Aroosa Kanwal

Rehumanizing Muslim Subjectivities: Postcolonial Geographies, Postcolonial Ethics is a timely and urgent monograph, allowing us to imagine what it feels like to be the victim of genocide, abuse, dehumanization, torture and violence, something which many Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir, Pakistan, Myanmar, Syria, Iraq and China have to endure. Most importantly, the book emphasizes the continued relevance of creative literature’s potential to intervene in and transform our understanding of a conceptual and political field, as well as advanced technologies of power and domination. The book makes a substantial theoretical contribution by drawing on wide-ranging angles and dimensions of contemporary drone warfare and its related catastrophes, postcolonial ethics in relation to the thanatopolitics of slow violence, dehumanization and the politics of death. Against the backdrop of such institutionalized and diverse acts of violence committed against Muslim communities, I call the postcolonial Muslim world ‘geographies of dehumanization’. The book investigates how ongoing legacies of contemporary forms of injustice and denial of subjecthood are represented, staged and challenged in a range of postcolonial anglophone Muslim texts, thereby questioning the idea of postcolonial ethics. One of the selling points of this book will be the chapters on fictional representations by Myanmar and Uyghur writers as, to the best of my knowledge, no critical work or single authored book is available on Myanmar and Uyghur literature to date.

As the first book-length study of emergent Pakistani speculative fiction written in English, this critical work explores the ways in which contemporary Pakistani authors extend the genre in new directions by challenging the cognitive majoritarianism (usually Western) in this field. Responding to the recent Afro science fiction movement that has spurred non-Western writers to seek a democratization of the broader genre of speculative fiction, Pakistani writers have incorporated elements from djinn mythology, Qur'anic eschatology, "Desi" (South Asian) traditions, local folklore, and Islamic feminisms in their narratives to encourage familiarity with alternative world views. In five chapters, this book analyzes fiction by several established Pakistani authors as well as emerging writers to highlight the literary value of these contemporary works in reconciling competing cognitive approaches, blurring the dividing line between "possibilities" and "impossibilities" in envisioning humanity’s collective future, and anticipating the future of human rights in these envisioned worlds.

The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing forms a theoretical, comprehensive and critically astute overview of the history and future of Pakistani Literature in English. Dealing with key issues for global society today, from terrorism, religious extremism, fundamentalism, corruption and intolerance to matters of love, hate, loss, belongingness and identity conflicts, this Companion brings together over thirty essays by leading and emerging scholars, and presents:

the transformations and continuities in Pakistani Anglophone writing since its inauguration in 1947 to today;
contestations and controversies that have not only informed creative writing but also subverted certain stereotypes in favour of a dynamic representation of Pakistani Muslim experiences;
a case for a Pakistani canon through a critical perspective on how different writers and their works have, at different times, both consciously and unconsciously, helped to realize and extend a uniquely Pakistani idiom.

Providing a comprehensive yet manageable introduction to cross-cultural relations and to historical, regional, local and global contexts that are essential to reading Pakistani Anglophone literature, The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing is key reading for researchers and academics in Pakistani Anglophone literature, history and culture, as well as other disciplines such as terror studies, post-9/11 literature, gender studies, postcolonial studies, feminist studies, human rights, diaspora studies, space and mobility studies, religion and contemporary South Asian literatures and cultures.

Definitions of home and identity have changed for Muslims as a result of international 'war on terror' rhetoric. This book uniquely links the post-9/11 stereotyping of Muslims and Islam in the West to the roots of current jihadism, the resurgence of different forms of Islam and ethnocentrism within the subcontinent and beyond, and to US realpolitik in order to foreground the effects of terrorism debates on Pakistanis at home and in the diaspora. Through close readings of fiction by Nadeem Aslam, Kamila Shamsie, Uzma Aslam Khan, Mohsin Hamid, Mohammed Hanif, H.M. Naqvi, Ali Sethi, Maha Khan Phillips and Feryal Gauhar, who confront negative attitudes towards Muslims and Islam in the twenty-first century, this book not only challenges the centrality of Western narratives but also foregrounds Anglo-American foreign policy in the Muslim world as a form of terrorism. The author proposes an articulation of a flexible identity among Muslims that is termed a 'global ummah' after 9/11.

