examine the multiple identities of victimized women as opposed to the commonly endorsed essentialist and reductive argument that is too easily conscripted into post-9/11 global discourses surrounding women of colour. In the context of the global hegemony of Western scholarship, my purpose in this paper is to foreground the simultaneous liberation and subjection, centricity and marginality, of Pakistani women. I argue that it is important to situate third world women’s subjection as well as agency in relation to the class, regional, ethnic and religious diversities that inform the degree and nature of freedom and constraints that women experience. In addition to this, urban, rural, tribal and feudal environments also inform the plurality of victimized identities as well as of women’s agency. Against this backdrop, I read Pakistani literary narratives as acts of breaking through the Eurocentric monopolization o...
The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing, 2018
The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing, 2018
Routledge eBooks, Jul 31, 2023
Journal of contemporary poetics, Jun 1, 2022
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2020
This article discusses how the first-person genre, especially a Gazan wartime diary, allows both ... more This article discusses how the first-person genre, especially a Gazan wartime diary, allows both writer and reader to imagine new possibilities for understanding contemporary colonial drone warfare, which is instrumental in the strategic silencing and invisibilization of war victims. By creating this zone of invisibilization (one that I will name the “dronesphere”) through obfuscating loss of life, war perpetrators aim to drown out the voices of opposition and resistance in Gaza. This is precisely why an increasing autonomy of military technologies that I call the “anthropomorphizing of drones” has triggered fierce debates over the unaccountability for war crimes committed against those on the receiving end of such autonomous weaponry. One specific case that deserves serious attention in this regard is the deafening silence surrounding Israel’s use of lethal drones to assassinate people in Palestine, which has led to the strategic silencing and invisibility of Palestinian deaths and...
Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora, 2014
Her first monograph Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction: Beyond 9/11 (Basings... more Her first monograph Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction: Beyond 9/11 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015) received the KLF-Coca-Cola award for the best non-fiction book of the year 2015 written in English by the writer of Pakistani origin in 2016. Aroosa's second book The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing (UK: Routledge, 2018) (co-editor Saiyma Aslam) is the first companion to Pakistani anglophone literature. She teaches Global Muslim Narratives, Modern Drama, Postcolonial literatures, Pakistani Literature in English and Contemporary Short Fiction. Aroosa's research and teaching interests focus on post-9/11 constructions of Muslims and Islam in relation to Islamophobic discourse, politics of representation, and questions of migration, borders, identity and resistance in contemporary Pakistani Anglophone fiction and Muslim writing. Her chapters on these connections can be found in Claire Chambers and Caroline Herbert,
This paper discusses the ways in which Nadeem Aslam’s novels – Maps for Lost Lovers and The Waste... more This paper discusses the ways in which Nadeem Aslam’s novels – Maps for Lost Lovers and The Wasted Vigil – highlight the need for a reconceptualisation of immigrant identity, in post-9/11 world, by linking traumatic experiences of an individual to the collective memory of a community or nation. Taking cue from Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s concepts of mourning and melancholia, an interface between transnational movement and mourning will be investigated in order to emphasise how private grief becomes a metaphor for public grief. With reference to Aslam’s novels (that are set against the background of post-9/11 rhetoric of war on terrorism), I discuss how an endless process of diasporic nostalgia and mourning interacts with immigrants’ efforts to deal with different ‘others’ in their adopted homelands.
Journal of Gender Studies, 2020
This article explores the phenomenon of the de and rehumanization of khwaja siras in two Pakistan... more This article explores the phenomenon of the de and rehumanization of khwaja siras in two Pakistani national television plays: Alif Allah Aur Insaan (Alpha, Allah and Man) and Khuda Mera Bhi Hai (God is Mine too). I argue that these two plays made a significant contribution to the reimagining and reconstruction of khwaja sira subjectivities, which were later endorsed by Third gender legislation in 2009 and the Pakistan National Assembly's historic Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act of 2018. In order to understand the process of the reversal of dehumanization, namely rehumanization, I discuss how violence (both physical and psychological) has been legitimized in Pakistan's patriarchal society by restricting the mobility of khwaja siras in both private and public spaces. Against the backdrop of processes of multilayered dehumanization and systemic violence, I argue that the pro-(gendered) minority narratives in these plays initiated a process of redefining the notions of home, belonging and relatedness for transgenders; in so doing, the newly-constructed multi-dimensional khwaja sira subjectivities gesture towards the (re)opening of gender restrictive spaces, enumerating the complex ways in which khwaja siras assert their agency and inclusion within mainstream society through resistance and collective action.
Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction, 2015
Whilst reflecting upon the diversity of Muslim writings in English in the conclusion of his book ... more Whilst reflecting upon the diversity of Muslim writings in English in the conclusion of his book Muslim Narratives and the Discourse of English, Amin Malak notes that “with no defining or definitive influences as yet interlinking the majority of them, they thus reflect the specificity of each writer’s sociohistorical milieu, intellectual progress, and artistic development … to an engagement with the world and the values of Islam” (151). This chapter also seeks to address first- and second-generation Pakistani writers’ intellectual and artistic engagement with the representation of Islam and Muslims in pre- and post-9/11 contexts. This was also necessary because “post-9/11 (Pakistani) fiction” has been seen as a de-historicised phenomenon; and what I have wanted to do is to contextualise the so-called boom in Pakistani post-9/11 fiction in relation to a rich literary tradition that has developed over more than three decades. By that I mean the first-generation fictional narratives concerned with the 1947 Partition and its aftermath as well as post-independence narratives written in the 1980s, with a particular focus on the Islamic reassertion during Zia-ul-Haq’s administration. This era is also foregrounded by many second-generation writers in their fictional works as a turning point in the political history of Pakistan. The post-9/11 situation of Pakistan indeed owes a great deal to Zia’s foreign policies and his ruthless Islamisation of the country, influencing the rise of Islamic extremism and jihadist culture in Pakistan and Afghanistan (discussed in Chapters 2 and 3).
Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction, 2015
Fictional representations of home and identity by second-generation writers of Pakistani origin h... more Fictional representations of home and identity by second-generation writers of Pakistani origin have received increasing attention, especially in the post-9/11 scenario, with its attendant reductive representations of Islamic fundamentalism. With an aim to rebut “9/11 fictional narratives” that reinforce public rhetoric in the West and thereby equating Islam with terrorism, Shamsie’s novels confront these negative international attitudes towards Muslims and Islam. By locating her characters in their ancestral homeland as well as abroad, Shamsie engages with issues related to identity and migration that began to change as a result of post-9/11 mainstream public narratives about suicide bombing, religious fanaticism, terrorism, jihad and Islamic fundamentalism. Linking these two foci (transnational movement and Muslim identity in the 9/11 context), I will be concerned here to highlight the wide range of experiences and dilemmas associated with Shamsie’s Pakistani and migrant characters’ sense of identity, their struggles with hyphenated identities, and the sometimes xenophobic imaginary of the white population abroad. I specifically address the ways in which stigmatisation on the basis of ethnicity has morphed into stigmatisation on the basis of faith, illustrating how xenophobia has taken the form of Islamophobia.
Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction, 2015
In Fear Of Small Numbers, Arjun Appadurai discusses the birth of Pakistan and draws our attention... more In Fear Of Small Numbers, Arjun Appadurai discusses the birth of Pakistan and draws our attention to “a huge and contentious scholarship surrounding the story of Partition, the politics that led to it, and the bizarre geographies it produced (with East and West Pakistan flanking an independent India from 1947–1973 when East Pakistan succeeded in seceding from West Pakistan, giving birth to Bangladesh, a new nation on India’s eastern borders)” (66). Appadurai’s concern over “the bizarre geographies” becomes the starting point for Uzma Aslam Khan’s engagement at a narrative level with her interpretation of issues of Muslim stereotyping and “war on terror” rhetoric. Rather than viewing 9/11 as the only marker of Muslim identity formations, Khan links the post-9/11 reframing of Pakistani identities to the upsurge of Islamic terrorist groups involved in sectarian conflicts within the subcontinent and the Middle East, as well as to the Islamisation of Pakistan from the 1970s onwards. In contrast to those second- generation writers who have focused for the most part on what has happened since 9/11, Khan’s oeuvre foregrounds pre-9/11 cultural, social, political and historical causes that underlie the recent global stereotyping of Muslims and Islam. This chapter explores Khan’s representations of South Asian political history of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, primarily in the novels Trespassing and The Geometry of God, which I describe as “retrospective prologues to post-9/11 fiction”, but also through her prolific journalistic writings.
Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction, 2015
Emphasising the centrality as well as the profound influence of “war on terror” discourses in the... more Emphasising the centrality as well as the profound influence of “war on terror” discourses in the reframing of Pakistani Muslim identities after 9/11, I have sought to present a big picture of “US realpolitik” in this book by looking beyond 9/11 contexts in fictional narratives by second-generation Pakistanis. My main contention has been that a post-9/11 paradigmatic shift in identity formation — from signifiers of race, gender, class and nationalism to the non-territorial global ummah — cannot be understood in its entirety without referring to 9/11 as a political construct rather than merely considering it a civilisational clash. Situating 9/11 within the parameters of cultural and political encounters as well as economic Manichaeism has enabled my challenge to the centrality of “culture talk” surrounding Islamophobic narratives after 9/11. The connection between increased Islamophobia and 9/11 necessarily engenders a particular kind of attention to historical events such as the “Rushdie Affair”, the Danish cartoon controversy, the Gulf Wars, the Cold War, the Soviet–Afghan war and the Iranian Revolution, which have contributed to radical perceptions about Islam and Muslims (particularly in relation to Pakistan). The present crises cannot be de-historicised; a series of recent events — including hysterical protests against the derogatory “Innocence of Muslims” YouTube video (2012), the persecution of religious minorities (particularly Shia Muslim Hazaras) in Quetta (2013) and the burning of Christians’ houses in the Badami Bagh area of Lahore (2013) over alleged blasphemy, all of which epitomise cultural and religious intolerance — are reminiscent of Muslims’ reactions towards offence in the past.
Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction, 2015
Post-9/11 culture plays a significant role in redefining diasporic Muslim identities due to an in... more Post-9/11 culture plays a significant role in redefining diasporic Muslim identities due to an inability or unwillingness of some diasporics to be fully accepted among host or home communities. This situation fosters feelings of alienation, exclusion, trauma and melancholy in such diasporics and deprives them of any sense of belonging. As a result of these pathologies of dislocation, diasporic identities are increasingly constructed on the basis of an imagined space that is not only geographically diverse, but also free from cultural artefacts of indigenousness. Since 9/11, Western public discourses have been raising questions over potential links between radical Islam, terrorism and Muslims, particularly because the terrorists who were involved in attacks on the World Trade Centre and the 7/7 London bombings were Western-educated Muslims. In this chapter I argue that it is largely due to the nature of emerging public narratives about the “war on terror” that second-generation diasporics in Britain — alienated from their cultures of origin and yet proud of their Muslim identities — are renegotiating their identities by affiliating with a global ummah.
Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction
Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction
Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction
Acknowledgements Introduction 1. How the World Changed: Narratives of Nationhood and Displaced Mu... more Acknowledgements Introduction 1. How the World Changed: Narratives of Nationhood and Displaced Muslim Identities 2. Responding to 9/11: Contextualising the Subcontinent and Beyond 3. Reimagining Home Spaces: Pre- and Post-9/11 Constructions of Home and Pakistani Muslim Identity 4. Global Ummah: Negotiating Transnational Muslim Identities Coda: Re-imagining Pakistan Notes Bibliography Index
NUML journal of critical inquiry, 2020
Following Edward Said’s theorization of filiation and affiliation, this paper maps transformative... more Following Edward Said’s theorization of filiation and affiliation, this paper maps transformative itineraries of second-generation Pakistani immigrants in Britain who negotiate their personal identities on the basis of choice and affiliation instead of filiation. I argue that, as a result of the changing relationships of migrant parents with their British-born children, either because of a clash between nostalgia for the culture of origin and the host culture, between racial discrimination or the changing social structures of multicultural Britain, familial bonds within Pakistani families in Britain are severely affected. In other words, public or “external debates” in the diaspora, that Ralph Grillo describes as migrants’ imagined cultural practices, interact with internal debates that occur within migrant families. Against this backdrop, I explore the tensions, informed by a filiation-affiliation dialectic, that exist between first and second generations and the way these affect t...
Journal of international women's studies, 2018
This survey paper focuses on Pakistani Anglophone literary narratives that examine the multiple i... more This survey paper focuses on Pakistani Anglophone literary narratives that examine the multiple identities of victimized women as opposed to the commonly endorsed essentialist and reductive argument that is too easily conscripted into post-9/11 global discourses surrounding women of colour. In the context of the global hegemony of Western scholarship, my purpose in this paper is to foreground the simultaneous liberation and subjection, centricity and marginality, of Pakistani women. I argue that it is important to situate third world women’s subjection as well as agency in relation to the class, regional, ethnic and religious diversities that inform the degree and nature of freedom and constraints that women experience. In addition to this, urban, rural, tribal and feudal environments also inform the plurality of victimized identities as well as of women’s agency. Against this backdrop, I read Pakistani literary narratives as acts of breaking through the Eurocentric monopolization o...
The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing, 2018
The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing, 2018