International lecture on post 9/11 Pakistani fiction

Dr Madeline Clements, a Senior Lecturer in English Studies, was invited to the International Islamic University, Islamabad (IIUI), to discuss how post 9/11 Pakistani Fiction in English may be read as an attempt to revise modern knowledge of the Islamic world.

Her public lecture, entitled, 'Writing Islam: Negotiating Tensions Shaping a Study of South-Asian Muslim Novelists after 9/11' focused on the reconfiguration of Muslim identities in post 9/11 Pakistani Fiction in English by Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid and Nadeem Aslam.

With a critical eye on the markedly reductive Othering strategies engaged by numerous global discourses regarding the identification in the wake of 9/11, Dr Clements’ viewed them as biased as numerous Muslims suffer as they are called upon to explain themselves in the Western public sphere.

With this being the contextual framework of her research, Dr Clements talked about how post 9/11 Pakistani Fiction in English may be read as an attempt to revise modern knowledge of the Islamic world and how this genre of literature may be utilised to reconfigure the potential of Muslims to connect with others.

She argued that a number of these writings continue to indulge 'exotic' appetites, or reinforce Eurocentric ways of seeing and that even highly resistant texts remain susceptible to appropriation by dominant political and cultural forces.

While her talk focused on the nuanced perspective on contemporary Islam as she once again questioned the unsettling binaries between the East and The West, the subsequent question and answer session led the talk to focus on the role of Pakistani Fiction in English in the context of the contemporary socio-political scenario and, in some cases, its problematic co-opting by the Western market.

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