A VIDEO RECORDING OF THE TALK IS AVAILABLE HERE.
ICM Spring 2021 New Books Series
Thursday, May 6, 2021 2:00 – 3:15pm
MARYAM WASIF KHAN
Associate Professor, Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Mushtaq Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS University, Lahore
Who Is a Muslim? (Fordham UP, 2021) argues that modern Urdu literature, from its inception in colonial institutions such as Fort William College, Calcutta, to its dominant iterations in contemporary Pakistan—popular novels, short stories, television serials—is formed around a question that is and historically has been at the core of early modern and modern Western literatures. The question “Who is a Muslim?,” a constant concern within eighteenth-century literary and scholarly orientalist texts, the English oriental tale chief among them, takes on new and dangerous meanings once it travels to the North-Indian colony, and later to the newly formed Pakistan. A literary-historical study spanning some three centuries, this book argues that the idea of an Urdu canon, far from secular or progressive, has been shaped as the authority designate around the intertwined questions of piety, national identity, and citizenship.
BIO
Maryam Wasif Khan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the Mushtaq Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS University, Lahore. She received her doctoral degree in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles under the supervision of Professor Aamir Mufti. She also holds an A.B. in Comparative Literature (summa cum laude) from Princeton University. Her work on British orientalism, Muslim reform and nineteenth-century prose fiction in Urdu has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies (MFS), Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History (MLQ) and PMLA. She is currently juggling several projects, which include cooking for and around her one-year-old son, Khayyam, as well as a series of essays on teaching and reading the Western Canon, outside of the Euro-American academy.
Image credit: Front page banner, poster image, Bibi Hajra, Ramzan Transmission (2019); Detail from book cover
