Seminar archive 2007

Inter-University Postcolonial Seminar Series
Postcolonial/Muslim cultures and representation
Autumn 2007

Following up on a successful one day workshop entitled ‘Framing Muslims’ this series is designed to explore links between postcolonial and Muslim cultures and literatures. (Follow this link for details of the September workshop programme [PDF].) The series has been organised by Dr Peter Morey (University of East London) and Dr Amina Yaqin (SOAS) in partnership with Professor Susheila Nasta of the Open University Postcolonial Research Group (co-ordinator of the seminar). It forms part of a multi-part project on ‘Framing Muslims’ funded by the AHRC. It will lead to a collaborative symposium on this subject in 2009.

All meetings 5.30pm Tuesdays, Room NG15, Senate House North.

Tuesday 9 October 2007

Mohsin Hamid
Author reading with Mohsin Hamid from his recently published novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist long listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize.
Mohsin Hamid grew up in Lahore, attended Princeton and Harvard Law School and worked for several years as a management consultant in New York. His first novel, Moth Smoke was published in ten languages, won a Betty Trask Award, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His essays and journalism have appeared in Time, The New York Times and the Independent among others.

Tuesday 23 October 2007

Dr Peter Morey (UEL)
“Stereotypes and Strangers: Muslims in Film and Television Drama since 9/11”
Peter Morey is Reader in English at the University of East London. He is the author of Fictions of India: Narrative and Power (Edinburgh UP, 2000), Rohinton Mistry (Manchester UP Contemporary World Writer’s Series, 2004), and co-editor of Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation and Communalism (Rodopi, 2006). He has published widely in the fields of colonial and postcolonial literature, and is currently working on a new monograph, entitled Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation from 9/11 to 7/7, co-authored with Amina Yaqin, to be published by Harvard University Press.

Tuesday 13 November 2007

Dr Amina Yaqin (SOAS)
“‘Honour Killings’ as a Muslim issue in migrant writing”
Amina Yaqin is Lecturer in Urdu and Postcolonial Studies at the SOAS, University of London. She has published essays on gender and sexuality in Urdu poetry, Pakistani culture and Indian literature in English. Currently she is revising her monograph entitled Imagining Pakistan and co-writing a book with Peter Morey on Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation from 9/11 to 7/7 to be published by Harvard University Press.

Tuesday 27 November 2007

Dr Rehana Ahmed (OU)
‘Faith, Class and Cultural Resistance: Hanif Kureishi and Contemporary
British Asian Fiction’Rehana Ahmed is Research Fellow appointed to the AHRC-funded project ‘Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870-1950’ which examines the formative South Asian contributions to Britain’s cultural, literary and political life in the period. Led by Professor Susheila Nasta, this interdisciplinary and collaborative project links the OU with the Universities of Oxford (Prof Boehmer) and London (Dr Ranasinha) as well as the British Library and SALIDAA. Dr Ahmed’s research interests are in twentieth-century and contemporary British Asian literature and culture. She has recently taught courses in postcolonial writing at Nottingham Trent University and Royal Holloway, University of London.

Tuesday 11 December

Dr Anshuman Mondal (Brunel)
“Reframing the ‘Islamic turn’ amongst young British Muslims”
Anshuman Mondal is Senior Lecturer at Brunel University. He has published essays on Indian literature in English, Gandhi, gender politics in Indian nationalism, modern Arabic narrative genres, modern Islam and fundamentalism, and the politics of the Middle East. He is the author of Nationalism and Post-Colonial Identity: Culture and Ideology in India and Egypt (Routledge, Curzon, 2003) and Amitav Ghosh for Manchester University Press’s Contemporary World Writers series.

Inter-University Postcolonial Seminar Series: Postcolonial/Jewish Histories and Literatures
Spring 2007

Designed to explore links between Postcolonial and Jewish histories/literatures, the seminars this term will focus primarily on South Asia. The series has been organised by Dr Susheila Nasta (Open University) in partnership with Professor Bryan Cheyette (University of Reading) and will lead, in 2008, to a collaborative symposium on this subject and to a special issue of the journal Wasafiri.

Tuesday 23 January, 2007
Professor Bryan Cheyette: "Salman Rushdie and ‘the Jews’" - Chair in Modern Literature and Director of Research in the School of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. Cheyette’s research interests include late nineteenth- , twentieth- and twenty-first century English literature, British-Jewish literature, ‘new’ literatures in English, theories of ‘race’ and modernity, and Holocaust literature. He is the editor of six books and author of Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society (Cambridge University Press, 1993 & 1995) and Muriel Spark (Northcote, 2000) and is completing Diasporas of the Mind: Literature and ‘Race’ after the Holocaust for Yale University Press which has chapters on Salman Rushdie and Frantz Fanon.

Tuesday 13 February, 2007
Dr Axel Stähler: " An ‘unlikely subject’? The Holocaust in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay" - teaches in the North American Studies Programme at the University of Bonn. At the University of Münster he is project coordinator of an international research project on fundamentalism and literature. He has just completed a book-length study on Anglophone Jewish writing and Jewish postcoloniality, Zion’s Fiction: Post-colonial Fictions of Jewish Identity. He has edited a collection of articles on Anglophone Jewish Literature to be published by Routledge in July 2007.

Tuesday 6 March, 2007
Usha Kishore: "Jewish identity in Independent India" - is a doctoral student at the Open University and a Lecturer in English at the Isle of Man College. Her poetry has been published in magazines and anthologies in the UK, US, Ireland, Europe, New Zealand and India and has been translated into German, Spanish and Italian. Her short story Dowry was shortlisted for the 2005 Asham Award and is to be published in The Edinburgh Review. She has published extensively on Tagore, and is currently completing a doctorate on Indian Poetry in English-a Postcolonial Perspective.

20 March, 2007
Professor Aamir Mufti: "Enlightenment in the Colony: the Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture" - Mufti is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. His interests include secularism and faith in modern culture, Marxism and aesthetics, minority cultures, exile and displacement, refugees and the right to asylum, modernism and fascism, language conflicts, and the history of anthropology. He works mainly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Urdu literature and nineteenth-century British literature. He is author of Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton University Press, 2007), editor of Critical Secularism, a special issue of Boundary 2 (2004), and is co-editor of the volume, Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minnesota University Press, 1997).