Papers by Iqra Shagufta Cheema
Examining the vernacular lives of Punjabi language in Pakistan, this essay considers the question... more Examining the vernacular lives of Punjabi language in Pakistan, this essay considers the question: what is the life of a language undesired in a hostile politicolinguistic ecology? By way of an answer, it employs the term paindoo to argue that Anglo-Urduphile postcolonial Pakistan reduces Punjabi to a lingual and visual accent that is caricatured, embodied, and gendered. This reductive accent is produced not by the speaker, but rather through the accented perception of the listener.
The Other #MeToos, 2023
From Asia to Africa to the Middle East, #MeToo has inspired local movements and hashtag trends li... more From Asia to Africa to the Middle East, #MeToo has inspired local movements and hashtag trends like #AnaKaman and transnational collective hashtags like #MosqueMeToo. Yet, most Western scholarly and popular treatment of the movement assumes it is a primarily Western phenomenon. To attend to the revolutionary international impact of #MeToo, Iqra Shagufta Cheema brings together contributions from scholars and scholar activists that look at specific iterations of the #MeToo movement across multiple communities, cultures, and countries in the Global South. Going beyond gender, this comprehensive study focuses on the intersectional assemblage of ethnicity, religion, race, class, and politics that informs #MeToo and its place in local and transnational feminisms. By doing so, The Other #MeToos highlights the adaptation, translation, and impact of #MeToo in non-Western, postcolonial, minoritized, and othered locales to explore its wider scope and possibilities.
ReFocus: The Films of Zoya Akhtar
H omosexuality, despite being represented conservatively and in dichotomous opposition to heteros... more H omosexuality, despite being represented conservatively and in dichotomous opposition to heterosexuality, is not an entirely unfamiliar territory for Indian popular and independent cinema. Indian cinematic queer representations range from homosocialism and homoeroticism in films like Sholay
Islamic studies, 2021
Benedict Anderson connects the rise of print capitalism to the rise of nationalism in Europe as w... more Benedict Anderson connects the rise of print capitalism to the rise of nationalism in Europe as well as in the colonies. Print capitalism and nationalism shared a similar relationship in the Indian subcontinent too that remained a British colony for almost 200 years, from 1757 to 1947. Employing Deputy Nazir Ahmad’s novel, Mir’āt al-‘Urūs (1869), I argue that the introduction of print capitalism proved crucial to the rise of Muslim national consciousness and for Muslim women’s education to redefine their sociopolitical role in the new Muslim imagined community under British colonization. Print capitalism, via the possibility of mass-produced books like Mir’āt al-‘Urūs, transformed the Muslim national imagination by making Indian Muslims a community in anonymity. I offer this new reading of Mir’āt al-‘Urūs to trace the interaction of print capitalism, Muslim national consciousness, and new roles for Muslim women in colonial India.
Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, 2021
Pakistaniaat, Dec 27, 2020
Decades after the 1947 partition of Indian subcontinent and post-1947 political antagonism, the b... more Decades after the 1947 partition of Indian subcontinent and post-1947 political antagonism, the bonds of land and love between people across India-Pakistan borders are still strong. The Sikh Heritage beyond Borders is yet one more manifestation of that. "The communal riots of 1947 manifested that religion is what the believers make of it," writes Dalvir S. Pannu in his introduction to the book-and rightly so (12). In this book, Pannu provides a textual and pictorial narration of a multitude of Sikh heritage sites in Pakistan. Pannu offers a comprehensive and nostalgic view of the Sikh history in Pakistan through the photos he took during his travel to Pakistan which is pleasing to the eye, comforting to the heart, and satisfying for any curious reader. After opening the introduction to The Sikh Heritage beyond Borders with a brief historical overview of British colonization plan, Pannu shares the heart wrenching memories of both Sikhs and Muslim who were forced to migrate to either side of the India-Pakistan border. These stories echo the stories that we have all seen on screens, read in memoirs, or heard from our ancestors-they share a sense of loss and longing. The book is divided Sikh heritage sites into five sections, each devoted to a city in Punjab in Pakistan: (i) Nankana Sahib, which includes fourteen sites; (ii) Sheikhupura, which includes three sites; (iii) Sialkot, which includes six sites; (iv) Kasur, which includes
Fashion, Dress and Post-postmodernism, 2021
and transfer of religious identity and cultural traditions across generations. Additionally, cons... more and transfer of religious identity and cultural traditions across generations. Additionally, considering the chapter limitation, I use South Asia to refer to India and Pakistan only. I choose these countries because centuries-old shared history between both countries makes their fashion, culture and arts similar in more ways than not. Though there has been a wide adoption and appropriation of Hindu cultural and religious rituals and objects, development of Muslim fashion has not gained much attention. Hence, this chapter will enable cross-cultural fashion connections as well as enhance readers' comprehension of post-postmodern Muslim women's identity as expressed through fashion choices. Readers might fi nd it ironic that I, in this chapter, deploy Western theories to discuss the ramifi cations of Muslim women's fashion and representation of their religio-political and sociocultural identities via fashion. This irony highlights the signifi cance of the discussion of non-Western subjects by a non-Western subject on a global platform in this chapter. It also displays the increasing post-postmodern impossibility of drawing hard lines between different cultural and religious factors.
Pakistaniaat, 2018
Crime is a socio-cultural phenomenon which is in dialogue with a number of nuanced and polyvalent... more Crime is a socio-cultural phenomenon which is in dialogue with a number of nuanced and polyvalent variables such as economy, culture, politics, topographical fabric, to name only a few, and therefore bears telling significance in the society. Since time immemorial crime has been persisting in the society and has been ceaselessly evolving in commensurate with socio-cultural developments in general and particularly with spatial and topographical alterations. It is sometimes supposed that crime seems at times to be a consequence of disjunctive and disruptive sharing of worldly resources conditioned by certain geopolitical status quo and at once a means for questioning ontological stability of certain a priori epistemological and sociological strands. At this point, one may be reminded of that contextual specificities play pivotal role in drawing the contour of crime and thus are of profound pertinence. Due to the liberalization of economy happened during 1990s, the overlapping trajectories of space and place inured by the irrevocable and irresistible forces of globalization have problematized stereotypical assumptions of crime and as a consequence of it, a number of aporias including the problematic interface between crime and space induced by changing topographical specificities, within the paradigm of crime have been triggered. 1 Ensuing contradictions, on the one hand, insist that one needs to reexamine the negotiation of crime with space and place in the postglobalization scenario in order to expound the changing nature of crime, and on the other hand, induce that critics are supposed to engage themselves in examining the problematic interplay among crime, space and place. There are some Pakistani novelists who have begun to deal with problematic negotiations of crime with space and place conditioned by social, cultural, economic, political, and religious alterations in the context of Pakistan. This article is intended to intervene into select Pakistani novels incorporating Akbar Agha's The Fatwa Girl (2011), Omar Shahid Hamid's The Prisioner (2013), and Bilal Tanweer'sThe Scatter Here Is Too Great (2013) to question the representation and ontological stability of crime in the select fictions and to lay bare some inherent loopholes in Abhisek Ghosal conventional understanding of crime's affinity with space and place, taking recourse to criminology.
Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, 2021
Benedict Anderson connects the rise of print capitalism to the rise of nationalism in Europe as w... more Benedict Anderson connects the rise of print capitalism to the rise of nationalism in Europe as well as in the colonies. Print capitalism and nationalism shared a similar relationship in the Indian subcontinent too that remained a British colony for almost 200 years, from 1757 to 1947. Employing Deputy Nazir Ahmad's novel, Mir'āt al-'Urūs (1869), I argue that the introduction of print capitalism proved crucial to the rise of Muslim national consciousness and for Muslim women's education to redefine their sociopolitical role in the new Muslim imagined community under British colonization. Print capitalism, via the possibility of massproduced books like Mir'āt al-'Urūs, transformed the Muslim national imagination by making Indian Muslims a community in anonymity. I offer this new reading of Mir'āt al-'Urūs to trace the interaction of print capitalism, Muslim national consciousness, and new roles for Muslim women in colonial India.
