Kashmiri Life Narratives Human Rights, Pleasure and the Local Cosmopolitan

Kashmiri Life Narratives takes as its central focus writings -- memoirs, non-fictional and fictional Bildungsromane -- published circa 2008 by Kashmiris/Indians living in the Valley of Kashmir, India or in the diaspora. It offers a new perspective on these works by analyzing them within the framework of human rights discourse and advocacy. Literature has been an important medium for promoting the rights of marginalized Kashmiri subjects within Indian-occupied Kashmir, successfully putting Kashmir back on the global map and shifting discussion about Kashmir from the political board rooms to the international English-language book market. In discussing human rights advocacy through literature, this book also effects a radical change of perspective by highlighting positive rights (to enjoy certain things) rather than negative ones (to be spared certain things). Kashmiri life narratives deploy a language of pleasure rather than of physical pain to represent the state of having and losing rights.

Rakhshan Rizwan is a writer and scholar working at the intersection of creative and scholarly practice. She is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with Utrecht University in the Netherlands and has a PhD in Comparative Literature. She has been a guest researcher at the Tilburg Law School. Her research interests include human rights and literature, postcolonial novels, decolonial legal fictions and minority rights and representation. She is author of "Local Flows: The Pleasurecentric Turn in Human Rights Advocacy in South Asia" (Tilburg Law Review, 2017) and "Repudiating the fathers: Resistance and Writing Back in Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator" (Kashmir Lit, 2013). Her poetry pamphlet, Paisley (2017) was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Prize.