BIOGRAPHY Fawzia Afzal-Khan Holds a Phd in English Literature From
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BIOGRAPHY Fawzia Afzal-Khan holds a Phd in English Literature from Tufts University and is Full Professor at Montclair State University, NJ. She is author of several books of scholarly criticism: Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel : Genre and Ideology in the works of RK Narayan, Kamala Markandaya, Anita Desai and Salman Rushdie (Penn State Press 1993), The PreOccupation of Postcolonial Studies (co-edited with Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Duke University Press, 2000), A Critical Stage: the Role of Secular Alternative Theatre in Pakistan (Seagull Press, 2005), and editor of the recent best-selling anthology, Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out (Interlink Books 2005). She has published scholarly articles on Feminist and Postcolonial Theory and Criticism and Performance and Cultural Studies in NWSA Journal, TDR (The Drama Review), Social Text, Womanist Theory and Research, Wasafiri, The Journal of South Asian Studies and other journals, and is on the Advisory Board of the South Asian Review. She has lectured all over the world, and is winner of several prestigious fellowships, including the W.E.B Dubois Fellowship at Harvard University, a Rotary Fellowship, an American Institute of Pakistan Studies grant and a Fulbright. She is a performance artist, working in the classical vocal North Indian tradition, and founding member of the theatre collective, Faim de Siecle, with whom she recently performed in the World Premiere of Five Streams at Asia Society, Manhattan. She is completing work on her memoir, Sahelian: Growing Up With Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style, set in Lahore and America. A chapter of it was just published in the anthology And The World Changed:: Contemporary Writings by Pakistani Women (ed Muneeza Shamsie, OUP, 2006). Fawzia is also a published poet, a finalist in the Annual Greenburgh Poetry Competition of 2000. Her most recent assignment was to set up a Postcolonial studies Graduate Program at Givernment College University, Lahore, where she was invited by the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan in Fall of 2005. PRESENTATION Betwixt and Between? Women, the Nation and Islamization in Pakistan Amina Jamal concludes her essay on feminist discourses in Pakistan by re-framing the tradition/modernity or Islamism/secularism debate which marks the limits—and limitations-of current transnational feminist theory. She suggests that the question posed by Pakistani Muslim feminists in response to the Islamization policies undertaken by the nation-state in recent decades—in itself a phenomenon linked to various practices of imperialist globalization—takes us beyond reinscriptions of a debilitating East/West binary which privileges modernity as a universal discourse of human rights that allows mainstream western feminists to simultaneously pity and patronize non-western Muslim women. While feminist groups gathered under the umbrella of WAF (Womens’ Action Forum), founded in Pakistan in the 1980s as a counterhegemonic move against the so- called Islamic government of Zia-ul-Haque, have indeed turned to a discourse of Universal Human Rights and to a liberal humanist conception of the Individual citizen— their deconstructive, catachrestic engagement with the notion of nation, opens up a space for a different kind of question than the simplistic, imperialist privileging of modernity over traditionalism generally allows; the question such a deconstructive engagement encourages us to ask, then, is What discursive conditions of “Islamization” make it necessary for women in Pakistan to privilege discourses of universal (Western) modernity despite their problematic epistemological and political connotations? (Jamal 2005,77). My own essay proposes to delineate some answers to this question by both instantiating and exposing the limitations of Jamal’s theoretical ruminations on Pakistani female subjectivity in a post 9/11 scenario, which has, as Jamal points out, witnessed an exponential rise in both public and private manifestations of extreme religiosity. This “return to fundamentalism,” manifested most publicly in the adoption of the hijab by an ever-increasing number of elite and middle-class urban women ( a phenomenon noticeable prior to 9/11, soon after Zia’s Islamization programme went into effect in the 1980s), has complicated and curtailed the effectivity and claims to authenticity, of the secular women’s rights organizations in Pakistan who privilege the “discourses of universal (Western) modernity” as the basis of their feminist praxis. In order to further explore the question of Pakistani Feminism’s relationship with the tradition/modernity or secularism/Islamism debate, ever mindful of the discursive conditions of Islamization as they continue to unfold in response to national and international pressures, I shall draw on my experiences during recent visits to Pakistan, the latest involving teaching and living in Lahore, the city of my birth. Having come of age in the 1970s, I came to the USA to pursue my doctorate the same year that Z.A. Bhutto, democratically-elected Prime Minister of Pakistan, was hanged by the government of the military dictator who had ousted him in 1977, the late general Zia-ul-Haque. While I have continued to live and work here ever since, I have maintained contact with Pakistan through annual visits to my parents home in Lahore, and have worked with theatre and women rights activists during some of these visits. Last year (Oct-Dec 2005), marked the first time I was there in a professional capacity as Professor in the Dept of English at the prestigious Government College University, invited to set up a program in Postcolonial Studies for MPhil/Phd students. A set of interrelated albeit discrete questions arose from the space I occupied as teacher within a Pakistani university which provided me with opportunities for interaction and exchange of ideas with the 16 registered students, all of them instructors at some other institutions of “Higher Education,” in Lahore or elsewhere, the majority being women(11 women, 5 men). Simply put, they are: 1) what does it mean to teach postcolonial theory to postcolonials? 2) Why were almost all my female students (save 1) wearing the hijab (head covering) popularized by Islamization across the globe (Pakistan being only one state amongst many in the Muslim world to have gone down this path in the last few decades of the 20th century)? 3) What does this sartorial gesture signify? How has women’s situation changed discursively between the time I was growing up (including my time as a masters student at this very institution 20+ years ago, when none of the female students wore the hijab)— and the 1980s onwards? 4) What function does the ideology of the “home” play in empowering as well as oppressing women? Is it different for women of different classes and locations (urban/rural}? 5) How has the current regime—the dictatorship of President Musharraf—buoyed by US- backing in exchange for cooperation in fighting Al-Qaeda forces in the border regions with Afghanistan and in restraining Islamic fundamentalism within the country— positioned itself vis-vis women’s rights? My purpose here is not to provide definitive answers to these questions (if indeed, such answers are even possible)—but rather, to offer a symptomatic reading of the state of Pakistani society and culture today which may help concretize the dilemmas and challenges faced by “secular” women rights activists in Pakistan as outlined by Amina Jamal. .