Gender, Sexuality and Feminism in Pakistani Urdu Writing by Amina Yaqin ISBN 9781785277559, 1785277553 instant download

Gender, Sexuality and Feminism in Pakistani Urdu Writing by Amina Yaqin ISBN 9781785277559, 1785277553 instant download

In India and Pakistan, Urdu poetry connects a multiplicity of voices in the public domain, appealing to an elite class, and extends beyond that ‘ashrafization’ in its formulation as an everyday lived experience offering different trajectories 
across a variety of spaces.  It is a signifier of national, local and gendered 
cultures, forming a cross-cultural mosaic across multiple identities and identification. You will find examples of phrases and poems cited and quoted in a variety of places: television channels will devote hours of primetime viewing 
to cultural discussion programmes and performances of poetry and song; 
politicians will quote well-known poems in the certainty that their significance 
will be broadly understood; and even the drivers of rickshaws and trucks will 
have adapted poetic phrases painted on their vehicles. Other cultural forms, 
including devotional music such as the qawwali, folk art and street theatre, 
engage a cross-section of society, offering a cultural aesthetic that draws from everyday life. Poetry thus advances an activist medium of self-expression in 
which authority and ownership of symbols, metaphors and personifications 
can be overturned and class politics questioned. In this landscape, it is neces-
sary to think about the place of women and their intersectional relations to 
class, nation and culture. Nosheen Ali has written about the plural diversities 
of poetic knowledges in South Asia and a decolonized approach to poetry 
through a region-led cross-cultural knowledge of poetic traditions in order to understand the culture of emotions and affect that are part of everyday life.
Poetry as both an oral and a written medium in the subcontinent was utilized 
by reformists, anticolonialists, progressives and nationalists. How do we make sense of the different types of narrative that are embedded in this …