Claire Chambers

A comparative approach to Pakistani fiction in English

This survey paper adumbrates an opening up of Pakistani fiction in order to draw comparisons with other writing by novelists of Muslim heritage. While Pakistani writers tend to be analysed as part of broader South Asian trends, Pakistan also faces west and has concerns in the Middle East, Central Asia, Europe and beyond that derive from its Muslim identity. Without overstating the idea of a universalizing umma (which can lead to neglect of the differences and tensions between different Muslim groups), the approach has the advantage of bringing together writers from Muslim countries to shed light on each other. South Asians, Arabs, and Africans are discussed together, because of their shared religious heritage, but never overlooking their vast contextual variations. Insights and themes unique to the research include the fact that writers often tap into a canon of largely Muslim literature and art from the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere, which responds to key moments in the construction of Muslim identity, so intertextuality is a significant concern.

Representations of the Oil Encounter in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason

This article analyses the handling of generic form in the middle section of Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason (1986), a section which has hitherto received little critical attention and which some readers find puzzling. In particular, it examines two literary modes used by Ghosh in representing a fictional Middle Eastern state: the picaresque and social realism. This well-demarcated textual focus forms the foundation for larger points about Ghosh’s writing, his critique of contemporary capitalist values and Western imperialism. Additionally, the article adumbrates ways in which Ghosh’s critique of the Oil Encounter can be connected to recent political developments, such as the so-called “war on terror”. It is also a significant contribution to writing on oil. Colonial sugar, spice, and even cod have all received due attention, while oil, the author suggests, remains woefully under-discussed, given its determining role in contemporary economies.

Countering the ‘Oppressed, Kidnapped Genre’ of Muslim Life Writing: Yasmin Hai's The Making of Mr Hai's Daughter and Shelina Zahra Janmohamed's Love in a Headscarf

This article, informed by interviews with Shelina Zahra Janmohamed and Yasmin Hai, examines their memoirs within the larger context of life writing by young writers of Muslim heritage living in the UK. While many life writing texts about Muslim women may be categorised as ‘misery memoirs’, describing the abuse, forced marriage, or kidnapping of the passive, oppressed Muslim female, Janmohamed and Hai produce contrasting accounts of their largely happy upbringings in British Asian families. Yasmin Hais The Making of Mr Hais Daughter (2008) is marketed in its blurb as ‘a fascinating story about immigration and identity’, and the author is seen as a representative of secular multiculturalism. In contrast, marketers try to constrict Janmohameds Love in a Headscarf (2009) within a devotional world of prescribed and proscribed practices. Despite this, I suggest that these writers are challenging and subverting attempts to pigeonhole them, and that they and others like them are producing an oeuvre of life writing growing in quality and quantity about Muslims in Britain.

‘The heart, stomach and backbone of Pakistan': Lahore in novels by Bapsi Sidhwa and Mohsin Hamid

Although much research has been undertaken on Indian cities, particularly Bombay/Mumbai, Calcutta/Kolkata and Delhi, Pakistani urban environments have not been subjected to anything like the same degree of scrutiny. There exists a long and rich history of artistic and textual interpretations of the city of Lahore, but this body of work has gone largely unappreciated in academic scholarship. To redress this critical gap, the article examines fiction by two diasporic authors from the Pakistani Punjab, Bapsi Sidhwa and Mohsin Hamid, for their representations of Lahore as a postcolonial megacity which is crucially important to the nation and the Punjab, and which interpenetrates with and is cross-fertilized by its Punjabi rural hinterland.

Bilqis the Vampire Slayer: Sarwat Chadda’s British Muslim Vampire Fiction

This essay focuses on the vampire in fiction by a contemporary British writer of Pakistani Muslim descent, Sarwat Chadda. In 2008, Chadda signed to Penguin Books’ children’s imprint Puffin, with whom he published two teenage vampire novels featuring the mixed-race protagonist Billi SanGreal, Devil’s Kiss (2009) and Dark Goddess (2010). Unless otherwise stated, we concentrate on Devil’s Kiss, because it is more germane to the volume’s theme of postcolonial vampires. We make occasional reference to Dark Goddess too, although this text places greater emphasis on werewolves than vampires: more Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles than Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As Chadda himself acknowledges, his debut novel contains echoes of Joss Whedon’s Buffy television series (we shall explore the ways in which both texts may be categorized as ‘slayer’ rather than ‘vampire’ narratives) and of The Da Vinci Code.1 Like Dan Brown’s 2003 best-seller, Umberto Eco’s earlier and more intellectual Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) and other novels in the conspiracy/secret history genre, Devil’s Kiss focuses on the activities of an offshoot of the medieval Knights Templar still operating furtively in contemporary society.

Guest Editorial: Postcolonial past, world present, global futures?

