Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies
Not a member yet
251 research outputs found
Sort by
Diasporic Memories, Dissident Memoirist
Get PDFFawzia Afzal-Khan’s memoir, Lahore with Love: Growing Up with Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style is less a narrative about the self than a biography about others, her dear circle of girlfriends, mostly from her days in school and college in Lahore. This memoir, divided neatly into five chapters with each chapter devoted to one friend so that the chapters are, in effect, homage and eulogy for the loss of friend and friendship. This paper explores Afzal-Khan’s memoir in relation to three feminist theoretical positionalities: the psychoanalytical, the postcolonial, and the autobiographical. The article sweeps across the myths from the story of Lot’s wife to Odysseus’s episode with the Sirens in order to interrogate the manners and methods in which the memoirist disrupts the phallogocentric order of social culture and national struggle. In many ways, the authorial project here is one of feminography, a feminist historiography that helps to informs the current global moment of political crisis and gender iniquity in contemporary Pakistan, especially as it relates to larger questions of discursive bridges and transnational dialectics in fields of feminist scholarship. Â
Inevitable Multiplicity of Subject Positions in Fawzia Afzal Khan’s Lahore with Love: Growing Up with Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style
Get PDFA review article about Lahore with Love
Suited Up in the Compositional Realm of ‘The Artist Formerly Known as Prince’: Identity, Belonging, and Acceptance in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album
No full textIn the opening passages of Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Rainbow Sign (1986), the author introduces the reader to Hanif Kureishi: a Londoner born to an English mother and Pakistani father, a father who “came to England from Bombay in 1947 to be educated by the old colonial power†(9). Kureishi’s childhood, filled with cousins, aunts, and uncles, included “important, confident people†(9), who frequently took him, in taxis, to hotels, restaurants, music houses, and other places of interest during his growing-up years in London. He recounts childhood incidents where his Pakistani heritage became a central point of focus in his life. It is an ambivalent rendering
Crises and Reconciliation in Swat
No full textSwat has held prominence for its known history. In 1915 Swat State came into being after which Swat tremendously progressed in fields of education, health care services, peace, communication and judicial system. The State was brought to an end in 1969 with which drastic changes occurred in all respects. A new and alien administrative apparatus was brought, characterized by federal and provincial centralization, bureaucratic mindset, red-tape and dilly-dally, which proved unresponsive and hence generated sense of deprivation and resentment. With each passing day, the people saw to the state period with nostalgia and aspired for a positive change, especially in the judicial arena. This boosted Tahrik Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Muhammadi (TNSM) and its demand for making the judicial system conform to Islamic laws. Some other factors, internal and external, also worked in their own ways. All these culminated into the Taliban upsurge in 2007 and the resultant fighting, military operations, destruction and displacement of millions of people. By July 2009, the Taliban were defeated and the situation brought under control by the security forces, but the Taliban and their ideology have not perished. Therefore, for a durable peace, the core issues needs to be addressed spiritedly and the Taliban brought to the mainstream
