Human Writes: Pakistani Women’s Writing

UK Friends of Khwendo Kor  is delighted to invite you to this very exciting talk: 

 Human Writes: Pakistani Women’s Writing

In this 30 minute talk, Claire Chambers and Sauleha Kamal will provide a reader’s guide to the burgeoning field of Pakistani women’s writing. They will argue that recent Pakistani cultural production by women has shown a distinct turn towards human rights discourse. Women writers and filmmakers are increasingly representing minorities’ precarious position in contemporary Pakistan, and many of them also explore fierce debates about human rights, Islam, and cultural relativism. Claire will walk you through how fiction, film and poetry by Pakistani women claim to put the human into human rights. Sauleha Kamal will join Claire in discussing the extent to which the exposure of these women to the international scene affects how they are received and who they influence. Both speakers will also discuss how their work might impact on the work of organisations such as Khwendo Kor (www.khwendokor.org) in rural areas and how spaces could be created for indigenous women writers.

Claire Chambers is Professor of Global Literature at the University of York. She is the author of British Muslim Fictions (2011), Britain through Muslim Eyes (2015), and Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels (2019). She has also published a collection of her essays entitled Rivers of Ink (2017). Finally, she co-edited Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora (2015) and A Match Made in Heaven (2020). Her research has been supported by funding from HEFCE, the British Academy,the Leverhulme Trust and the AHRC. Claire is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, acts as Editor-in-Chief (with Rachael Gilmour) of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and writes a regular column for Dawn’s Books and Authors.

Sauleha Kamal is a PhD candidate and Overseas Research Fellow at the University of York researching post-9/11 South Asian narratives in the context of human rights and politics. She holds an MPhil (English: Criticism and Culture) from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Chevening and Cambridge Trust scholar, and a BA (Economics & Social History and English) from Barnard College, Columbia University. Her scholarly work, essays, and fiction have appeared in various places including Postcolonial Text, The Atlantic, and Catapult. She was a writer in residence at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York in November and December 2019.

The event is free to attend but booking must be made in advance by emailing to frok.events@gmail.com with your name and the email address with which you will be joining the session. If you are unfamiliar with using Zoom then let us know and we will send instructions.  Booking closes 12^th Nov..

We will send out joining instructions the day before the talk.