This book focuses on the way that notions of home and identity have changed for Muslims as a result of international 'war on terror' rhetoric. It uniquely links the post-9/11 stereotyping of Muslims and Islam in the West to the roots of current jihadism and the resurgence of ethnocentrism within the subcontinent and beyond.

As the first book-length study of emergent Pakistani speculative fiction written in English, this critical work explores the ways in which contemporary Pakistani authors extend the genre in new directions by challenging the cognitive majoritarianism (usually Western) in this field. Responding to the recent Afro science fiction movement that has spurred non-Western writers to seek a democratization of the broader genre of speculative fiction, Pakistani writers have incorporated elements from djinn mythology, Qur'anic eschatology, "Desi" (South Asian) traditions, local folklore, and Islamic feminisms in their narratives to encourage familiarity with alternative world views. In five chapters, this book analyzes fiction by several established Pakistani authors as well as emerging writers to highlight the literary value of these contemporary works in reconciling competing cognitive approaches, blurring the dividing line between "possibilities" and "impossibilities" in envisioning humanity’s collective future, and anticipating the future of human rights in these envisioned worlds.

Rehumanizing Muslim Subjectivities: Postcolonial Geographies, Postcolonial Ethics is a timely and urgent monograph, allowing us to imagine what it feels like to be the victim of genocide, abuse, dehumanization, torture and violence, something which many Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir, Pakistan, Myanmar, Syria, Iraq and China have to endure. Most importantly, the book emphasizes the continued relevance of creative literature’s potential to intervene in and transform our understanding of a conceptual and political field, as well as advanced technologies of power and domination. The book makes a substantial theoretical contribution by drawing on wide-ranging angles and dimensions of contemporary drone warfare and its related catastrophes, postcolonial ethics in relation to the thanatopolitics of slow violence, dehumanization and the politics of death. Against the backdrop of such institutionalized and diverse acts of violence committed against Muslim communities, I call the postcolonial Muslim world ‘geographies of dehumanization’. The book investigates how ongoing legacies of contemporary forms of injustice and denial of subjecthood are represented, staged and challenged in a range of postcolonial anglophone Muslim texts, thereby questioning the idea of postcolonial ethics. One of the selling points of this book is the chapters on fictional representations by Muslim Myanmar and Uyghur writers as, to the best of my knowledge, no critical work or single authored book is available on Myanmar and Uyghur literature to date.

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.

This volume offers a critical exploration of the many ways in which transcodification acts at the intersection of literature, art, history, and social and cultural artifacts to foster instances of recognition in the US. Recognition covers a wealth of meanings: from the mere acknowledgement of existence, validity or legality, or appreciation of something as valuable, to the identification of something as known or familiar. Accordingly, this volume deals with different struggles for recognition. One focus of the volume is the assessment of artistic achievement in relation to a so-called original, with essays concerned with cultural codes and with the role that translation, adaptation, and cross-cultural encounters have played in US artistic and literary productions. A second, parallel, strand focuses on the fight for political and social inclusion, or on the dynamics beneath the recognition of group and gender identities, to explore how activism and artistic/literary productions challenge received identity boundaries and accepted social and cultural hierarchies. Bringing together recognition and transcodification/transculturality, the book deconstructs crystalized and codified categories and celebrates the crossing of boundaries.

The accruement of crises over the last two decades, with their particular manifestations in the European context, has evoked the feeling of living in exceptional times, as captured in the recurrent claim that we live in the "age of anxiety." The main aim of this collection is to analyse, from a multidisciplinary perspective, the causes and consequences of the current dominance of the discourse of fear, anxiety, and crisis through the experience of distinct and often interdependent moral panics in twenty-first-century Europe. With its multidisciplinary approach, this volume sheds light on the need to view the interrelationship between different crises and their associated affects as crucial in attaining a more nuanced understanding of the aetiology and effects of the current "age of anxiety." This multidisciplinary scrutiny of the interrelationship of twenty-first-century fears, anxiety and crises signals an original engagement with these complex phenomena in order to make their emergence and profound effects on contemporary society more comprehensible. The timeliness of the thematic focus and the rigorous in-depth analyses make this collection relevant to students and academics within the fields of sociology, literary and cultural studies, political science and anthropology, as well as to those in European studies and global studies.

