SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

‘Without him life loomed like a void’- Romance, Agency and the Play of Imagination in Qaisra Shahraz’s The Holy Woman

Abstract

The discourse of romance has become synonymous with popular, mass media culture in Pakistan and shaped its many diverse forms, from iconic television drama serials to novels that are part of a wider literary history.

This paper explores how the genre of romance can potentially serve as a site on which Pakistani women writers refashion and reconfigure their role in their country’s nationalist imaginary. Nationalism and its ideologies are clearly important to these writers and I am concerned with he way they respond to its challenges and the subsequent implications this has for gendered agency. Qaisra Shahraz is a novelist whose work highlights the breadth of these responses. I will be focusing on how her novel, The Holy Woman (2001), consciously employs the tropes of populist romances that Pakistani audiences will widely recognise, to negotiate complex questions of gender and agency. Her context is an immensely significant one, where nationalism evinced a ‘rebirth’ within the radical politics of religious fundamentalism under the military dictatorship of General Zia in the Eighties. Her novels are concerned with how these politics are played out across the lives and bodies of the women in the Sindhi community of Pakistan.

The body of Shahraz’s heroine becomes a site through which questions of sexuality, religion and gender can all be explored at the level of representation, where agency appears to be located. This contemporary novel also raises interesting issues about reception and the pleasures of reading. Shahraz was a much sought after scriptwriter for popular Pakistani television drama serials before she emigrated from Karachi to Manchester and wrote novels. Her novels carry out a textual excavation of the political unconscious of this discourse across the representation of gender, sexuality and class and against the backdrop of a rejuvenated nationalism. The salient question is how the author manages this without compromising the pleasures of reading that her novels undoubtedly offer. Her novels illuminate wider issues concerning the reception of literature and the way it was and continues to be consumed by readers who are mainly middle-class women. Shahraz effectively reconfigures nationalist narrativity from within its own representational limits, limits at which gender strains.

Speaker Biography

I completed my BA Hons in English with Film at King’s College, London in 2005. I stayed on for an MA in 20th Century Fiction in the following academic year and returned a year after completing my Masters to begin a PhD in 2007-08, supervised by Dr. Anna Snaith. I was awarded my Doctorate in September 2012. My thesis, entitled Agency and its Discontents: Nationalism and Gender in the work of Pakistani Women Writers, explored the work of Pakistani women writers, from the moment the country was “created” 60 years ago, to present day diasporic texts. The focal point of my research was how these complex literary interventions figured across a hegemonic nationalist historiography which refuses to grant them a representational space in its political work.

My research interests lie in the field of postcolonial literature, specifically the work of writers in what has broadly become a canon of South Asian fiction. I explore the extent to which contemporary theorisations within postcolonial studies of agency, performativity and the politics of sexual and particularly gendered identities can be employed to approach such a varied and diverse body of work. To this end, I engage a series of critical discourses. Postmodern expressions of postcolonialism are interrogated by a feminism that is materially grounded, to investigate how the representations of feminist agency in these texts can be read against the extremely tenuous historical contexts they are produced in.