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

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.

Reimagining the Mughal Emperors Akbar and Aurangzeb in the 21st Century

The paper focuses on the reigns and policies of the two Mughal Emperors, Akbar and Aurangzeb, and analyses how they have been remembered in the wider social memory. While Akbar is glorified as a 'secular' and 'liberal' leader, Aurangzeb is often dismissed and ridiculed as a 'religious bigot', who tried to impose the Shari'ah law in diversified India. The paper traces and evaluates the construction of these two grand narratives which were initially formed by the British historians in colonial India and then continued by specific nationalist historians of India and Pakistan, after the independence of the two nation-states. By citing some of the most popular misconceptions surrounding the two Mughal Emperors, this study attempts to understand the policies of these two emperors in a wider socio-political narrative and attempts to deconstruct these ‘convenient’ misinterpretations. Concluding the analysis of how these two emperors are viewed differently in both India and Pakistan, the paper asserts the importance of leaving behind the modern concepts of 'liberal versus conservative' while understanding these emperors and reinforces the practice to understand these historical figures on their own terms.

‘We have nothing to celebrate!’: Fighting gender-based violence in Cape Town, South Africa

This article illustrates the de-politicisation and re-politicisation of the fight against gender-based violence and femicide in Cape Town, South Africa. Firstly, this article shows how gender-based violence and femicide has been de-politicised through a conservative political narrative of the African National Congress (ANC) and through restricting funding relationships between Northern donor organisations and womxn’s NGOs in Cape Town. Secondly, I argue that, with the emerge of a new autonomous feminist movement in 2018, the Total Shutdown (TTS), the re-politicisation of gender-based violence happened on multiple levels. Not only did the activist movement manage to put gender-based violence back on the political agenda, it also helped NGO benefactors to reconnect with their feminist goals to end femicide in South Africa. This research is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Cape Town from September 2018 until January 2019 and includes the stories of Capetonian NGO benefactors and TTS activists.

European Integration in the teachings of John Paul II: Selected aspects

Nowadays, European integration is going through a crisis that has been observed for several years. The financial crisis, Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, and anti-democratic tendencies in many countries (unfortunately also including the EU member states) are leading to a new rise of the ideology of nation states. Moreover, many politicians are also promoting anti-EU slogans, highlighting the concept of national sovereignty and the need to protect it. Following this type of rhetoric and political narrative, the United Kingdom left the European Union in 2020. This situation encourages reflection on how this process was perceived by John Paul II, who is still regarded by many Poles as an unquestionable authority figure, and his teachings remain an important signpost for the future for many Poles. This paper is an attempt to explore the issue of European integration in the teachings of the Polish Pope. John Paul II’s statements on European integration were always deeply balanced and dealt primarily with the spiritual and cultural aspects. However, he did not omit economic or even political issues whenever he deemed them rightful and meaningful. In fact, up until the end of his life and his pontificate, John Paul II was an avid supporter of the idea of European integration, and this attitude shines through in his texts and speeches analysed for this study. Of course, in his perceptive mind, the Pope did notice the flaws and imperfections of European integration projects and warned clearly against reducing the European cooperation only to economic aspects, disregarding the spiritual, cultural or moral dimension. Above all, however, he noticed and appreciated the achievements of European cooperation mechanisms, which ensured peace and robust economic development in the second half of the 20th century for the countries which were actively involved in it.

Epilogue

Covid-19 was not just a virus. It was a story: of our collective health, our vulnerability, and our resilience. This overarching narrative emerged from many smaller narratives. There was the political narrative of the pandemic, the story of governments working to respond to an unprecedented threat. There was the economic narrative, lived across a variety of scales, from multinational corporations scrambling to adapt to changing workplace realities to the dinner tables around which many people, newly unemployed, worked out monthly expenses. It was a global story, as an epidemic that started in China crossed provincial and then international borders to engulf the world. At a deeper level, it was the story of individuals, each trying to navigate the difficulties of the moment. The sick and the well, those who recovered from the disease and those who succumbed to it. And just as the broader narrative of Covid-19 is anchored in these individual stories, each of these stories has something to say about the foundational forces that shaped the arc of the pandemic....

The politics of presence: Political representation and New Zealand's Asian members of Parliament

<p>In New Zealand, existing studies relating to the political representation of the country’s minority groups are largely confined to that of women and the Māori population. Unsurprisingly then, the representation of Asian-New Zealanders is an area that has been mostly overlooked to date. However, the numerous indicators that allude to the group’s growing social and demographic presence also suggests it is of increasing importance that they are included in New Zealand’s political narrative. This thesis seeks to address the gap by undertaking a case study of current and former Asian-New Zealand members of Parliament, in an attempt to establish their representative role. The complexities of this undertaking are readily recognised. The theoretical component of this thesis draws on a number of concepts from under the umbrella of political representation. Similarly, the primary data gathered from a series of extensive interviews with the intention of supplementing the aforementioned literature review is subject to other factors, including but not limited to political structure and individual perception. In spite of the expansive and subjective area of focus, and while only intended to be an exploratory (rather than exhaustive) work, it is hoped that this thesis will make a meaningful contribution to an understudied field in New Zealand political studies.</p>

