Nation, City, Household

Presents the first in-depth study of contemporary English-language Pakistani women’s fiction, exploring how female authors use narrative to critique patriarchal norms and Western stereotypes through spatial and emotional portrayals of women's everyday lives

The title discusses the literary production of contemporary Pakistani women through the analysis of a corpus of novels that provide representations of the ways in which women navigate the complexities of Pakistani society in relation to three different but related domains, the nation, the city and the household. This critical interrogation serves to underscore the inherent value of literary articulations that portray contemporary Pakistani society from an Indigenously situated female perspective. Fictional narratives written by Pakistani women constitute a form of discursive agency that challenges both local patriarchal structures and Western representations of Muslim women as voiceless and powerless. The discussion locates the selected fictional narratives within the broader historical contexts of Pakistani Anglophone and Urdu literary traditions. This perspective shows that women’s contribution to the South Asian literary scene is neither new nor limited in terms of genre or language.

In Pakistan, women have always found themselves at the receiving end of oppressive dynamics of power, something against which they have articulated forms of personal and collective resistance. Seeing fiction as a means of expression that cannot exist outside of a human society, within which it is generated and from which it elaborates its imagery, allows attending to the ways in which the interaction between literature and society contributes to the construction of shared narratives. The study highlights that while the authors reveal the intersectionality of power dynamics, they also show that patriarchal mechanisms of force affect women across the entire social spectrum, even if with different degrees of coercion, and provide their readers with resolute female models pointing out that a positive social transformation is possible through personal acts of resistance.

Employing spatial and affective frameworks, this monograph moves from the macro-level of the nation to the micro-level of the household to analyse three spatial dimensions as crucial contexts for understanding how women’s social bonds are formed and reformed in response to normative pressures exerted by familial and extra-familial agents. In line with the idea expressed by Sara Ahmed (2004) that social interaction cannot be separated from the emotions and feelings that it stimulates in individuals, the discourse pays attention to the nexus between character’s emotions and their behaviour, highlighting how feelings stimulate the questioning of normativity.