This paper discusses the role of ontological and epistemological agency of material culture in the Surah al-Shams as regards transforming humans' understanding of the world they inhabit. I particularly analyse the intersection of the notion of materiality and the divine to reconsider its implications for human cognition. I argue that the Surah al-Shams not only validates the agency of material culture in the world by associating it with the divine, but also rebuts the anthropocentric approach and assumed agency of humans over material-cultural phenomena. While foregrounding the mutually constitutive positioning of non-human actants, Surah al-Shams helps us understand how landscapes and other natural and cosmic objects inform, impact on and transform mankind's perception of the world they inhabit. Nevertheless, it is important to highlight that this perception or meaning associated with natural symbols can only be unleashed in relation to divinity as its referent. Taking a cue from Beate Pongratz Leisten and Karen Sonik's discussion surrounding "a relationship between an agent operating on behalf of a divinity and the divinity itself as referent-and that enables us to speak of objects or images as agents or even (detachable) parts of the composite divine" (Pongratz-Leisten & Sonik 2015, p. 6) and Lorraine J. Daston's idea of sacral "things that talk" (Daston 2004, p. 21), I will show how the celestial bodies and cosmic phenomena referred to in the Surah allow an understanding of divinity as composite and capable of distributing its agency into a diverse constellation of (culturally/ religion-specific) indexes (Daston 2004, p. 20).

This paper critically analyzes the Pakistani television Urdu plays Khuda Mera Bhi Hai (God is Mine Too) and Alif, Allah Aur Insan (Alpha, Allah and Man) which map the transformative itineraries of transgender individuals from occupations and roles that are "likely to be perceived as disgusting or degrading" to those offering "job satisfaction, engagement and opportunity for career advancement" (Simpson et al, 2012, p. 1). In order to create a greater public awareness about transgender individuals who, like other citizens, have equal rights to dignified jobs, the plays suggest a new way of doing gender through a process of sartorial transition. As we all know, the lack of transgender rights legislation and extreme limitations in employment have pushed khwaja siras in Pakistan to do jobs such as beggars or entertainers, which are mostly labelled as 'dirty work', khwaja siras subjectivities are largely regarded as morally tainted and are deemed disqualified from social acceptance. While rebutting the stigma associated with transgender work, the plays suggest a process of sartorial transition, from being dressed as females (firqa) to being dressed as males (Khoktki), as a means to avail opportunities of dignified work for khwaja siras. I would argue that instead of suggesting ways of dealing with vulnerabilities associated with gender nonconformity, the plays continue to project khwaja sira subjectivities as transphobic, unless they hide their trans-identities. Therefore, in both plays-in which, through different occupational settings, the boundaries between dignified and undignified work are negotiated-the idea of 'dirty work' and its related stigma is only hastily shown to be replaced by Trans' desire to 'be themselves'.

Literary representations of the city of Peshawar have continued to be shaped by fierce genealogical and political conditions, both nationally and globally. It would not be wrong to say that Peshawar has generally been depicted as a place of terror – a place taking shape according to changing civil and military dynamics following the post-9/11 geo-political discourse on the war against terrorism. In order to rebut the monolithic myths that largely define this city in terms of claustrophobia, terror and a threat to social order, I posit a nexus between De Certeau’s rhetoric of walking and Jeffrey A. Kroessler’s idea of ‘the city as palimpsest’ (2015: n.p.) to discuss the ways in which an English woman’s  act of walking in the streets of Peshawar becomes palimpsestic exercises that unveil Pashtun histories that have been erased and written over. I argue that Kamila Shamsie’s A God in Every Stone takes a more positive stance in providing a contrapuntal reading of Peshawar to enable the readers to recuperate the forgotten stories of Pashtun life and peaceful chivalry that are mysterious but far from orientalist notions of barbarism and uncivilisation, so conveniently associated with Pashtun culture.