The politics of presence: Political representation and New Zealand's Asian members of Parliament

<p>In New Zealand, existing studies relating to the political representation of the country’s minority groups are largely confined to that of women and the Māori population. Unsurprisingly then, the representation of Asian-New Zealanders is an area that has been mostly overlooked to date. However, the numerous indicators that allude to the group’s growing social and demographic presence also suggests it is of increasing importance that they are included in New Zealand’s political narrative. This thesis seeks to address the gap by undertaking a case study of current and former Asian-New Zealand members of Parliament, in an attempt to establish their representative role. The complexities of this undertaking are readily recognised. The theoretical component of this thesis draws on a number of concepts from under the umbrella of political representation. Similarly, the primary data gathered from a series of extensive interviews with the intention of supplementing the aforementioned literature review is subject to other factors, including but not limited to political structure and individual perception. In spite of the expansive and subjective area of focus, and while only intended to be an exploratory (rather than exhaustive) work, it is hoped that this thesis will make a meaningful contribution to an understudied field in New Zealand political studies.</p>

Characterizing partisan political narrative frameworks about COVID-19 on Twitter

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis that has been testing every society and exposing the critical role of local politics in crisis response. In the United States, there has been a strong partisan divide between the Democratic and Republican party’s narratives about the pandemic which resulted in polarization of individual behaviors and divergent policy adoption across regions. As shown in this case, as well as in most major social issues, strongly polarized narrative frameworks facilitate such narratives. To understand polarization and other social chasms, it is critical to dissect these diverging narratives. Here, taking the Democratic and Republican political social media posts about the pandemic as a case study, we demonstrate that a combination of computational methods can provide useful insights into the different contexts, framing, and characters and relationships that construct their narrative frameworks which individual posts source from. Leveraging a dataset of tweets from the politicians in the U.S., including the ex-president, members of Congress, and state governors, we found that the Democrats’ narrative tends to be more concerned with the pandemic as well as financial and social support, while the Republicans discuss more about other political entities such as China. We then perform an automatic framing analysis to characterize the ways in which they frame their narratives, where we found that the Democrats emphasize the government’s role in responding to the pandemic, and the Republicans emphasize the roles of individuals and support for small businesses. Finally, we present a semantic role analysis that uncovers the important characters and relationships in their narratives as well as how they facilitate a membership categorization process. Our findings concretely expose the gaps in the “elusive consensus” between the two parties. Our methodologies may be applied to computationally study narratives in various domains.

Community, Nation and Region: Shrimoni Akali Dal (SAD) and the Politics of Community Formation

This article relies on a historical sociology approach to trace the shifting trajectory of community formation and the forging of boundaries through three discrete though corresponding imaginaries— panth (community) , qaum (nation) and punjabiyat (regional identity)—in the Sikh political narrative. The emergence of each of these grand ideas of Sikh solidity has a history putatively inter-laced with the social make up and political economy of its time. The central object of enquiry for this article is the Shrimoni Akali Dal (SAD) and the attempt is to examine the shifting terrain of its religio-political goals and objectives. Since its inception in 1920, the SAD as a political organisation and Shrimoni Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee as the chief ecclesiastical authority, have been the principle bearers of the Sikh religio-political consciousness. The three constitutive imageries of community formation that SAD in particular and Sikh politics in general has fostered, do not betray a linear trajectory. Instead, there is a discernible simultaneity where each of these ideas co-exist, but subject to contextual operationalisation.

‘We the People’: Demarcating the Demos in Populist Mobilization—The Case of the Italian Lega

This article is a theoretically guided and empirically based analysis of how populist movements invoke the notion of the ‘people’ as a cornerstone of their political mobilization. While the confrontation between the virtuous ‘people’ and the unresponsive elites speaks to how populism challenges established political actors and institutions, the actual meaning of who the ‘people’ are and what they represent is shifting and often driven by strategic considerations. Analytically the article investigates the distinct ways in which nationalism and populism conceptualize and politically mobilize the notion of the ‘people’. Empirically it focuses on the Italian League and engages in a discourse analysis of its political campaigns over the past 30 years. Based on this textual analysis of political campaigns, the article sheds light on how the reference to the ‘people’ has been employed as this political actor has transformed from a regionalist party advocating for autonomy in Northern Italy to one taking up the role of a populist-nationalist party at the national level. This case study allows the author to make a generalizable hypothesis about the nature of identity politics promoted by populist actors and the way in which the invocation of the ‘people’ and their alleged enemies is a pivotal political narrative that opens and restricts opportunities for political mobilization. This interpretative approach also allows for a more concise conceptual understanding of the affinity that right-wing populists demonstrate toward nativist ideologies.