Rehumanizing Muslim Subjectivities: Postcolonial Geographies, Postcolonial Ethics

Rehumanizing Muslim Subjectivities: Postcolonial Geographies, Postcolonial Ethics is a timely and urgent monograph, allowing us to imagine what it feels like to be the victim of genocide, abuse, dehumanization, torture and violence, something which many Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir, Pakistan, Myanmar, Syria, Iraq and China have to endure. Most importantly, the book emphasizes the continued relevance of creative literature’s potential to intervene in and transform our understanding of a conceptual and political field, as well as advanced technologies of power and domination. The book makes a substantial theoretical contribution by drawing on wide-ranging angles and dimensions of contemporary drone warfare and its related catastrophes, postcolonial ethics in relation to the thanatopolitics of slow violence, dehumanization and the politics of death. Against the backdrop of such institutionalized and diverse acts of violence committed against Muslim communities, I call the postcolonial Muslim world ‘geographies of dehumanization’. The book investigates how ongoing legacies of contemporary forms of injustice and denial of subjecthood are represented, staged and challenged in a range of postcolonial anglophone Muslim texts, thereby questioning the idea of postcolonial ethics. One of the selling points of this book is the chapters on fictional representations by Muslim Myanmar and Uyghur writers as, to the best of my knowledge, no critical work or single authored book is available on Myanmar and Uyghur literature to date.

Aroosa Kanwal is Associate Professor in English Literature, Department of English at the Quaid-e-Azam University, Pakistan. She recently held a postdoctoral fellowship at Lancaster University, UK (2018-2020). She is the author of Contemporary Pakistani Speculative Fiction and the Global Imaginary: Democratizing Human Futures (Routledge, 2023), The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing (Routledge, 2019) and Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction: Beyond 9/11 (2015). Her monograph Rethinking Identities received the KLF-Coca-Cola award for the best non-fiction book of the year 2015. She has published chapters and articles in Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora (Routledge, 2014), edited by Claire Chambers and Caroline Herbert; Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts (2012), edited by Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe; Journal of Gender Studies, (Routledge), Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (Routledge), Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and Journal of International Women’s Studies, (US).