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 In my last post but one I pledged to continue my discussion of Benazir Bhutto’s two premierships and eventual assassination by examining the legacy she left behind for novelists to explore. Then, of course, the pandemic took hold, and I couldn’t not respond to the global health and welfare emergency. However, now…
by Claire Chambers The last book I edited was about love and desire, and then I was slowly turning my attention to that other great universal pastime: food. For food is love; love in a more complex sense than mere carnality, a relationship that is layered as a paratha. The Pakistani novelist Bina Shah wrote to…
by Claire Chambers In Owen Bennett-Jones’s ten-part podcast, The Assassination, which he made for the BBC World Service in 2017, listeners become immersed in the circumstances around the murder of Benazir Bhutto ten years earlier. They learn of the security concerns, sectarian hatred, and patriarchal demands faced by even this most privileged woman. Benazir, a dynastic…
by Claire Chambers A few tall, dreamy-eyed Sikh men were on my plane to Lahore. Guru Nanak’s 550th birth anniversary celebration was taking place nearby about a month later, on 12 November 2019, so I guessed their final destination was Nankana Sahib, Guru Nanak’s birthplace. The British-Indians’ presence was a reminder, if any were needed,…
by Claire Chambers I’m just back from a short trip to Lahore and, while the colours, tastes, and sounds are still vibrant in my mind, I want to write it all down. On my way to Pakistan I got talking to someone at Manchester Airport. We were both eager to charge our phones before the…
by Claire Chambers Today I ask to what extent it is a positive development that there are no discussions of race and religion in Danny Boyle’s and Richard Curtis’s film Yesterday, whose protagonist Jack Malik is from a South Asian, possibly Muslim, background. In his essay ‘Airports and Auditions’ for Nikesh Shukla’s The Good Immigrant,…
by Claire Chambers As I step, bleary-eyed, out of my PIA aeroplane from Manchester, UK, I notice a door sign warning of the danger of falling personnel. Partly amused, partly disconcerted, I head for the luggage carousel at Karachi's Jinnah International Airport. In the car on our way to my hotel, we follow a man…
by Claire Chambers At a Sheikh Zayed Book Award event in 2017, Marina Warner told the audience that the Arabic root word for water and story is the same. Both nouns, she claimed, relate to the verb 'to transfer', rawin being one way to say 'storyteller', while rawiya is 'to drink one's fill' or 'to…
by Claire Chambers In her 1989 memoir Meatless Days, Sara Suleri famously writes that 'leaving Pakistan was, of course, tantamount to giving up the company of women'. She goes on to explain that in Pakistan womanhood did not truly exist as a concept: 'we were too busy for that, just living, and conducting precise negotiations…
by Claire Chambers Today is the anniversary of 70 years of Pakistan, and tomorrow it will be Indians' turn to celebrate their nation's Independence Day. I recently wrote about South Asian cultural production that portrays Nehru, the Mountbattens, and the Edwina-Jawaharlal relationship or affair. Today I turn my attention to depictions of the Quaid-i-Azam or…
by Claire Chambers In discussions of postcolonial and diasporic literature, questions of faith and religious identity have until recently tended to be subsumed under such categories as ethnicity, nationality, hybridity, and race. Rae Isles, a character who lectures on Middle Eastern politics in Leila Aboulela's The Translator, accordingly asserts: 'Even Fanon, who I have always…
Authenticity is a term that often comes up in postcolonialism and especially my own subdiscipline of Muslim literary studies. But what does it mean to be authentic, and is the quest for authenticity a productive or stifling one? A fetishization of authenticity can trap apparently ‘authentic’ cultures in picturesque poverty and a pastoral past that never existed, ignoring their plural present. The anti-authenticity stance can also be challenged on academic grounds, because what is research if not a process of authentication? Authenticity cannot be so easily dismissed as a discourse of power, since it is one in the service of knowledge too.
by Claire Chambers In her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt argues that there is nothing in evil that is radical or lucid. Instead, she claims, even the most extreme evil is senseless and banal. Amos Elon summarized Arendt's argument in terms that cannot but resonate with the current political circumstances in the United…
If you’ve ever read my blog posts for 3 Quarks Daily or columns for Dawn’s Books & Authors section, you will know me for my criticism of world literature. But as it’s the holidays, I want to write about something more frivolous. I have a confession to make: as well as being a lecturer in global literature, for the last five years I have also moonlighted as a Beto Perez and ZumbaZumba instructor.
by Claire Chambers The current volatile state of global higher education raises urgent questions. Student protests broke out at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, in March 2015. These demonstrations initially called to remove the statue of the racist imperialist Cecil Rhodes from campus. As Rachael Gilmour explains, the ejection of Rhodes's statue was…
by Claire Chambers Much has been written about Boris Johnson as a politician in recent weeks. But Johnson is also an author of fiction, verse (I won't dignify it by using the word 'poetry'), and journalism. As such, another way of understanding the man's worldview is to scrutinize his imaginative work. I examine Johnson's little-known…
by Claire Chambers Leila Aboulela's debut novel The Translator (1999) is about a love affair between a Sudanese translator, Sammar, and her employer, the Scottish lecturer Rae Isles. Turkish novelist Elif Shafak similarly handles various transcultural love affairs in her 2012 novel Honour, but is more concerned with their darker aspects of jealousy and disgrace.…
by Claire Chambers Since 1855, both orthodox and non-practising Arab Muslim writers have produced an exciting, politicized, and high-quality body of artistic work. Among other aims, it seeks to portray the concerns of British-based members of the transnational faith group, or ummah. My research indicates that, particularly in the years following the riots in northern…
by Claire Chambers I recently wrote an essay for Dawn on general postcolonial rewritings of Shakespeare's Othello. For the present column, I turn to what Ania Loomba has called 'the made-in-India Othello fellows'. In other words, I am interested in those Indian writers who, from Henry Louis Vivian Derozio onwards, have looked to this play…
Iin light of the examination of the issue of torture in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and Moazzam Begg’s autobiography Enemy Combatant, this essay discusses Elaine Scarry’s and Tzvetan Todorov’s evaluation of the fallout caused by the torture of the Other.