NUML journal of critical inquiry

The The “Mumbai Riots” and the Play of Literary Strategies: A Reading of Rahman Abbas’s Rohzin

Almuth Degener — 2021-06-29

The present paper traces reflections of the 1992-3 Mumbai Riots in Rahman Abbas’s 2016 Indian Urdu novel Rohzin by using instruments of literary criticism. While this novel is overtly a story about the love of two young people, it is also a profoundly political novel bearing on a number of problems faced by the younger generation, especially young Muslims in India. Since politics and aesthetics are enmeshed in the plot, the parts of novel related to the Mumbai Riots show that both plot and literary strategies—focalization, time-frame, flashbacks and flash-forwards—employed by the author carry the political import of the text. Furthermore, the features of Magical Realism in the selected text also have both aesthetic and political impact. The article attempts to shows how literary strategies are employed in support of a multi- religious, politically riven, and secular India.

CONSTRUCTING A SELF BETWEEN IMAGE AND TEXT: READING BECHDEL’S FUN HOME

Zainab Younus — 2021-12-02

Graphic memoirs offer a visual representation of the relationship between a moment and the construction of memory. McCloud describes the work of the comic author and the reader as a dance between “the seen and the unseen”. This is what makes the medium of graphic memoirs unique, as it “gives so much to its audience while asking so much from them as well” (1993, p. 92). My aim in this paper is to ascertain the impact using graphic conventions has on the effective and affective construction of meaning and identity in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) and howr The Gutter becomes even more significant in graphic memoirs, because the use of panels can fracture the flow of the narrative into the sequenced segments which alternate with the blank spaces of the gutters. These blank spaces represent an effort to redefine the “connections between memory and history, private experience and public life” via a written account and the “act of witness” represented by a combination of the visual and the verbal (Cvetkovich, 2008, 111-20). Using this mix of image and text, Bechdel creates an almost palimpsestic effect as a majority of panels show items layered over other images, indicating a blending between the narrative of Bechdel’s real life experience and the representation of that life experience in the text. For the reader, this can imply a way to address the gaps in knowledge not only for them but also for Bechdel herself.

Abjection and Taboo Objects in Edward Bond’s Plays

Salma Khatoon — 2021-12-02

What is most striking about Edward Bond’s plays is his unconventional representation of visible forms of violence and insanity. His plays deeply probe political, economic, and societal norms and values in provocative and thought-provoking ways for which he has often been compared to such contemporary British playwrights as Pinter, Brenton, Osborne, and Arden who profusely use violence and cruelty in their works. This article draws on Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and develops the argument that violence in Edward Bond can be placed within the field of abjection as its diverse manifestations appear as taboo objects, abject emaciated, festering bodies and sites of abjection that populate his dramatic world.

Between Form and Molecule: Investigating the Beyond in Chris Colfer’s The Wishing Spell

Zainab Akram — 2021-12-02

Fairy tales permeate the world with a magical charm, but time has brought changes in fairy tale narration, mode, context and interpretations. Under the post structural lens, the undertaken research investigates the transformations that occur at molecular level, beyond the physical and molar corporeality among selected characters in the fairy tale, The wishing spell (2013). The focus is not the examination of changes in physical anatomic structure or form of the selected characters, rather the exploration of body’s capability and potentials of undergoing phenomenological transformations through the lens of becoming molecular by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987). Becoming molecular promotes the idea that instead of comprehending the whole form of an issue, a fragment or molecule needs to be comprehended as it makes it easy to understand the entire form of problem. Becoming molecular is an internal or mind attachment of the body to another entity and the attachment or link is beyond the physical form of corporal state of being. The undertaken research endeavors to map multiple occurrences of becoming molecular in the characters of Snow White and the Evil Queen, by following the thematic model of textual analysis by Miles and Huberman (2014). The findings reveal that becoming molecular is an endless process that emerges in unlimited molecular links amid two different bodies. These links illuminate profound insights by influencing thoughts and bringing changes in actions and behavior. The changes cannot be perceived through senses as in the physical world. These links do not disrupt the physical appearance of either body, rather bring changes at molecular level.

A Research Article

Amir Abbasi — 2021-12-02

The article examines The Wasted Vigil, a post-9/11 novel by Nadeem Aslam to find out how the writer articulates imperialist ideology in his composition. The study reveals that the writer internalizes the imperialist discourses on the war in Afghanistan and becomes a voice of the imperialist powers by consolidating their ideology. Some of the ideologies that the novel incorporates are Western cultural supremacy, fear of the ‘evil empire’, mystic East, human rights violation, stereotyping, Islamophobia, patriarchy, white man’s burden, rehabilitation and political economy. Inspired by the theories of Said, Dabashi, and Chomsky, the paper approves that the writer, obliterating some ground realities, extends on the persistent misrepresentation of the local culture and stereotypes the war-affected people of Afghanistan as established by the imperialists during the New Great Game.