scholarly journals Writing as Resistance: A Reading of Mohsin Hamid’s Select Novels

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rongina Narzary

Mohsin Hamid, one of the powerful voices to emerge from Pakistan engages with themes that go beyond the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 and portrays contemporary issues relevant to Pakistan. In the process, Hamid consciously performs the role of the mediator and attempts to explain his country to the readers. In his two novels, Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist Hamid not only represents modern-day Pakistan but also offer resistance to the association of Pakistan with terrorism thereby replicating the postcolonial tendency to “write back” and reclaim one’s identity. Furthermore, he offers a nuanced understanding of the hostilities that prevail between India and Pakistan. Fictional representations of Islam and Muslim identities by writers of Pakistani origin have received increased attention, especially in the post 9/11 political climate with its attendant reductive representations of Islamic fundamentalism. The ‘war on terror’ which has had the effect of equating Islam and Muslims with terrorism has become a dominant political narrative in Europe and the US over the last decade. It is such diffused representation of Muslim identity which has evoked criticism in the ‘orient’ and Hamid shines bright in this regard.

2006 ◽  
Vol 80 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 63-81
Author(s):  
Timothy S. Chin

Analyses the novel 'Brown girl, brownstones' (1959) by Paule Marshall. Author argues that this novel offers a complex and nuanced understanding of how Caribbean migration impacts upon cultural identity, and how this cultural identity is dynamically produced, rather than static. He describes how the novel deals with Barbadian migrants to the US in the 1930s and 1940s, and further elaborates on how through this novel Marshall problematizes common dichotomies, such as between the public and the private, and between racial (black) and ethnic (Caribbean) identity. Furthermore, he indicates that Marshall through her representation of the Barbadian community, foregrounds the central role of women in the production of Caribbean identity in the US. In this, he shows, Bajan women's talk from the private sphere is very important. Further, the author discusses how the Barbadian identity is broadened to encompass Caribbean and African Americans in the novel, thus creating transnational black diaspora connections, such as by invoking James Baldwin and Marcus Garvey.


2008 ◽  
Vol 80 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 63-81
Author(s):  
Timothy S. Chin

Analyses the novel 'Brown girl, brownstones' (1959) by Paule Marshall. Author argues that this novel offers a complex and nuanced understanding of how Caribbean migration impacts upon cultural identity, and how this cultural identity is dynamically produced, rather than static. He describes how the novel deals with Barbadian migrants to the US in the 1930s and 1940s, and further elaborates on how through this novel Marshall problematizes common dichotomies, such as between the public and the private, and between racial (black) and ethnic (Caribbean) identity. Furthermore, he indicates that Marshall through her representation of the Barbadian community, foregrounds the central role of women in the production of Caribbean identity in the US. In this, he shows, Bajan women's talk from the private sphere is very important. Further, the author discusses how the Barbadian identity is broadened to encompass Caribbean and African Americans in the novel, thus creating transnational black diaspora connections, such as by invoking James Baldwin and Marcus Garvey.


2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 487-502 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pelle Åberg ◽  
Joakim Ekman ◽  
Johnny Rodin

Based on data from a survey conducted in Saint Petersburg in 2013, this article sheds new light on attitudes towards fatherhood in contemporary Russia. We explore what norms are held concerning fatherhood, how these attitudes are related to age, sex, education and income as well as to ideal–typical models established in previous research on fatherhood from Western Europe and the US. Thus, the article also discusses what explanatory value established theoretical models have for the Russian context. Norms of the role of the father in the family are related to general norms of masculinity and, hence, are an important part of the study of politics and the political climate in a society. The results show that there are several fatherhood ideals present in contemporary Northwestern Russia: a traditional breadwinner model, an active fatherhood model as well as what we refer to as a marginalized fatherhood model. The latter has not been substantially identified in previous research, and may tentatively be identified as a legacy of the Soviet era.