In lieu of an abstract, here is the editorials first paragraph: A good way to think about postcolonial literary studies today is by looking at how the field is described in job listings addressed to us, or which we feel “interpellated” by (Althusser, 2014/1971: 190−97). In some of its recent posts, the British website Jobs.ac.uk, for example, advertised positions in postcolonial studies, but also in global literatures, global Anglophone literatures, world literature, and in some cases transnational literatures. These different ways of naming the subdiscipline and its objects of study confirm a shift that has been happening over time, which is that the colonial experience is no longer the automatic lens through which we train our critical gaze on the literatures of Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, and beyond. Accompanying this development, especially since the early twenty-first century, has been a sense of crisis in the field as its applicability to today’s world continues to be called into question.

‘Sexual misery’ or ‘happy British Muslims’?: Contemporary depictions of Muslim sexuality

We begin this article with a close look at some contemporary pictures of sexual life in the Muslim world that have been painted in certain sections of the Western media, asking how and why these pictures matter. Across a range of mainstream print media from the New York Times to the Daily Mail, and across reported events from several countries, can be found pictures of ‘sexual misery’. These ‘frame’ Muslim men as tyrannical, Muslim women as downtrodden or exploited, and the wider world of Islam as culpable. Crucially, this is not the whole story. We then consider how these negative representations are being challenged and how they can be challenged further. In doing so, we will not simply set pictures of sexual misery against their binary opposites, namely pictures abounding in the promise of sexual happiness. Instead, we search for a more complex picture, one that unsettles stereotypes about the sexual lives of Muslims without simply idealising its subjects. This takes us to the journalism, life writing and creative non-fiction of Shelina Zahra Janmohamed and the fiction of Ayisha Malik and Amjeed Kabil. We read this long-form work critically, attending to manifest advances in depictions of the relationships of Muslim-identified individuals over the last decade or so, while also remaining alert to lacunae and limitations in the individual representations. More broadly, we hope to signal our intention to avoid both Islamophobia and Islamophilia in scrutinising literary texts.

50th Anniversary Editorial

We (Claire Chambers and Susan Watkins) had our first meeting with John Thieme and our publisher SAGE in June 2010. We started shadowing John and answering correspondence immediately after that, with a view to becoming the new editors of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. The announcement of the change in editorship was sent to the board on 31 August 2010 and we officially became co-editors on 14 December 2010. The first issue under our editorship came out in September 2011 (46.3), with essays by Stuti Khanna and Nicole Thiara on Salman Rushdie, Mac Fenwick on Lorna Goodison, and Patrick Evans on Janet Frame, among others. Our first term ran until 31 December 2013, and the second will come to an end on 31 December 2015. In this, our 50th anniversary year, and in our final issue with the two of us as co-editors (about which, more later), it seems an appropriate moment to reflect on the journal’s development. In his March 2010 (45.1) editorial, John Thieme used the example of Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore (2003),1 to point to authors who, writing from within Britain, create “different versions of the national imaginary”, shaped by postcolonial and diasporic concerns (Thieme, 2010: 5). The pendulum had shifted dramatically since the uncredited first editorial in JCL (1966) where it seems Arthur Ravenscroft, subsequently the named editor, excluded studies of British authors from the journal because “many of the problems that face writers using English outside the United Kingdom suggest that, in a literary sense at least, Britain is in a very different position” (n.a. 1966: v). By 2010, John Thieme could state that JCL welcomes articles “on British writing that very obviously speak to the nation’s postcolonial identity” (2010: 6). Using the analogy of literary prizes, Thieme felt that JCL was to the Commonwealth Writers Prize what other journals in English were to the Man Booker. In other words, like the Commonwealth Writers Prize, JCL tends not to privilege British authors. If and when it does, the focus tends to be on those like Phillips and Andrea Levy (two of just three British recipients of the award between 1987 and 2011) who have strong diasporic connections. By contrast, the (Man) Booker Prize, which is just three years younger than JCL, has been won by 29 writers with full or partial British nationality, and only 20 non-British authors. This may 599855 JCL0010.1177/0021989415599855The Journal of Commonwealth LiteratureEditorial research-article2015

Orientalism in Reverse: Early Muslim Travel Accounts of Britain

Muslims now number almost 2.7 million in Britain or approximately five per cent of the population (Office for National Statistics, 2011). The rise to the current figure became markedly steep after the late 1940s, mostly due to the aftermath of empire and a post-war demand for manual labour. However, it is important to recognize that Muslims have visited, lived, and worked in Britain for hundreds of years. As Sukhdev Sandhu observes: Blacks and Asians tend to be used in contemporary discourse as metaphors for newness. Op-ed columnists and state-of-the-nation chroniclers invoke them to show how, along with deindustrialization, devolution and globalization, Englishness has changed since the end of the war. That they had already been serving in the armed forces, stirring up controversy in Parliament, or […] helping to change the way that national identity is conceptualized, often goes unacknowledged. (Sandhu, 2003: xviii)

‘England-Returned’: British Muslim Fiction of the 1950s and 1960s

In this chapter and the next, I track the transition in the second half of the designated period whereby authors move from mostly belonging to the ‘England-returned’1 class to predominantly coming from the myth of return class. This chapter and the previous one examine the largely upper-class, transient, intellectual class of ‘England-returned’ writers (they are Arab and white British as well as South Asian). In the final chapter on the 1970s and 1980s, a more permanent, generally working-class ‘myth of return’ class of writers is in the ascendant.