ABSTRACT

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 realise 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. It is also relevant to 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.

chapter |12 pages

Introduction

part I|2 pages

Reimagining history The legacy of war and Partition

chapter 1|9 pages

‘All these angularities’

Spatialising non-Muslim Pakistani identities

chapter 2|13 pages

1971

Reassessing a forgotten national narrative

chapter 3|14 pages

History, borders, and identity

Dealing with silenced memories of 1971

part II|2 pages

9/11 and beyondContexts, forms, and perspectives

chapter 6|12 pages

The nuclear novel in Pakistan

chapter 7|14 pages

Uses of humour in post-9/11 Pakistani anglophone fiction

H.M. Naqvi’s Home Boy and Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes

chapter 8|12 pages

Comic affiliations/comic subversions

The use of humour in contemporary British-Pakistani fiction

chapter 9|10 pages

Resistance and redefinition

Theatre of the Pakistani diaspora in the UK and the US

part III|2 pages

The dialectics of human rightsPolitics, positionality, controversies

chapter 12|13 pages

Divergent discourses

Human rights and contemporary Pakistani anglophone literature

chapter 14|10 pages

Phoenix rising

The West’s use (and misuse) of anglophone memoirs by Pakistani women

chapter 15|11 pages

Writing back and/as activism

Refiguring victimhood and remapping the shooting of Malala Yousafzai

part IV|2 pages

Identities in questionShifting perspectives on gender

chapter 16|15 pages

Doing history right

Challenging masculinist postcolonialism in Pakistani anglophone literature

part V|2 pages

Spaces of female subjectivityIdentity, difference, agency

chapter 20|12 pages

Conjugal homes

Marriage culture in contemporary novels of the Pakistani diaspora

chapter 21|11 pages

British-Pakistani female playwrights

Feminist perspectives on sexuality, marriage, and domestic violence

part VI|2 pages

Shifting contextsNew perspectives on identity, space, and mobility

part VII|2 pages

Unsettling narrativesImagining post-postcolonial perspectives

chapter 25|10 pages

Non-human narrative agency

Textual sedimentation in Pakistani anglophone literature

part VIII|2 pages

New horizonsTowards a Pakistani idiom

chapter 28|13 pages

‘Brand Pakistan’

Global imaginings and national concerns in Pakistani anglophone literature

chapter 29|12 pages

Competing habitus

National expectations, metropolitan market, and Pakistani writing in English (PWE)

chapter 30|10 pages

De/reconstructing identities

Critical approaches to contemporary Pakistani anglophone fiction

chapter 31|11 pages

On the wings of ‘poesy’

Pakistani diaspora poets and the ‘Pakistani idiom’

chapter 32|13 pages

Brand Pakistan

The case for a Pakistani anglophone literary canon