Narrating Pakistan: An anthology of contemporary creative writing

Narrating Pakistan: An anthology of contemporary creative writing

Narrating Pakistan is an attempt to explore the idea of Pakistan through contemporary stories-the term, the country, the nation, the identity, the idea, the boundary, the border, the story, the history, the arch, or the absence thereof. What are some of our stories? What demands to be written? And what remains unsaid?

The stories, fictional and nonfictional, show multiple perspectives on what constitutes a Pakistani writer or a Pakistani narrative. The characters range from truck drivers in interior Sindh to Muslim boys growing up in the suburban United States, from young men arriving in Sydney and Frankfurt battling cultural shock to women in urban Islamabad fighting patriarchy. Interweaved among the surrealistic imaginations of diasporic writers are reflections on memory, language, disease, death, and belonging. All the writers gathered here share a contemporary cosmopolitan sensibility. The last author in the anthology is a digital entity and problematises the idea of a storyteller with a distinct geographical region and acknowledges the post-human future awaiting all of us.

A momentous coming together of brilliant young writers. The writers in this anthology are narrating a different story of Pakistan-a richer, truer, more nuanced Pakistan than can be found in any newspaper or column. A book to help us feel more deeply, and see farther. 

About the speakers

Saeed Ur Rehman Associate Professor, Habib University, Karachi, has a PhD from the Australian National University, and has held a postdoctoral fellowship at Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. His research has appeared in Cultural Dynamics, Kunapipi, The Historian, and Journal of Research (Humanities). He has published monographs on minorities and the education policies of Pakistan. His research interests include postcolonial knowledge production and the politics of cultural identity. He contributes regularly to Pakistani newspapers on literary and social issues.

Khadeeja Farooqui is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English at Princeton University. She works on issues of migration, citizenship, gender, and labor in Global Anglophone Literature, focusing particularly on the GCC. Her first edited collection of essays and stories titled Narrating Pakistan was published in 2023. She holds a B.A. in Literature and Creative Writing from NYU Abu Dhabi and an MFA in Creative Writing (nonfiction) from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

Discussant

Sauleha Kamal is a researcher, writer and development consultant. Her recent PhD problematised ideas about the novel, empathy and human rights in light of the economic aims of the literary marketplace. An alumna of the University of Cambridge (where she was a Chevening-Cambridge Trust scholar) and Barnard College, Columbia University, her research can be found in Postcolonial Text, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and other places. Her writing has appeared in various places including The New Yorker and The Atlantic. She is coediting an issue on human rights and world literature for the Journal of Word Literature. She was a writer-in-residence at Yaddo in Fall 2019.