2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 95-97
Author(s):  
Adis Duderjia

Gabrielle Marranci seeks to shift the analyses of “Islamic fundamentalism/radicalism” discourses away from those focusing on cultural and politicalessentialism, scripturalism, and social determinism and toward that ofexploring the dynamics of radicalization by examining the central role ofemotions on identity formation. His main thesis is that fundamentalismmust be understood as a process linked to identity and identification (nota thing) and that theories which take into account the crucial role of emotions,feelings, and the environment can explain fundamentalism, includingIslamic fundamentalism, more accurately then social deterministand/or cultural constructivist theories can (pp. 77-80). The author thus setsout to “engage with an incredibly expanding academic literature [onIslamic fundamentalism] that tends to treat religious fundamentalism onthe basis of culturalist or social theory discourse” (p. 153). He uses thesame analytical lens adopted in his Jihad beyond Islam (London: Berg,2006) ...


Author(s):  
Rosamond C. Rodman

Expanding beyond the text of the Bible, this chapter explores instead a piece of political scripture, namely the Second Amendment of the US Constitution. Over the last half-decade, the Second Amendment has come to enjoy the status of a kind of scripture-within-scripture. Vaulted to a much more prominent status than it had held in the first 150 years or so of its existence, and having undergone a remarkable shift in what most Americans think it means, the Second Amendment provides an opportunity to examine the linguistic, racial, and gendered modes by which these changes were effected, paying particular attention to the ways in which white children and white women were conscripted into the role of the masculine, frontier-defending US citizen.


2020 ◽  
pp. 074391562098472
Author(s):  
Lu Liu ◽  
Dinesh K. Gauri ◽  
Rupinder P. Jindal

Medicare uses a pay-for-performance program to reimburse hospitals. One of the key input measures in the performance formula is patient satisfaction with their hospital care. Physicians and hospitals, however, have raised concerns especially about questions related to patient satisfaction with pain management during hospitalization. They report feeling pressured to prescribe opioids to alleviate pain and boost satisfaction survey scores for higher reimbursements. This over-prescription of opioids has been cited as a cause of current opioid crisis in the US. Due to these concerns, Medicare stopped using pain management questions as inputs in its payment formula. We collected multi-year data from six diverse data sources, employed propensity score matching to obtain comparable groups, and estimated difference-in-difference models to show that, in fact, pain management was the only measure to improve in response to pay-for-performance system. No other input measure showed significant improvement. Thus, removing pain management from the formula may weaken the effectiveness of HVBP program at improving patient satisfaction, which is one of the key goals of the program. We suggest two divergent paths for Medicare to make the program more effective.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 681-681
Author(s):  
Regina Shih

Abstract The prevalence of caregiving for an adult or child with special needs has increased significantly in the past five years (from 18.2% to over 21.3%), driven by an increase in the prevalence of caring for a family member or friend aged 50 and older. At the same time, care recipients have greater health and functional needs that necessitate care from others in comparison to 2015. These new 2020 data from the Caregiving in the US Survey by the National Alliance for Caregiving suggests that not only are more American adults taking on the role of caregiver, but they are doing so for increasingly complex care situations. This paper addresses the prevalence of caregiving including the demographics of family caregivers, relationship between the caregiver and the care recipient, health conditions of the care recipient, and living situations of care recipients and their caregivers.


2021 ◽  
pp. 096701062199722 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nivi Manchanda ◽  
Chris Rossdale

The past ten years have witnessed a revival in scholarship on militarism, through which scholars have used the concept to make sense of the embeddedness of warlike relations in contemporary liberal societies and to account for how the social, political and economic contours of those same societies are implicated in the legitimation and organization of political violence. However, a persistent shortcoming has been the secondary role of race and coloniality in these accounts. This article demonstrates how we might position racism and colonialism as integral to the functioning of contemporary militarism. Centring the thought and praxis of the US Black Panther Party, we argue that the particular analysis developed by Black Panther Party members, alongside their often-tense participation in the anti–Vietnam War movement, offers a strong reading of the racialized and colonial politics of militarism. In particular, we show how their analysis of the ghetto as a colonial space, their understanding of the police as an illegitimate army of occupation and, most importantly, Huey Newton’s concept of intercommunalism prefigure an understanding of militarism premised on the interconnections between racial capitalism, violent practices of un/bordering and the dissolving boundaries between war and police action.


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