Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights

'Labours in the Cause of Humanity in Every Part of the Globe' Transatlantic Philanthropic Collaboration and the Cosmopolitan Ideal, 1760-1815.

The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic

That parent-child relationships should play a significant role within South Asian American literature is perhaps no surprise, since this is crucial material for any writer But the particular forms they so often take – a dysfunctional mother-daughter dynamic, leading to the search for maternal surrogates; and the figure of the prematurely deceased father – are more perplexing Why do families adhere to these patterns in so many South
Asian American texts and what does that tell us about this œuvre? More precisely, why are mothers subjected to a harsher critique than fathers and what purpose does this critique serve? How might we interpret the trope of the untimely paternal death? In this article I will seek to answer these questions – arguably key to an understanding of this growing body of writing – by considering works produced between the 1990s and the early twenty-first century by a range of South Asian American writers

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Mother-Weights and Lost Fathers: Parents in South Asian American Literature

References are often made in contemporary Indian discourse, both popular and academic, to the ‘new Indian woman’, a subject position that is seen as coterminous with the emerging identity of the Indian nation as modern – the ‘new India’. This article unpacks key discourses that construct the ‘new woman’ in the public imagination and suggests that the modernity of this imagined figure is founded upon a notion of autonomy that is deeply embodied. While the characteristics of this embodied modernity challenge influential feminist arguments as to the ‘shallow’ modernity of the ‘new Indian woman’, it nonetheless has problematic implications from a feminist perspective. The narrative shaped by these discourses around the question of what it means to be modern not only perpetuates an historically pervasive reductionism in which woman is seen to be defined and determined by the corporeal but also, and more problematically, constructs a boundary around the notion of modern womanhood that excludes women whose bodil...

Embodying modernity: reading narratives of Indian women's sexual autonomy and violation

Border Work, Border Trouble: Postcolonial Feminism and the Ayah in Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India

Drawing on postcolonial, feminist, historicist, and formalist methodologies, this article reexamines an almost unknown novel Zohra (1951), among the first to be written and published in English by an Indian Muslim woman writer (Zeenuth Futehally). This article argues that Zohra works on two fronts, combining the private/personal and public/political: it critiques the systems of purdah and arranged marriage that shackle women in a secular nation desirous of modernity and insists on the rightful claims of Indian Muslims to belonging and citizenship in modern India (after Partition) on the basis of their anticolonial, anticommunalist struggles for social reform and national independence.

Adultery Behind Purdah and the Politics of Indian Muslim Nationalism in Zeenuth Futehally's Zohra

Abstract:Western fiction about the 9/11 attacks tends to center white American experiences and perspectives and reinforce dominant Western stereotypes and misconceptions about Muslims, especially Muslim men. Counter-discursive post-9/11 fiction from a Muslim cosmopolitan perspective that seeks to intervene in these modes of representation inevitably has to contend with globally dominant epistemological frameworks of suspicion. While Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) is among the most well-known of such counter-discursive fictions, this article focuses on H. M. Naqvi’s less well-known novel Home Boy (2009) to argue that Home Boy constitutes a postcolonial response to 9/11, an explicit critique of the ensuing American response and Islamophobia, and a tactical alternative to and implicit critique of Hamid’s novel. The article highlights some problems created by the narrative strategies Hamid uses and shows how Naqvi takes a different approach, in particular by foregoing the temptations of ambiguity and gender stereotyping and highlighting the multiple traumas experienced by Muslims from 9/11 and its aftermath. In so doing, the article suggests how critical readers can recognize both the drawbacks of Hamid’s celebrated novel and the alternative possibilities of other strategies that Muslim writers can use to address the problems of neo-Orientalism and global Islamophobia.

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H. M. Naqvi’s Home Boy as a Response to Post-9/11 Islamophobia and as Implicit Critique of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Abstract:Ambreen Hai juxtaposes her experiences of class mobility in Pakistan with the American dream. As a teenager, Hai and her household witness the unraveling of her cousin Roohi’s relationship with a man of a higher social class she met in medical school. Hai explores classism, sexism, and her mother’s competitive schadenfreude in seeing an ambitious peer fall short of their goals. She celebrates American aspirationalism, despite its flaws.

Ambreen Hai

Papers

Border Work, Border Trouble: Postcolonial Feminism and the Ayah in Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India

Adultery Behind Purdah and the Politics of Indian Muslim Nationalism in Zeenuth Futehally's Zohra

H. M. Naqvi’s Home Boy as a Response to Post-9/11 Islamophobia and as Implicit Critique of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

The Inspection Tea Party