This essay examines the political implications of acts of violence committed
against Kashmiri civilians by the Indian military, who target human flesh and
body parts instead of the whole body. My argument is premised on the
contemporary shock and awe thanatopolitical strategies of the Indian state
that aim to traumatize the civilian through horroristic violence, to the
extent that they offer no opposition. Drawing upon the notions of
‘horrorism’ and ‘pulverization of the human’, I will discuss the ways in
which the violence inflicted on Kashmiri bodies not only erases their
uniqueness and individuality, but also leaves them unrecognizable as
human bodies, so that they fail to elicit any empathy in spectators. In so
doing, this essay examines strategies of violence designed to immobilize
and paralyze not only Kashmiri civilians, but also spectators of such
horrific incidents. Using Feroz Rather’s The Night of Broken Glass and
Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator, two novels that desanitize the war in
Kashmir by showing bodily injuries in their raw state, I engage the
aesthetics of flesh and its political implications. I discuss the ways in which
both narratives deploy tropes of immediate and excessive violence,
disturbing violations of the human body, not only to challenge mainstream
political narratives about the Muslim world, in particular Kashmir, but
also to reorient the reader’s ideas about what this war means to Kashmiris.

This survey paper examines the evolving trends in contemporary Pakistani speculative fiction which brings together tropes and motifs from imaginative worlds of local folklores as well as Islamic mythical worlds of South Asian civilization. We particularly discuss the ways in which, by adapting extra-terrestrial life forms, mythological tropes and themes from the Urdu popular genre tradition, Pakistani anglophone writers bring to the fore the greater potential of the speculative genre in responding to more contemporary problems associated with patriarchy, fundamentalism, gender issues, neo-colonialism, marginalization, racism, war technology and anxieties associated with emergent forms of nationalism. This paper specifically engages with Pakistani anglophone speculative fiction which is explicitly in conversation with Urdu science fiction and fantasy tradition, and in so doing these works create new worlds of indigenous cultures as vibrant and resistant yet firmly fixed in both myth and alternate futures. Our survey of a long-standing fascination of Pakistani anglophone writers with some local tropes that refigure in their speculative fiction shows how these non-western speculative paradigms can serve to re-centre and revive Pakistani speculative tradition in the global popular culture.

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 the personal struggles of an embittered anglicized Asian second generation and dramatize the metaphorical birth of a subject outside the confines of the familial order.

ABSTRACT
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.

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 a struggle for survival through the use of top-down control via drones in the region. However, Atef Abu Saif's use of "strategic anthropomorphism" in his wartime diary The Drone Eats with Me: A Gaza Diary does not grant the drone absolute autonomy in death-dealing but imagines Drone as a fictional character. Instead, the execution of Gazans is presented as a prolonged reconnaissance performance, which not only allows Gazans to see drones as an extension of (absent) drone operators' bodies, but also to register their protest against the Israeli authorities by imagining Drone as a living entity. Therefore, using the authority of direct experience that Youval Noah Harari calls "flesh witnessing" (2008), Abu Saif's wartime diary enables the formation of Palestinian subjectivities held under the sign of erasure, thereby claiming their rights as social and political human bodies.

Pakistani anglophone literature, with its evolving aesthetic and generic complexity, displays a rich kaleidoscope of works exemplifying the curatorial, normative and extensive dialogic standards is certainly on an epochal itinerary of canon formation. A literature that is in fact a product of multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, transnational, transcultural and trans-local literary traditions of Pakistan, the subcontinent and the Muslim world (and also in dialogue with anglophone literatures from around the world) is urgently in need of recognition as a distinct literary tradition to let all the discordant chords be heard and form a unique canonical symphony, aka Brand Pakistan.

The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali

Set in the British penal colony of the Andaman Islands in the years of the Second World War, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali features three local-born offspring of prisoners, Nomi, Zee and Aye, and their families’ tormented histories as they go through trials and tribulations within heterotopic spaces of confinement and otherness. The novel juxtaposes the complex history of the island and its inhabitants with the Japanese invasion underway in 1942 and their surrender to the British empire in 1945. Through chilling stories of freedom and resistance of colonial subjects from Rangoon, Chittagong, Penang, Delhi and Lahore, prisoners of the starfish jail and female factories, the force-feeding of hunger strikers in prison, native spies and sex slaves of ianjo, Aslam Khan unfurls before her readers the untapped history of undivided India.

I corresponded with Uzma via email about her most recent novel, about writing historical fiction, and the inextricable relationship between trauma and healing in her fiction

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...

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...

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...

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.

ABSTRACT 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.