Dr Caroline Herbert

This article examines how recent Pakistani literature in English negotiates the legacies of Partition and the 1971 civil war, focusing on Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography (2002). I argue that Shamsie engages with Urdu literary culture to explore the complex dialectics of memory and forgetting, intimacy and estrangement that affect Pakistani subjectivities in the post‐Partition, post‐Bangladesh period. Shamsie fuses two non‐narrative forms, Urdu lyric poetry and maps, to produce what I call “lyric maps” of Karachi, to interrogate the multiply layered “cartographic anxiety” that affects contemporary Pakistani subjectivities, and to disrupt national narratives that censor – or seek to forget – the loss of Bangladesh. Drawing together questions of narrative form with those of national forgiveness, I end by exploring the novel’s “mapping” of Karachi as a conflicted, but potentially productive, site for processes of reconciliation structured by difference and discontinuity.

This paper examines the relationship between photography and narration in Salman Rushdie's 1999 novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet in order to consider the changing representation of Bombay in the author's work. In this novel, Rushdie places a photographer‐narrator at the centre of his attempts to negotiate tensions between aesthetics and politics, offering a renegotiation of the relationship between the migrant and his homeland which has been a central concern of his work thus far. I suggest that Rai's photography enables Rushdie to establish a relationship between his changing representational strategies, his own altered position in relation to his place of birth, and the social transformations taking place within Bombay. At the same time, Rushdie positions the crisis in Rai's narration of Bombay as a strategic act of resistance to the rise of exclusionary politics within that city during the 1990s.

An exploration of the representation of cities in postcolonial literatures, including discussions of Bombay/Mumbai, Karachi, Johannesburg, Delhi, Toronto, London, Lagos.

Despite its aesthetic experimentation, its intervention into urgent questions about citizenship and belonging in contemporary India, and its attention to the most iconic of Indian cities, Mumbai, Madhusree Dutta’s 2006 documentary film 7 Islands and a Metro – and Dutta’s work more broadly – has yet to receive the critical attention it demands. Addressing this gap, this article examines Dutta’s use of spectrality to structure her search for a documentary form that makes room for Mumbai’s marginalised subjects to narrate themselves into its representational histories and contemporary spaces. Key to Dutta’s approach is a visual dialogue between the city’s historical ghosts and its spectral citizens – those who exist in a state of dispossession and social invisibility in the present, such as women, migrant workers, casteized and Muslim subjects, and the urban poor. Through this spectral framework – a dialogue between the living and the dead, which is also an intertextual dialogue between the past and the present, the fictional and the actual – Dutta’s film probes the complexities of representation and self-representation, agency, and access to story-making processes and platforms. Dutta’s formal play foregrounds the multiple ways in which the city and citizenship are mediated, represented, and claimed, and the multiple ways in which spectral subjects are produced and displaced. Her aesthetic experimentation – particularly her use of spectrality and performative modes of representation – enables reflections on the ways in which spectral subjects seek to render themselves visible in the city and claim themselves as active agents and participants in the making of Mumbai.

This article examines how fictions of Bombay figure the global city as haunted by spectral subjectivities, offering narratives of visibility and invisibility that engage with the intertwined impacts of global capitalism and Hindu nationalism. Focusing on Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) and Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games (2006), I explore how Bombay fictions mobilise narratives of spectrality and embodiment to urge us to read for communities rendered invisible by overlapping discourses of ethnic and economic exclusivity, by the violent transition of the city from ‘Bombay’ to ‘Mumbai’. I argue that narratives of urban spectrality enable critical interventions into ongoing debates about India's secular pasts and futures, situating the emergence of the Hindu Right and the decline of secularism within the context of India's economic liberalisation in the 1990s. I argue that, by foregrounding the city's spectral subjects, and by affiliating culturally and economically marginalised citizen-subjects, Rushdie and Chandra offer strategies of reading for and from the perspective of minoritised populations that can be aligned with Aamir Mufti's notion of ‘critical secularism’. My examination of spectrality extends Mufti's critical practice into one attentive to processes of socioeconomic marginalisation in the city-space, to bodies rendered homeless by Hindu majoritarianism and global capitalism.

Artists, musicians, writers and their work have been central to Anglophone Indian author’s efforts to excavate the subcontinent’s past in response to the crisis in secularism and in resistance to the separating out of complex and intertwined cultures into the categories of ‘Hindu’, ‘Muslim’, ‘majority’ and ‘minority’. Focusing on Shashi Deshpande’s novel Small Remedies, this essay considers the relationship between music, memory and national identity, and explores what imaginative resources the interaction between music and fiction might offer to our understandings of the minoritization of Muslim subjectivities and of the shared histories of religious cultures on the subcontinent.

Literary, cinematic and media representations of the disputed category of the ‘South Asian Muslim’ have undergone substantial change in the last few decades and particularly since the events of September 11, 2001. Here we find the first book-length critical analysis of these representations of Muslims from South Asia and its diaspora in literature, the media, culture and cinema. Contributors contextualize these depictions against the burgeoning post-9/11 artistic interest in Islam, and also against cultural responses to earlier crises on the subcontinent such as Partition (1947), the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war and secession of Bangladesh, the 1992 Ayodhya riots , the 2002 Gujarat genocide and the Kashmir conflict. Offering a comparative approach, the book explores connections between artists’ generic experimentalism and their interpretations of life as Muslims in South Asia and its diaspora, exploring literary and popular fiction, memoir, poetry, news media, and film. The collection highlights the diversity of representations of Muslims and the range of approaches to questions of Muslim religious and cultural identity, as well as secular discourse. Essays by leading scholars in the field highlight the significant role that literature, film, and other cultural products such as music can play in opening up space for complex reflections on Muslim identities and cultures, and how such imaginative cultural forms can enable us to rethink secularism and religion. Surveying a broad range of up-to-date writing and cultural production, this concise and pioneering critical analysis of representations of South Asian Muslims will be of interest to students and academics of a variety of subjects including Asian Studies, Literary Studies, Media Studies, Women’s Studies, Contemporary Politics, Migration History, Film studies, and Cultural Studies.