Claire Chambers is a senior lecturer 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 and co-editor of Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora. She recently 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 a selection of her essays, Rivers of Ink. Her research has been supported by funding from HEFCE, the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). She publishes widely in such journals as Postcolonial Text and Contemporary Women’s Writing, and is Co-editor of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Email: claire.chambers [at] york.ac.uk
by Claire Chambers The Chilean-American author Isabel Allende published her twenty-first Spanish-language novel Violeta in 2022, with an English translation by Frances Riddle appearing the same year. This historical novel is affecting and witty, as Allende paints a vivid picture of rural and urban communities in an unnamed country which clearly recalls Chile. Riddle’s translation…
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…
by Claire Chambers I was delighted to learn that Abdulrazak Gurnah had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. On 7 October 2021 it was announced that the prize had been bestowed on Prof Gurnah for‘his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between…
by Claire Chambers In these dying days of summer, as I steel myself for the onslaught of an uncertain term ahead, I’ve been reading J. A. Mensah’s Castles from Cobwebs (Saraband, 2021). By way of a disclaimer I must note that J. A. – Juliana – is my colleague. However, she took up her creative…
by Claire Chambers Covid-19 has led to various reactions akin to the various phases in the process of grieving. Davide Bertorelli observes in his chapter for The World Before and After Covid that ‘people have experienced differing degrees of anxiety, panic and disruption in every aspect of their lives’. Given what Bertorelli calls our current…
by Claire Chambers Few twentieth-century books witnessed Silver Jubilee celebrations but, 25 years after the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), the monograph was commemorated in this way at his faculty in Columbia University, New York. Just a few months later, in September 2003, the Palestinian-American literary critic and theorist would die at 67 after protracted…
by Claire Chambers I recently edited an anthology about food from Muslim South Asia. Published by Pan Macmillan in India as Desi Delicacies, the book’s first half is made up of life writing essays, while the second half comprises short stories. To give a taste of the volume, it opens with Bina Shah’s virtuosic Foreword:…
by Claire Chambers This has been a terrible year with almost no redeeming features. I have written elsewhere about Covid-19’s hardships, both personal and political. Today, with a vaccine on the horizon and Trump defeated, I want to find some other crumbs of comfort that, as with Hansel and Gretel, might take us somewhere. I…
by Claire Chambers At the time of writing President Donald Trump is an inpatient at the Walter Reed Medical Center. He is of course receiving treatment for coronavirus, a virus he has repeatedly downplayed as being ‘like the flu’. Influenza causes a temperature, achy muscles, often a headache, and some upper respiratory tract symptoms such…
by Claire Chambers Ghazal poetry is an intimate and relatively short lyric form of verse from the Middle East and South Asia. The form thrives in such languages as Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and now English. Like the Western ode, these poems are often addressed to a love object. Influenced by ecstatic Sufi Islam, the ghazal’s subject…