1st Edition
Muslim Women’s Writing from across South and Southeast Asia
This essential collection examines South and Southeast Asian Muslim women’s writing and the ways they navigate cultural, political, and controversial boundaries. Providing a global, contemporary collection of essays, this volume uses varied methods of analysis and methodology, including:
• Contemporary forms of expression, such as memoir, oral accounts, romance novels, poetry, and social media;
• Inclusion of both recognized and lesser-known Muslim authors;
• Division by theme to shed light on geographical and transnational concerns; and
• Regional focus on Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
Muslim Women’s Writing from across South and Southeast Asia will deliver crucial scholarship for all readers interested in the varied perspectives and comparisons of Southern Asian writing, enabling both students and scholars alike to become better acquainted with the burgeoning field of Muslim women's writing. This timely and challenging volume aims to give voice to the creative women who are frequently overlooked and unheard.
Introduction
Feroza Jussawalla and Doaa Omran with assistance from Gerard A. Lavin
India
Chapter 1:
From Ismat Chugtai to Samina Ali and Monica Ali: Women’s Communities, Contexts, and Conflicts
Feroza Jussawalla
Chapter 2:
"Based on Love and Truth": Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Theological Negotiations in Sultana’s Dream
Cynthia A. Leenerts
Kashmir
Chapter 3:
Critique of Exclusionary Women’s Nationalism in Kashmir, and Reconceptualizing the Relationship Between State and Non-State Women Actors
Nyla Ali Khan
Chapter 4:
Conflict and Women in Kashmir: A Study of Ather Zia’s Poetry
Shruti Sareen
Chapter 5:
Songs and Slogans of Protest: Exploring Kashmiri Women’s Resistance(s) to the Indian State
Samreen Mushtaq
Pakistan and Afghanistan
Chapter 6:
The Trade of Giving Up Being a Woman: A Transnational Antiracist Reading of Nadia Hashimi’s The Pearl That Broke Its Shell
Umme Al-wazedi
Chapter 7:
Women, Violence, and Conflict: A Study of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire
Muddasir Ramzan
Chapter 8:
Poetics of Resistance by the Muslim Woman
Sobia Khan
Chapter 9:
The Empowerment of Women in the Controversial Landscape of Pakistan in The Upstairs Wife
Heba Abdel-Aziz
Bangladesh and Sri Lanka
Chapter 10:
A Mother in a War: Jahanara Imam’s Ekattorer Dinguli
Debali Mookerjea-Leonard
Chapter 11:
Encountering the "Pseudo Gatekeepers": Islamism and Secularism in Identity Construction of Bangladeshi Women in Fiction
Hafiza Nilofar Khan
Chapter 12:
Writing Rights: Women and Community in Sharmila Seyyid’s Ummath
Sk Sagir Ali
Indonesia and Malaysia
Chapter 13:
Being Religious, Cool, and Global in the Eyes of Indonesian Muslim Woman Writers: Negotiating Religion and Popular Lifestyle in Islamic Pop Novels
Diah Ariani Arimbi
Chapter 14:
Reclaiming Islamic Religious Interpretations through Women’s Experience: Life, Activism, and Authorship of Three Indonesian Muslim Feminists
Lien Iffah Naf’atu Fina & Yuyun Sri Wahyuni
Chapter 15:
Malaysian Muslim Women’s Writing: A History of Colonization, Decolonization, and Globalization
Nor Faridah Abdul Manaf & Ruzy Suliza Hashim
Chapter 16:
Negotiating Conflicts amongst Muslim Female Characters in Malay Romance Novels: A Narratological Perspective
Jariah Mohd. Jan and Diana Abu Ujum
Burma, Brunei, and the Philippines
Chapter 17:
Agency of Rohingya Muslim Women Survivors of Genocide in Myanmar
Afroza Anwary
Chapter 18:
Beyond Intractability: Muslim Women Negotiating Identities in Brunei Darussalam
Hannah Ming Yit Ho
Chapter 19:
Reading Her Face: Affect Theory in Narratorial Representation in Malaka Gharib's Graphic Novel I was their American Dream
Wessam Elmiligi
Comparative Perspectives
Chapter 20:
Partition Historiographies in Qurratulain Hayder’s River of Fire (India) and Radwa Ashour’s Tantoura (Palestine): Assertion vs. Subalterity
