National and individual Muslim Trauma. The collision of Islam and American neocapitalist thinking in Nadeem Aslams "The Blind Man's Garden"

Matthias Dickert

• Publisher: GRIN Verlag
• Year: 2020
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9783346122698
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Scientific Essay from the year 2020 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, Comenius University in Bratislava, language: English, abstract: 'South Asian literature' is a literary term closely connected to countries like India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, the Maldives or Bangladesh. Afghanistan here holds an outside position because of the fact that Afghan writers at home face an extremely difficult situation. So it is mostly the exile position from which they write about their country. Afghanistan nevertheless is often picked by migrant writers as a setting of their novels because it is ideal to reflect the 9/11 development for both character development or plot. It is therefore logical that this country is not only a neglected part of South Asian literature it is also hardly mentioned by critics. It is simply speaking difficult to label Afghan writing as 'colonial' or 'neo-colonial writing'. Many Muslim writers sometimes make use of female characters as being central parts for the narrative it is interesting to note that the female presentation plays a marginal role in history making or in the sense of ordering and interpreting past and present thus theorizing matters in general. However, growing female issues in many novels such as oppression, prostitution, rape, domestic violence or birth control slowly seem to change the traditional female role as being inferior to man. This present trend is not only seen by feminist anthropologists, Western radical feminists or gender studies but also more and more by writers from both sexes. Thus, matters like patriarchy, culture, class, religion or nation are newly discussed making 'South Asian Literature' an extremely energetic field of contemporary migrant writing. They fulfill that what other critics see in three areas while reading postcolonial contexts. The first area they reflect is "reading texts produced by writers from countries with a history of colonies". The second element they discuss lies in the fact they write texts "produced by those that have migrated from countries with a history of colonialism, or those descended from migrant families". And the last area they cover lies in the fact that they are "re-reading texts produced during colonialism ... addressing the imperial experience or not". So one can conclude from this that 'South Asian literature' has become not only one important element of 'Postcolonial writing' it also includes many political aspects which are of importance for this essay.