Claire Chambers is Professor of Global Literature at the University of York, where she teaches contemporary writing in English from South Asia, the Arab world, and their diasporas. She is the author of British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers, co-editor of Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora and Translation and Decolonisation: Interdisciplinary Approaches, and co-author of Storying Relationships: Young British Muslims Speak and Write About Sex and Love. She published two paired monographs, Britain Through Muslim Eyes: Literary Representations, 1780−1988 and Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels. Together these books narrate a literary history of Muslim writing in Britain from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Claire has also brought out such anthologies as Rivers of Ink, A Match Made in Heaven, Desi Delicacies, and Forgotten Foods. Her forthcoming monograph is Decolonizing Disease: Pandemics, Public Health, and Decoronial Writing (Liverpool University Press, 2025). Claire’s research has been supported by funding from HEFCE, the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Leverhulme Trust. She publishes widely in such journals as Interventions and Contemporary Women’s Writing, and for over a decade acted as Editor-in-Chief of JCL: Literature, Critique, and Empire Today. Email: claire.chambers [at] york.ac.uk
by Claire Chambers Not long ago I wrote for 3 Quarks Daily about R. K. Narayan’s The Vendor of Sweets. In Narayan’s 1962 novel, a young man comes home to India from studies in the United States of America with an apparently preposterous ambition. Now back in South Asia, he wants to manufacture ‘story-writing machines’…
by Claire Chambers Graham Foster from the International Anthony Burgess Foundation recently invited me to read and talk about R. K. Narayan’s The Vendor of Sweets (1967) for the Foundation’s podcast series. You can listen to our podcast here. The series is based on Burgess’s 1984 book Ninety-Nine Novels, in which the author of A…
by Claire Chambers Recently I’ve noticed that a new wave of state-of-the-nation – or, more accurately, ‘state‑of‑the‑world’ – novels tend to arrive clad in yellow dust jackets while bearing short, even one‑word, titles. I’m thinking of books like Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, Asako Yuzuki’s Butter, and Rebecca F. Kuang’s Yellowface. Published in English within…
by Claire Chambers Entering Delhi’s famous Sunday Book Market – known locally as the Patri Kitab Bazaar – in Daryaganj is to step into another world. Previously a tangle of tarpaulin stalls behind Jama Masjid, it has been moved to a gated compound called Mahila Haat. In her new Cambridge University Press Element titled Old…
by Claire Chambers One day I went to my workplace in York, northern England, where I checked my pigeonhole as usual. An airmail letter lay in the metal box. Its postmarks were from Pakistan, and a man’s name and a Karachi address were scrawled on the back of the envelope. Because of the bimonthly columns…
by Claire Chambers Continuing my previous 3QD post about Pamela Sneed’s Funeral Diva, and an earlier piece contextualizing literary representations of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, today I want to discuss the work of Sindiwe Magona. She is one of South Africa’s most renowned Black women writers, and her autobiography To My Children’s Children (1990) is required…
by Claire Chambers In her provocative, genre-defying book, Funeral Diva (2020), Pamela Sneed declares her intention to write ‘a story about being trapped in a story’. This is Sneed’s metafictional idea that main storylines can fail to capture the full reality. To counter dominant narratives, the author creates a turbulent churn of memoir, poetry, essays,…
by Claire Chambers The writer Tabish Khair was born in 1966 and educated in Bihar before moving first to Delhi and then Denmark. He is the author of various acclaimed books, including novels The Thing About Thugs, How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position, and Just Another Jihadi Jane. He has also published…
by Claire Chambers Introduction Hari Kunzru has recently completed the third novel in his three colours trilogy about race, class, and the arts. White Tears concerns music and was published in 2017. Red Pill deals with literature and came out in 2020. And Blue Ruin zeroes in on fine art, having just been released last…
by Claire Chambers I have already written columns for 3 Quarks Daily about starting Hindi language-learning early in the Covid-19 pandemic, continuing to intermediate level as things opened up, and then learning Urdu alongside Hindi once Covid became less of a problem. However, as is suggested by the post-2020 timestamp of my linguistic odyssey, I…
by Claire Chambers I’m excited about the imminent Halloween publication date of Forgotten Foods: Memories and Recipes from Muslim South Asia, a book I edited with Siobhan Lambert-Hurley and Tarana Husain Khan. The new book is a partner volume to Desi Delicacies which I edited and wrote about for this blog in 2021. One of…
by Claire Chambers Rebecca F. Kuang’s new novel Yellowface, a hilarious and haunting satire about the publishing industry, is proving a literary fiction bestseller this summer. However, it is her previous book Babel, or the Necessity of Violence that interests me here. Whereas Yellowface concerns contemporary America, Babel is a capacious piece of speculative fiction…
by Claire Chambers Having begun Hindi and eventually reaching an intermediate level, I sailed into the vast ocean of the Urdu language. There, a novice again, I felt lost amid roiling currents. Yet I kept my compass pointed towards receptivity, hoping the winds of curiosity would steer me to the shores of understanding. I’m not…
by Claire Chambers In my last blog post I wrote about starting to learn the Hindi language during the pandemic. I embarked on this linguistic journey partly from a sense I didn’t fit into my own culture – or, equally, that English culture wasn’t the right fit for me. The sociologist Edward Shils wrote in…
by Claire Chambers Soon after the pandemic commenced its ‘global humbling’ in March 2020, I took on a humbling of my own in the form of learning Hindi. Trying to speak a new language makes most adults feel vulnerable. There is little to hold onto, so the unfamiliar language feels slippery, even treacherous. Compared to…
by Claire Chambers It’s still such a strange time as regards the Covid-19 pandemic. Most governments have lifted restrictions and lockdowns. However, new variants are still emerging and far too few people have been vaccinated globally to lend confidence for the health crisis’s resolution. With this in mind, I’ve been reading Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s…
by Claire Chambers I know Lyn Innes from her career as an eminent postcolonial critic at the University of Kent. Since retirement, Innes has turned her hand to life writing. This is unsurprising when one learns of her unique and fascinating family history. Her book The Last Prince of Bengal: A Family’s Journey from an…
by Claire Chambers Language has an important role to play in national identity. One only has to think about the Shaheed Minar in Dhaka. As its name suggests, this monument commemorates what many Bangladeshis view as the shaheeds or martyrs of the Bengali language movement who were killed in Bengal in 1952. The history of…
by Claire Chambers Maniza Naqvi’s new novel The Inn, published by Maktab-e-Danyal, is about that moment when summers of love and friendship begin a slow-motion nosedive into an autumn of sexual malice and drawn-out feuds. Sal, the novel’s protagonist, is a middle-aged radiologist originally from Pakistan. At the turn of the twenty-first century, he is living…
Review of Fernando Castrillon and Thomas Marchevsky (eds) Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy: Conversations on Pandemics, Politics, and Society (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021) by Claire Chambers In Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the first-person narrator Saleem Sinai invites readers to imagine themselves in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, row by…