and transfer of religious identity and cultural traditions across generations. Additionally, cons... more and transfer of religious identity and cultural traditions across generations. Additionally, considering the chapter limitation, I use South Asia to refer to India and Pakistan only. I choose these countries because centuries-old shared history between both countries makes their fashion, culture and arts similar in more ways than not. Though there has been a wide adoption and appropriation of Hindu cultural and religious rituals and objects, development of Muslim fashion has not gained much attention. Hence, this chapter will enable cross-cultural fashion connections as well as enhance readers' comprehension of post-postmodern Muslim women's identity as expressed through fashion choices. Readers might fi nd it ironic that I, in this chapter, deploy Western theories to discuss the ramifi cations of Muslim women's fashion and representation of their religio-political and sociocultural identities via fashion. This irony highlights the signifi cance of the discussion of non-Western subjects by a non-Western subject on a global platform in this chapter. It also displays the increasing post-postmodern impossibility of drawing hard lines between different cultural and religious factors.
The White Tiger is the narration of a journey of the protagonist Balram from rags to riches amid ... more The White Tiger is the narration of a journey of the protagonist Balram from rags to riches amid fierce class war, exploitation, amorality and expanding globalization. Balram is crushed in a callously stratified society as a resident of dark India. He is unable to pursue his education because of unavoidable economic pressure. He is compelled to become a Halwai (sweet maker) and then a driver to a rich man's foreign qualified son who resides in a cosmopolitan city. This cosmopolitan life opens up utterly new and till now undiscovered horizons of life, riches, and success to him. He happens to observe, learn and experience completely new and startling incidents, people and places there which resultantly make him take the revenge of the whole proletariat on the bourgeoisie. Novel validates the veracity and relevance of the Marxist ideas exposing various divisions and fissures within Indian societal structure.
Drafts by Iqra Shagufta Cheema
Description Since taking the international turn 20 years ago, compositionists have sought to unco... more Description Since taking the international turn 20 years ago, compositionists have sought to uncover what it means to teach writing in English to international students and within international settings (Donahue, 2009; Horner et al., 2009; Matsuda, 2013). Scholars invested in the relationship between internationalization of English and writing composition have examined writing pedagogy in international contexts (Milson-Whyte, 2015; Fraiberg, 2010) as well as started initiatives like Writing Research Across Borders and drafting the 2019 CCCC "Statement on Globalization in Writing Studies Pedagogy and Research." Concurrently, online writing instruction (OWI) scholars have called for more research on teaching multilingual students. 1
Book Reviews by Iqra Shagufta Cheema
Islamic Studies, 2019
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has been often treated militarily or occasionally dipl... more The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has been often treated militarily or occasionally diplomatically, but rarely ideologically. ISIS, Ideology, Symbolics, and Counter Narratives, a book by Masood Ashraf Raja, focuses on this oftneglected aspect, fostering conditions of ISIS ideology, its local and global catalysts, its strategies of recruitment, and proposal for a more tolerant, humane, and peaceful counter-ideology. The book is interdisciplinary: the writer employs theoretical terms from humanities and theological terms from Islam to discuss religious as well as cultural, political, global, and economic factors in the making and nurturing of ISIS. Raja argues that, unlike Western stereotype of most Muslims as terrorists, ISIS ideology only appeals to those already receptive to extremist mindset. Factors like neoliberal economy, global inequities, international financial institutions, Western foreign policies, and failed neoliberal model of education in developing countries, also helped increase ISIS recruits. The book also provides comprehensive historical overview of ideas like jih┐d and situates them in the contemporary world. Raja, who has previously served in Pakistan army, combines his knowledge of military practices and his training as a
Uploads
Papers by Iqra Shagufta Cheema
Drafts by Iqra Shagufta Cheema
Book Reviews by Iqra Shagufta Cheema