Short description:

This book analyzes the philosophical "voyages" of the Muslim self through close readings of 20th century South Asian works in the Muslim modernist, Marxist, and postcolonial intellectual traditions. It demonstrates how the legacies of Marxisms and anti-colonial humanisms have shaped Muslim Anglophone literatures of the present.

The book concentrates on Indo-Pakistani political and literary forms related to subjectivity by writers who lived in Britain, or who are British, such as Muhammad Iqbal, Ahmed Ali, Zulfikar Ghose, Hanif Kureishi, and Kamila Shamsie. Building on Brennan?s new theory of anticolonialism, it emphasizes neglected relationships in both postcolonial and materialist conceptions of subjectivity, such as the dialectic between oral culture and religion.

This book offers groundbreaking and innovative new perspectives, consituting a shift to a new generation of postcolonial studies focused on humanism. It will be of interest to students and scholars in Geography, Asian Studies, Literature, and Cultural Studies.

Long description:

This book analyzes the philosophical "voyages" of the Muslim self through close readings of 20th century South Asian works in the Muslim modernist, Marxist, and postcolonial intellectual traditions. It demonstrates how the legacies of Marxisms and anti-colonial humanisms have shaped Muslim Anglophone literatures of the present.

The book concentrates on Indo-Pakistani political and literary forms related to subjectivity by writers who lived in Britain, or who are British, such as Muhammad Iqbal, Ahmed Ali, Zulfikar Ghose, Hanif Kureishi, and Kamila Shamsie. Building on Brennan?s new theory of anticolonialism, it emphasizes neglected relationships in both postcolonial and materialist conceptions of subjectivity, such as the dialectic between oral culture and religion.

This book offers groundbreaking and innovative new perspectives, consituting a shift to a new generation of postcolonial studies focused on humanism. It will be of interest to students and scholars in Geography, Asian Studies, Literature, and Cultural Studies.

Table of Contents:

Introduction PART I Intellectual history 1. Humanism?s fragments: Adorno, anti-imperialism, peripheral literature 2. Voyages of the self: Muslims as anticolonial subjects in Muhammad Iqbal?s philosophy of history PART II Literary history 3. The remaking of the world: Indo-Pakistani Muslims and the Progressive Writers? Movement 4. Modernist twilight: Peripheral modernism in the novels of Zulfikar Ghose PART III Poetic history 5. History and racial charisma: Hanif Kureishi and the Muslim other in the post-Cold War Bildungsroman 6. The return of realism in recent Pakistani Anglophone fiction