Doaa Omran
Chapter 21:
Muslim Women Re-membering the Nation, Writing Their Transnational Selves in Diasporic Memoirs: Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days and Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage: From Cairo to America—A Woman’s Journey
Bhawana Pillai
Chapter 22:
Women’s Narratives and the Politics of the Personal in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column and Siti Rukiah’s The Fall and the Heart
Amany El-Sawy
Biography
Feroza Jussawalla, Ph.D., University of Utah, 1980, is Professor Emerita at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. She has taught at the University level for more than forty years, beginning with her years as a T.A. at the University of Utah, then at the University of Texas at El Paso (1980-2021) and as Full Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, NM, 2001-2021. She is the author of Family Quarrels: Towards a Criticism of Indian Writing in English (Peter Lang, 1984), co-editor of Interviews with Writers of the Postcolonial World, (University Press of Mississippi, 1992), Emerging South Asian Women Writers (Peter Lang, 2017), and Memory, Voice and Identity: Muslim Women’s Writing from Across the Middle East (Routledge, 2021). She also edited Mr. Naipaul’s interviews given through his career to various newspapers and journals into Conversations with V.S. Naipaul (Mississippi, 1997), which was both translated into French, and featured on Sir Naipaul’s Nobel Prize page. She has co-taught an NEH Summer Seminar and an NEH Institute on Postcolonial Literatures housed at the School for Asian and African Studies in London. She has also won prestigious grants such as the Rockefeller Foundation residency in Bellagio, Italy and the Alumni Teaching Award at the University of New Mexico (2014). She is the author of more than three hundred articles and book chapters, primarily on Indian Writing in English, Postcolonial Literatures in English, Indian Critical Theory, D.H. Lawrence and Muslim Women’s writing, written from 1979 onward. Her book of poems is Chiffon Saris (2003) published by the Kolkotta Writer’s Workshop and the Toronto South Asian Review. She has published several individual poems, most recently on-line with Silver Birch Press https://silverbirchpress.wordpress.com.
Doaa Omran’s research interests include postcolonial theory, feminism, and the Middle Ages. She did her master’s and PhD at the University of New Mexico. She wrote her ground-breaking dissertation titled Female Hero Mega-Archetypes in the Medieval European Romance (2019) on Quranic and Biblical female characters as mega-archetypes in Medieval literature. Her MA thesis was titled Occidental Encounters: Early Nineteenth-Century Egyptian travelers to Europe (2012). She is currently a visiting lecturer at the same university where she received her master’s and doctorate. She received her BA in English language and literature at Alexandria University, Egypt. Her awards include: a Fulbright Scholarship (2007), the Women of Color award at UNM (2012), Dean of Graduate Studies Dissertation Award (2016) and first place in sIdentity: Muslim Women’s Writing from across the Middle East. She was also invited by Women Studies: an Interdisciplinary Journal to be Guest co-editor of the special issue Muslim Women Speaking Persistently. Her book chapters include "The Woman from Tantoura: An Autotheoretical Reading in the Art of Resistance," "Ambivalence in the Poems of the Slave-Knight ‘Antarah Ibn Shaddād: An Engagement with Historicism(s), “Muslim Face, White Mask: Out al-Kouloub al-Dimerdashiyyah’s Ramza as a Mimic (Wo)man," and "Anachronism and Anatopism in the French Vulgate Cycle and the Forging of English Identity through Othering Muslims/Saracens." She is the administrator of the Facebook group "CompLitScholars" which serves a community of more than 1,000 international researchers.
