Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies
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Discovering Herstory and Construction of Alternative Female Identities in Fawzia Afzal-Khan’s Lahore with Love: Growing Up with Girlfriends, Pakistani Style
Full text linkThe aim of this research is to re-explore and delineate the historical narrative of Pakistan depicted in Fawzia Afzal-Khan’s Lahore with Love from a female perspective. Consequently, the study manifests weaving of herstory to affirm the presence of a female identity in the universal discourse of Pakistani history. The aim of this research paper is manifold as it also explores the construction of alternate identities of Pakistani women in Afzal-Khan’s memoir. The researcher attains this objective by showing a holistic picture of Pakistani history by highlighting the various herstories in this text. Each female voice lends a different vantage point to reflect the female discourse of Pakistan’s past through its effect on women. Moreover, the metamorphosis in each character is traced by analyzing the herstoies which subsequently reveal the construction of an alternate female identity as a defense mechanism to survive in the phallocentric norms of the country. The significance of this research study lies in critical exploration of the memoir from a feminist gaze to accentuate the presence of women who had been silenced at the behest of socio-political ambiance and class structures. This research fills the gap in South Asian memoir writing which has not been studied under a feminist framework.
The tool of this study is feminist theory with specific focus on Herstory by Robin Morgan and identity crisis for the female gender. Future researchers can explicate French feminism in Afzal-Khan’s memoir to deconstruct feminist linguistic patterns rendering an epitome of E`criture fe`minine. It is an exploratory, inductive and qualitative research with specific focus on the grounded theory pattern. It is not an inter-disciplinary research.
Keywords: South Asian Memoir Writing, Herstory, Female Alternate Identities, Pakistani Women, Feminism, Pakistani Literature
Fawzia Afzal-Khan’s Siren Song: Deconstructing the Self-Image of Pakistani Culture by Presenting Alternative Social Realities
Full text linkReview of Line on Fire: Ceasefire Violations and India-Pakistan Escalation Dynamics by Happymon Jacob
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Discursive Representation of the Troubling Position of Islam in Anglophone Pakistani Fiction: A Critical Analysis
Full text linkThe present paper seeks to understand the complex representation of Islam in Pakistani English writings as a significant site of public discourse. Owing to the vital significance of Islam, one can rightly consider Islam as one of the most vital trajectories that constitutes Pakistan’s historical and intellectual landscape. On the other hand, the contemporary Pakistani English writings, as they are shaped within the crucible of collective history and politics, have engaged with the place and position of Islam in the spheres of community (private) and state (public) simultaneously. By employing a comparative reading of Muhammad Hanif, Nadeem Aslam, and Uzma Aslam Khan as representative voices of contemporary Pakistani fiction, the article offers some critical angles to view their fictional and fictionalized worlds in terms of their representation of Islam. In so doing, my reading foregrounds the subtle distinction between Islam and Islamization by referring to the former as a belief system and cultural code whereas later is an institutionalized, often a more oppressive imposition of Islamic ideology on some people. The article analyzes how Islam has been contextualized in the creative and imaginative settings of these writers so as to conflate this vital distinction and this in turn, has some serious ontological and cognitive effects on the reading community. The paper concludes by underscoring the need to have a nuanced and contextualized understanding of Islam and its complex representation in the literary discourse produced by Anglophone Pakistani writers at both home and diaspora. In so doing, I attempt to highlight the need to appreciate the public imperative of Islam and its diverse expression in both community and state so as to deconstruct the dominant discursive representation in Anglophon
The Task of the Translator: Cultural Translation or Cultural Transformation?
Full text linkThis paper critiques the concept of cultural translation as theorized and used in postcolonial studies. Taking contemporary Pakistani anglophone fiction as an example, the paper considers the use of the concept of cultural translation in postcolonial theory as a strategy for legitimizing and valorizing a specific kind of sensibility and literature, the ‘migrant’ and/or cosmopolitan sensibility and literature, produced almost exclusively in/for metropolitan locations and in European languages by postcolonial migrant writers. This literature, the paper argues, overturns and subverts the concept and practice of linguistic and textual translation proper as theorized in the discipline of translation studies in which the source culture of the translated text exercises a certain priority over the target or receiving culture and the key concern is about what transformations the target language and the receiving culture undergo in the practice and process of translation. In postcolonial literature, the paper contends, it is the source culture and text that are transformed to suit the expectations and literary taste of the readers in the target language and culture. In this sense then, postcolonial cultural translation actually signifies a transformation of the native culture of the postcolonial writer, a transformation that is manifested in the specific migrant and cosmopolitan sensibility represented in his or her work. To construct the theoretical framework for this discussion, the paper establishes two positions on the concept of cultural translation, one from Homi Bhabha and Robert Young, the other from Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said. In light of the contrasting views of these theorists and critics, the paper discusses the work of four Pakistani anglophone writers, two from the first generation, namely Ahmed Ali and Bapsi Sidhwa, and two from the second generation, namely Musharraf Ali Farooqi and Mohsin Hamid. The paper sees their work in relation to the concept of cultural translation and highlights their distinct position with regard to this concept
Cartography of Crime: Spatial and Topographical Contentions and Contestations
Full text linkCrime is a socio-cultural phenomenon which is in dialogue with a number of nuanced and polyvalent variables such as economy, culture, politics, topographical fabric, to name only a few, and therefore bears telling significance in the society. Since time immemorial crime has been persisting in the society and has been ceaselessly evolving in commensurate with socio-cultural developments in general and particularly with spatial and topographical alterations. It is sometimes supposed that crime seems at times to be a consequence of disjunctive and disruptive sharing of worldly resources conditioned by certain geopolitical status quo and at once a means for questioning ontological stability of certain a prioriepistemological and sociological strands. At this point, one may be reminded of that contextual specificities play pivotal role in drawing the contour of crime and thus are of profound pertinence. Due to the liberalization of economy happened during 1990s, the overlapping trajectories of space and place inured by the irrevocable and irresistible forces of globalization have problematized stereotypical assumptions of crime and as a consequence of it, a number of aporias including the problematic interface between crime and space induced by changing topographical specificities, within the paradigm of crime have been triggered.1 Ensuing contradictions, on the one hand, insist that one needs to reexamine the negotiation of crime with space and place in the post-globalization scenario in order to expound the changing nature of crime, and on the other hand, induce that critics are supposed to engage themselves in examining the problematic interplay among crime, space and place. There are some Pakistani novelists who have begun to deal with problematic negotiations of crime with space and place conditioned by social, cultural, economic, political, and religious alterations in the context of Pakistan. This article is intended to intervene into select Pakistani novels incorporating Akbar Agha’s The Fatwa Girl (2011), Omar Shahid Hamid’s The Prisioner (2013), and Bilal Tanweer’sThe Scatter Here Is Too Great (2013) to question the representation and ontological stability of crime in the select fictions and to lay bare some inherent loopholes in conventional understanding of crime’s affinity with space and place, taking recourse to criminology
