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South Asia

In Session: Selfhood and Agency: Muslim Women’s Fashioning of State, Religion, and Literature in South Asia

2: Shredded Testimonies: Qurratulain Hyder's Disengagement with National Histories

Thursday, March 25, 2021

3:00pm – 4:30pm EDT

Paper Presenter(s)

SH

Syed Akbar Hyder
The University of Texas at Austin, United States

Qurratulain Hyder (1927-2007) features as the most prominent Urdu novelist of the twentieth century. Her commentaries on the 1947 partition of South Asia often creatively transgress genre boundaries between fiction and reportage. Hyder’s oeuvre pushes at the confines of traditional history writing, challenging her readers to extricate their histories from the narratives of nation-states. This presentation will focus on the ways in which Hyder drew from Urdu lyrical traditions when writing the history of her world. It will draw attention to her fashioning of a language that not only upsets the order of prose but conjures up an imaginative sphere that undermines the categories of the European Enlightenment and its attendant modernity.