Journal of Contemporary Poetics

Initial Pages

Aroosa Kanwal — 2023-06-01

Editorial, Advisory Board and Table of Contents

Mujhay Na Kha Jana! : Women and Food in Faseeh Bari Khan’s "Burns Road Ki Nilofer"

Saba Khaliq — 2023-06-01

This paper is a materialist feminist study of Pakistani writer, Faseeh Bari Khan’s comedic telefilm, “Burns Road Ki Nilofer”, translated as “Nilofer of Burns Road”. A recurrent motif in Pakistani comedic telefilms is of women, both married and single, portrayed as beasts with voracious appetites and insatiable consumption patterns. This paper expounds how Khan’s female characters are portrayed as women of agency who, by claiming the right to comment on the desiring, economy and distribution of food, rise beyond their stereotypical representations of gluttonous eaters. Following Lisa Angelella’s scholarship on food and feminism, I posit that both Nilofer and her mother, Saeeda, try to negotiate their sense of selfhood and approach what it means to be a woman and a human via their conversations on food in the telefilm. My research aims to unravel the underlying dominant factor in their crippled sense of self while also retaining within it a muffled identification of female agency when the female characters consume as per their desiring. The void that women wish to fill while devouring great amounts of food, is occasioned by the absence of women’s positionality as a class in a patriarchal capitalist society where, as materialist feminist scholar Christine Delphy propounds, they are not made part of the system of “exchange of values” despite their domestic “labor” (“The Main Enemy” 73). Thus, this research reimagines womanhood and women’s exploitation in a domestic mode of production within Pakistani patriarchal capitalist cartographies.
Keywords: Materialist feminism, feminist food studies, Pakistani television, female selfhood, female appetite

Between Past and Present: Unravelling Colonialism’s Enduring Impact in The Wandering Falcon

Toqeer Ahmed — 2023-06-01

In my exploration of the profound and enduring impacts of colonialism on the nomadic tribes of Baluchistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan, I draw from Jamil Ahmad’s The Wandering Falcon and insights from postcolonial theorists. My study illuminates the tribes’ persistent struggles for recognition, representation, and basic rights. These tribes, once proud custodians of their distinct cultural heritage, now confront challenges from modern encroachments, political marginalisation, and economic hardships, all deeply rooted in colonial legacies. The imposition of foreign legal systems, combined with the pervasive influence of modern media, has led to a noticeable erosion of their traditional social structures and values. The economic consequences of colonialism in the region are stark, with aggressive resource extraction and the demarcation of artificial borders disrupting their economic foundations. My research underscores the tribes’ enduring struggles, emphasising the contemporary relevance of these colonial legacies. As these tribes grapple with modern challenges, I stress the importance for policymakers to recognise and address these colonial legacies, advocating for a more inclusive and equitable future. In conclusion, my research suggests the need for additional exploration into the intersections of colonialism, gender dynamics, and identity within the nomadic tribes of Baluchistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan, while advocating for the formulation and implementation of strategies that empower these tribes, ensuring that their concerns are met with both empathy and efficacy.
Keywords: Colonialism, nomadic tribes, marginalisation, Baluchistan, traditional lifestyles

Manto's "Toba Tek Singh" and the Politics of Translation

Sajjad Hussain — 2023-06-01

translating a source text into a target language. Furthermore, the current study compares three English translations of the short story “Toba Tek Singh” by Saadat Hasan Manto by three translators from three different countries: Khalid Hasan, Khushwant Singh, and Frances W. Pritchett. These three translations are analyzed from three different geo-cultural perspectives, that is, Pakistani, Indian, and Anglo-American. In our research, we have combined the general conventions of translation with the insights emerging from CDA, particularly Van Dijk’s notion of media discourse. The translations are examined with regard to such aspects as addition, omission, modulation, and faithfulness. This study reveals serious compromises on faithfulness in Hasan’s and Singh’s translations. This can possibly be attributed to the geopolitically volatile climate in which both of these translators must have conceptualized their target text. However, Pritchett appears to be largely successful in maintaining faithfulness to the source text and her translation is by and large more skilled and is only negligibly marked by ideological inventions.
Keywords: CDA, faithfulness, manipulation, political ideology, translation

Female Gothic, Modernity and the Aesthetics of Change: Demythologising the South in Eudora Welty

Shabbir Ahmad — 2023-06-01

Eudora Welty, an American fiction writer, brings forth women’s issues and promotes feminist ethics in her writings: novels and short stories. Her stories reveal her concern with the extended subordination of women under machismo in Southern America. More significantly, her work highlights the growth of women’s liberal thinking during the development of modernity in the southern parts of America. She looks at the change in time and thought under modernity to examine the local culture and literature with a critical eye on the strict gender order in the South. Her fiction explores varied forms of oppression in marriage, kinship, and community structure of the changing South through female Gothicism. In depicting her female characters as fleeing spatial confinement for freedom and self-transformation, Welty develops an aesthetic of mobility that threatens the mythologized constructions of Southern culture. This eventually leads to a reactionary modernism that calls for the redefinition of identity and culture in the history of Southern America. For centuries, the South has been considered the most segregated, white-centric patriarchal society due to its particular culture, geography and history. The change in thought and culture caused by modernity becomes a threat to the customary plantation business as well as to the conservative male hierarchical order as it engenders a revision of women’s identity. This study may help in further research on Gothic literary studies in combination with discourses on culture and women’s identity in literary works.
Keywords: Female Gothic, mythologized culture, modernity, Southern America, women’s identity

Faith and Identity in Stephen Crane’s “In Heaven” and Taufiq Rafat’s “This Blade of Grass”: Linguistic Relativity Leading to Worlds Within Words

Sajid Ali — 2023-06-01

This study revolves around the idea that literature which comes from different social and cultural backgrounds often flags the differences between faith and identity and thereby extends the debates surrounding them. It attempts to analyse two works by two different poets: “In Heaven” by Stephen Crane and “This Blade of Grass” by Taufiq Rafat. Both bring a diversity of ideas into their works while writing about faith since they are from two different social and cultural backgrounds. This study approaches both texts from the perspective of linguistic relativity, which helps us understand the conceptualisation of textual meaning in relation to semantic relativity (Casasanto 174). The argument here focuses on the close reading of the texts while foregrounding their lexical and contextual meanings. Descriptive, interpretive research techniques are used for textual analysis to look at both works contrastively in order to extract their linguistic relativity vis-a-vis their subject matter and to extract elements of faith and identity embedded within them. At the same time, this study finds that despite dealing with similar subject matter, setting, character, and language, the two poems reflect two distinct identities because of the linguistically relative meaning of words. The difference in identities was evident because of the differences in faith where Crane’s blade of grass is portrayed through biblical references while Rafat’s blade of grass is situated in the context of Sufism and fana.
Keywords: Faith, identity, darvesh, linguistic relativity, world within words

Environmental Ethics: Life Narratives from Kashmir and Palestine

Shumaila Noreen — 2023-06-01