Postcolonial Servitude: Interiority and System in Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

This article focuses on Pakistani-American writer Daniyal Mueenuddin's notable first collection of interlinked short stories In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (2009) as an example of an emergent wave of contemporary transnational fiction that foregrounds the figure of the domestic servant as central, not marginal, emphasizing diverse servants' vulnerability and agency as stigmatized subaltern individuals locked within cultures of domestic servitude. Situating his fiction in the contexts of Anglophone South Asian literary history and Pakistan's postcolonial feudal system, it argues that Mueenuddin makes a significant intervention by crafting strategies of subaltern representation that explore a servant's interiority, and highlighting the interlocking systems of power that dehumanize or constrain him or her. It explores the intersections of gender, sexuality, and class evoked in these stories, the psychic complexities of individuals who struggle against habitual abjection, subordination, and disempowerment, and the ways servants, working in the intimacy of an employer's home, strive to ameliorate their lot within frameworks of patriarchy, corruption, and violence. Mueenuddin's cultural work is to urge shifts in ways of seeing, to defamiliarize the familiar, and to encourage empathetic ways of thinking about ethical action in specific postcolonial contexts

(Re)Reading Fawzia Afzal-Khan's Lahore with Love: Class and the Ethics of Memoir

This essay proposes a reading of Fawzia-Afzal-Khan's memoir, Lahore with Love, via the lens of theories of ethics in autobiography studies. It poses questions regarding the ethics of representing others in one's relational life-story, others who are both proximate and non-proximate, members of ones family or circle of friends as well as members of other classes. It attempts to complicate easy conclusions or judgements in the debate following the cancellation of the book contract by the publisher and argues for a more nuanced, theoretical approach and reading of the memoir as a text in a contemporary global context

Departures from Karachi Airport: Some Reflections on Feminist Outrage

Prefatory Note: This essay revisits an experience - my encounter with an airport border control official as I was leaving Pakistan - that occurred in October 2000. At First, this otherwise trivial incident seemed to me illustrative of several postcolonial and/feminist concerns, such as the regulation of national and gender identities at sites of border crossing, or the patriarchal oppressiveness of state power and practices. But as I retold the story, I began to realize that there were additional dimensions to it that called for something else, that required me to re-examine, though not altogether repudiate, my initial indignation. This encounter then became a cultural text calling for a somewhat different critical analysis, leading me to reflect on feminist (and postcolonial) outrage, on how we might complicate our gender-based reactions, and how such a feminist politics may be responsibly practiced. (Much of this essay was written before September 11, 2001. I have not returned to Pakistan since then and can only imagine that airport security has greatly increased

Research Notes: Children as Scavengers (Rag Pickers) “A Case of Karachi”

In developing countries, the emerging mega cities face a number of interlinked issues, such as, increased flow of trading activities (particularly in the coastal cities), expansion in manufacturing and service sectors (because of a relatively developed infrastructure). As a combined effect of these factors there is a significant increase in population from within and neighboring countries. The situation aggravates even further when the huge influx of population exerts enormous pressure on limited physical and social infrastructure of a city. The obtained situation is thus observed with increased environmental degradation and significant rise in poverty levels. The coastal city of Karachi which is the largest city of Pakistan is now considered as one of the ten biggest mega cities in the world and appears as a classic case of such type of expansion in its size of population. As per the last population census of 1998 in the country, Karachi had a population of 9.8 million (though controversial). In absence of the new population census which was due in 2008, different estimates suggest that the current population size of Karachi city would be around 20 to 25 million. Along with the population growth, an average income level of its inhabitants has also caused upward shifts in consumption expenditures. The simultaneous raise in production of solid waste, as an outcome of improved standards of living and increased business activities, has impaired the city’s institutional capacity to properly dispose off and recycle the solid wastes. In the obtained situation, the remaining part of solid waste is disposed off and recycled by the private sector

"Mother-weights" and lost fathers: parents in South Asian American literature

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

Laughing with an Iranian American Woman: Firoozeh Dumas\u27s Memoirs and the (Cross-) Cultural Work of Humor

This essay critically analyzes Firoozeh Dumas\u27s humorous memoirs and situates them in the multiple contexts of post-9/11 Muslim American responses to Islamophobia, women\u27s humor, and Iranian American women\u27s life writing. Drawing on philosophical, feminist, ethnic, and contemporary scientific theories of humor and the methods of literary criticism, the author argues that Dumas employs the beneficial and inclusive (not malign and exclusive) positive mode of humorous personal storytelling to build connection through laughter via the emotional and cognitive shifts structurally central to humor. Dumas addresses multiple audiences and engages in important (cross-) cultural work in a particularly fraught political and cultural climate of anti-Muslim sentiment and tense Iran-U.S. relations

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

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 is among the most well-known of such counter-discursive fiction, this article focuses on H. M. Naqvi’s less well-known novel Home Boy to argue that Home Boy constitutes both a postcolonial response to 9/11, and 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 by highlighting the multiple traumas experienced by Muslims as well 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