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.

Introduction / Aroosa Kanwal and Saiyma Aslam -- Reimagining History: The Legacy of War and Partition. "All These Angularities": Spatialising non-Muslim Pakistani Identities / Cara Cilano -- 1971: Reassessing a Forgotten National Narrative / Muneeza Shamsie -- History, Borders and Identity: Dealing with Silenced Memories of 1971 / Daniela Vitolo -- 9/11 and Beyond: Contexts, Forms and Perspectives. Global Pakistan in the Wake of 9/11 / Ulka Anjaria -- US-American Inoutside Perspectives and the Dynamics of Post-9/11 Dissociation in Pakistani Fiction / Claudia Nordinger -- The Nuclear Novel in Pakistan / Michaela M. Henry -- 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 / Ambreen Hai -- Comic Affiliations/Comic Subversions: The Use of Humour in Contemporary British Pakistani Fiction / Sarah Ilott -- Resistance and Redefinition: Theatre of the Pakistani Diaspora in the UK and the US / Suhaan Mehta -- Historiographic Metafiction and Renarrating History / Nisreen Yousef -- The Dialectics of Human Rights: Politics, Positionality, Controversies. Pakistani Fiction and Human Rights / Esra Mirze Santesso -- Divergent Discourses: Human Rights, and Contemporary Pakistani Anglophone Literature / Shazia Sadaf -- The Taming of the Tribal within Pakistani Narratives of Progress, Conflict and Romance / Uzma Abid Ansari -- Phoenix Rising: The West's Use (and misuse) of Anglophone Memoirs of Pakistani Women / Colleen Lutz Clemens -- Writing Back and/as Activism: Refiguring Victimhood and Remapping the Shooting of Malala Yousafzai / Rachel Fox -- Identities in Question: Shifting Perspectives on Gender. Doing History Right: Challenging Masculinist Postcolonialism in Pakistani English Literature / Fawzia Afzal-Khan -- Love, Sex, and Desire v/s Islam in British Muslim Literature / Kavita Bhanot -- Everyday Life and Wordly Subjectivity in Pakistani Anglophone Fiction / Mosarrap Hossain Khan -- Spaces of Female Subjectivity: Identity, Difference, Agency. Agency, Gender, Nationalism and the Romantic Imaginary in Pakistan / Abu-Bakar Ali -- Conjugal Homes: Marriage Culture in Contemporary Novels of the Pakistani Diaspora / Rahul K. Gairola and Elham Fatma -- British-Pakistani Female Playwrights: Feminist Perspectives on Sexuality, Marriage, and Domestic Violence / Aqeel Abdulla -- Shifting Contexts: New Perspectives on Identity, Space and Mobility. Identifying Islamic Spaces of Worship in Contemporary British Pakistani Life Writing / Gerogia Stabler -- Homes and Belonging(s): The Interconnectedness of Space, Movement and Identity in British Pakistani Novels / Eva Pataki -- Committed and Communist: Negotiating Political Alegiances in the Diaspora / Miquel Pomar-Amer -- Unsettling Narratives: Imagining Post-postcolonial Perspectives. Non-Human Narrative Agency: Textual Sedimentation in Pakistani Anglophone Literature / Asma Mansoor -- Post-Postcolonial Experiments with Perspectives / Hanji Lee -- Peripheral Modernism and Realism in British-Pakistani Fiction / Asher Ghaffar -- New Horizons: Towards a Pakistani Idiom. "Brand Pakistan": Global Imaginings and National Concerns in Pakistani Anglophone Literature / Barirah Nazir, Nicholas Holm and Kim L. Worthington -- Competing Habitus: National Expectations, Metropolitan Market and Pakistani Writing in English (PWE) / Masood Raja -- De/Re-constructing Identities: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Pakistani Fiction / Faisal Nazir -- On the Wings of Poesy: Pakistani Diaspora Poets and the Pakistani Idiom / Waseem Anwar -- Brand Pakistan: The Case of Pakistani Anglophone Literary Canon / Aroosa Kanwal and Saiyma Aslam

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.

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 Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures is the first globally comprehensive attempt to chart the rich field of world literatures in English. Part I navigates different usages of the term ‘world literature’ from an historical point of view. Part II discusses a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to world literature. This is also where the handbook’s conceptualisation of ‘Anglophone world literatures’ – in the plural – is developed and interrogated in juxtaposition with proximate fields of inquiry such as postcolonialism, translation studies, memory studies and environmental humanities. Part III charts sociological approaches to Anglophone world literatures, considering their commodification, distribution, translation and canonisation on the international book market. Part IV, finally, is dedicated to the geographies of Anglophone world literatures and provides sample interpretations of literary texts written in English.

It is a commonplace belief that history is written by the victorious. However, less recognised but equally common is the idea that the defeated also write history, even if their particular account is rather different. This collection looks at these matters from a novel and distinct perspective. It essentially presents the idea that victors often perceive themselves as defeated, by examining the ways in which the idea of defeat comes to dominate the victors’ own sense of superiority and achievement, thereby undermining the certainties that victory is conventionally thought to create. The contributions here discuss fiction (mostly UK and US) published since the First World War. Through the frameworks of experience, memory and post-memory, they examine this subliminal defeat, basically as seen in conflict itself, in the societies that it affects, and in the individual lives of those who it destroys. The result is an innovative literary account of the victorious-yet-somehow-defeated.

This book explores the dynamic intersections where cultures, languages and spaces converge, shaping identities and creating new forms of expression. The authors attempt to unravel the complexity of narrative and imaginative spaces by examining cultural identities in global contexts. The essays on literary representations consider abstract border crossings through rewriting and reappropriation in various genres, while also looking at immigrant fiction, post-Anthropocene narratives and hybrid spaces through a postcolonial lens. The essays on history and politics critically examine identity conflicts in the United States, while the contributions on applied linguistics and language pedagogy offer insights into online teaching experiences during COVID-19, sociocultural aspects of language use and the formation of bilingual identities. Employing innovative methods in reinterpreting literary works, political narratives and different types of discourse, past and present, this collection contributes to ongoing scholarly dialogues on the multifaceted challenges associated with identity construction through border crossings.