Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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A Handful of Soil: An Ecocritical Reading of Land in Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Where the Streets Had a Name
Get PDFThis article explores how Randa Abdel-Fattah (1979-), a Palestinian-Egyptian Australian diasporic writer, engages with the land as being ecocritically functional in her Palestinian-centred novel Where the Streets Had a Name (2008). The premise of the article is that a fictional representation of the Palestinian struggle for emancipation against occupation can be read for its environmental concerns; in particular, for the representation of the intersections of nature and culture. To this end, the article proposes a tripartite approach in reading politics of environment in the narrative by focusing on the effects of land on mind, body and voice. The analysis is carried out through the lens of ecocriticism and it reveals the symbiotic interconnections between humans and land. The findings reveal that the crisis experienced by the Palestinians in Abdel-Fattah's fiction goes beyond the need to preserve their past as the land has strong implications on their present state of mind, body and voice
Reading Emerson and Tagore in the Age of Religious Intolerance
Get PDFThe greatest problems of the world result from people of different cultures, races and religions being unable to get along and to work together to solve problems such as racism, religious extremism, terrorism and ethnic conflicts. These problems have implicated our contemporary time, especially the post-9/11 era, with anxiety, fear, and suspicion. In this crucial phase of human history, we need what Martha Nussbaum calls an “imaginative capacity†to see how the world looks from the point of view of a person who has a different religion. In this article, I discuss the religious thoughts of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). Although they lived in different cultures and belonged to different literary periods, their intellectual correspondence shows how both of them transcended contemporary religious traditions and established an original relationship with the Supreme Being. It is my hope that this comparative analysis, thus far unexplored, will provide us with insights into understanding religion with an “imaginative capacity†at a time when religious intolerance is disrupting peace across the globe
Commemorating Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Contextualising her Work in South Asian Muslim Feminism
Get PDFColonial Muslim South Asia had two leading cultural centres: Bengal and North India. As part of the far-reaching reformist movement during the colonial period and beyond, intellectual work from these two places included a powerful segment of feminist writing which has remained the harbinger of the women’s rights movement among Muslims of this region. It is important to give research attention to South Asian Muslim writers, many of whom have been marginalised mainly because of the dominance of, and sometimes overriding and disproportionate focus on, their Hindu counterparts. Against this background, this article discusses the life, incredible commitment, sacrifice and feminist accomplishments of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932). It will also contextualise her ideas in the broader South Asian Muslim feminist tradition
From Sakhawat Memorial School to Rokeya Hall: A Journey Towards Language as Self-Respect
Get PDFThe paper traces the trajectory of Sakhawat Memorial School – founded in Calcutta by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain in 1911 – with reference to questions of identity and language in undivided India. The secularist Rokeya prioritised her ethno-linguistic identity as against her pan-Islamist self in the running of her school at a time when respectable Muslims of Bengal were caught between choosing the “Islamic†Urdu and “Hindu†Bengali as their mother tongue. Did the pioneering efforts of Sakhawat Memorial School in making Bengali Muslim women learn to read and write in their mother tongue have anything to do with the coming together of all Bengalis and women’s contribution in upholding the honour and dignity of their mother tongue during the Language Movement of 1952 in erstwhile East Pakistan? In addressing this question, the paper seeks to recognise Rokeya and the Sakhawat Memorial School as precursors of the secular nationalist movement that saw the birth of a new nation in 1971
“This Image of Themselvesâ€: (Re)Discovering the Merlion’s Liminality
No full textThe publication by Singaporean small press Firstfruits Publications of Reflecting on the Merlion in 2009 marked a consolidation of the canon of Merlion poetry in Singapore. Apart from inspiring the work gathered in this anthology, Edwin Thumboo’s “Ulysses by the Merlion†has also attracted both praise and criticism for its engagement with the Merlion. This essay seeks to establish a reading of Thumboo’s poem using the concept of liminality, one that has previously been given little attention in the critical literature on the poem, despite being embedded in the text itself. It also argues that by ignoring this concept, the Merlion poems by Lee Tzu Pheng and Alfian Sa’at that followed after Thumboo’s have had the unfortunate effect of forcing the discourse surrounding the Merlion into a dead end