Mobility and Corporeality in 19th and 21st Century Anglophone Literature: Bodies in Motion aims at exploring the intersection of literary, mobility and body studies in Anglophone literature from the 19th century to the 21st century. Corporeal mobility includes a variety of mobile bodies that have long been othered and marginalised due to issues pertaining to gender, disability, race, and class. Yet there is a relative lack of academic work on it, despite the fact that Anglophone literature has increasingly portrayed the circulation of characters, objects, and information since the 19th century, echoing the many types of mobility that have occurred through processes of colonisation, decolonisation and globalisation. This book, therefore, discusses the ways in which literatures produced in the English-speaking world challenge normative depictions of bodies on the move and reconceptualise them by making corporeality an essential feature of movement across the world.

What does it mean to be an English-language fiction writer in a country that is perpetually on the brink of disaster? In this first-ever collection of interviews with Pakistani novelists writing in English, Mushtaq Bilal explores how fictions are informed by the authors' cultural identities. Is it possible, for instance, to write about Pakistan without self-censoring? How do writers contest and challenge Western stereotypes of the country? Do they even consciously do that? And what about challenging Pakistani stereotypes of the West?Providing fresh insights into some of the most important and politically engaged contemporary fiction to come out of the subcontinent, Writing Pakistan is essential reading for anyone interested in the art of storytelling, in books and in Pakistan itself - because to understand a nation, one needs to talk to those who are writing it.

While news reports about Pakistan tend to cover Taliban attacks and bombings, and academics focus on security issues, the environment often takes a backseat in media reportage and scholarship. In particular, Pakistani women's attachment to their environment and their environmental concerns are almost always ignored. Shazia Rahman traces the ways in which Pakistani women explore alternative, environmental modes of belonging, examines the vitality of place-based identities within Pakistani culture, and thereby contributes to evolving understandings of Pakistani women--in relation to both their environment and to various discourses of nation and patriarchy. Through an astute analysis of such works as Sabiha Sumar's Khamosh Pani (2003), Mehreen Jabbar's Ramchand Pakistani (2008), Sorayya Khan's Noor (2006), Uzma Aslam Khan's Trespassing (2003), and Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows (2009), Rahman illuminates how Pakistani women's creative works portray how people live with one another, deal with their environment, and intuit their relationship with the spiritual. She considers how literary and cinematic documentation of place-based identities simultaneously critiques and counters stereotypes of Pakistan as a country of religious nationalism and oppressive patriarchy. Rahman's analysis discloses fresh perspectives for thinking about the relationship between social and environmental justice.

This book focuses on the way that notions of home and identity have changed for Muslims as a result of international 'war on terror' rhetoric. It uniquely links the post-9/11 stereotyping of Muslims and Islam in the West to the roots of current jihadism and the resurgence of ethnocentrism within the subcontinent and beyond. Definitions of home and identity have changed for Muslims as a result of international 'war on terror' rhetoric. This book uniquely links the post-9/11 stereotyping of Muslims and Islam in the West to the roots of current jihadism, the resurgence of different forms of Islam and ethnocentrism within the subcontinent and beyond, and to US realpolitik in order to foreground the effects of terrorism debates on Pakistanis at home and in the diaspora. Through close readings of fiction by Nadeem Aslam, Kamila Shamsie, Uzma Aslam Khan, Mohsin Hamid, Mohammed Hanif, H.M. Naqvi, Ali Sethi, Maha Khan Phillips and Feryal Gauhar, who confront negative attitudes towards Muslims and Islam in the twenty-first century, this book not only challenges the centrality of Western narratives but also foregrounds Anglo-American foreign policy in the Muslim world as a form of terrorism. The author proposes an articulation of a flexible identity among Muslims that is termed a 'global ummah' after 9/11.