Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, Bard Translation and Translatability Initiative, and Asian Studies Program Present
Gender, Sexuality, and Feminism in Pakistani Urdu Writing
Tuesday, April 18, 2023
Olin Humanities, Room 102
5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Amina Yaqin, University of Exeter, Associate Professor of World Literature
My book offers a new understanding of progressive women’s poetry in Urdu and the legacy of postcolonial politics. It underlines Urdu’s linguistic hybridities, the context of the zenana, reform, and rekhti to illustrate how the modernising impulse under colonial rule impacted women as subjects in textual form. My argument draws on genealogies of gender in Urdu literary culture from the canonical texts for sharif women from Mirat-ul Arus to Umrao Jan Ada that need to be looked at alongside women’s diaries and autobiographies so that we have an overall picture of gendered lives from imaginative fiction, memoirs and biographies.The influence of the Left, Marxist thought and resistance against colonial rule fired the Progressive Writers Movement in the 1930s. In post-Partition Pakistan, despite the disintegration of the Progressive Writers Movement and the official closure of the Left in Pakistan, I argue that an exceptional legacy can be found in the voices of distinctive women poets including Ada Jafri, Zehra Nigah, Sara Shagufta, Parvin Shakir, Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed. Their poems offer new metaphors and symbols borrowing from feminist thought and a hybrid Islamicate culture. Riaz and Naheed joined forces with the women’s movement in Pakistan in the 1980s and caused some discomfort amongst Urdu literary circles with their writing. Celebrated across both sides of the border, their poetry and politics is less well known than the verse of the progressive poet par excellence Faiz Ahmed Faiz or the hard hitting lyrics of Habib Jalib. The book demonstrates how they manipulate and appropriate a national language as mother tongue speakers to enunciate a middle ground between the sacred and secular. In doing so they offer a new aesthetic that is inspired by activism and influenced by feminist philosophy.
For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102