Muslim Women's Popular Fiction
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Birmingham
Department Name: Department of English Literature
Abstract
"When was the last time you heard a Muslim woman speak for herself without a filter? Or outside the white gaze? On her own terms? Or outside the narrative built around us by the media and governments?" (Mariam Khan, 'Introduction', It's Not About the Burqa, p. 1).
Focusing on writing by women deemed 'popular' rather than 'literary', the initiative engages with under-studied popular and genre texts (including romance, chick lit, comics, graphic novels, detective fiction, Young Adult, fantasy, autobiography, memoir, and science fiction) from a range of established critical disciplinary perspectives and across languages. The project is interested in looking more closely at this writing alongside its production context through a focus on publishers and editors.
The project asks:
* How does genre act as a 'filter' for Muslim women's writing?
* What opportunities do popular and genre fiction provide for challenging the dominant 'filters' on Muslim women's voices?
* What contexts and pressures do popular fiction publishing and production models provide?
* How are Muslim women authors engaging with and transforming established narrative and genre forms?
These areas of expertise have not been brought together substantially before - this is an opportunity to gather disparate expertise and bring together a global network of scholars to discuss and produce focused work on this topic. By bringing together experts on popular fiction, publishing and genre, with established researchers of Muslim women's writing, this networking project aims to produce new and much-needed collaborative interventions and establish a critical platform for future research.
In the first year, the steering committee will develop 5 local 'nodes', each highlighting an area of particular expertise. Through in-person or online events, each node will focus on developing scholarly networks more locally, creating local community impact, and work as platforms for facilitating a dialogue between local and diasporic scholars of popular genre.
1. Translation - led by Dr Peter Cherry
A workshop on translation of Turkish and Arabic popular fiction with translators, representatives from publishers; a discussion on Turkish soap operas' popularity within Turkey and abroad with invited academics, journalists and actors; collaboration with students taking modules on world literature, migration in contemporary world fiction and translation studies.
2. Education - led by Dr Amy Burge
A workshop with local educational partners, National Literacy Trust, policymakers; collaboration with students on third-year module Muslim Women's Popular Fiction.
3. Literature and Decoloniality - led by Dr Aroosa Kanwal
A workshop and online discussion with translators, researchers, educators and students on indigenous literary traditions and contemporary Muslim women's Anglophone genre writing.
4. Text and Image - led by Dr Esra Santesso
A workshop with graphic novelists and cartoonists (potentially Ozge Samanci, Huda Fahmy, Deena Mohamed, Leila Abdelrazaq), comics scholars, on popular visual genres and Islamic feminism.
5. Mobilities - led by Dr Lucinda Newns
A workshop with academics and authors about how works of popular and genre fiction have travelled across borders and enabled migrant, indigenous, minority ethnic and decolonial perspectives to emerge in the global literary marketplace.
In the second year, the network will host an international conference to bring together researchers from local nodes and elsewhere, encouraging collaboration across languages, disciplines and genres. The conference programme will include scheduled time for researchers to meet previously identified research partners and structured space and workshops in which network members can plan for future collaboration (for example, the preparation of co-authored articles for the edited book, or planning for future funding bids).
Focusing on writing by women deemed 'popular' rather than 'literary', the initiative engages with under-studied popular and genre texts (including romance, chick lit, comics, graphic novels, detective fiction, Young Adult, fantasy, autobiography, memoir, and science fiction) from a range of established critical disciplinary perspectives and across languages. The project is interested in looking more closely at this writing alongside its production context through a focus on publishers and editors.
The project asks:
* How does genre act as a 'filter' for Muslim women's writing?
* What opportunities do popular and genre fiction provide for challenging the dominant 'filters' on Muslim women's voices?
* What contexts and pressures do popular fiction publishing and production models provide?
* How are Muslim women authors engaging with and transforming established narrative and genre forms?
These areas of expertise have not been brought together substantially before - this is an opportunity to gather disparate expertise and bring together a global network of scholars to discuss and produce focused work on this topic. By bringing together experts on popular fiction, publishing and genre, with established researchers of Muslim women's writing, this networking project aims to produce new and much-needed collaborative interventions and establish a critical platform for future research.
In the first year, the steering committee will develop 5 local 'nodes', each highlighting an area of particular expertise. Through in-person or online events, each node will focus on developing scholarly networks more locally, creating local community impact, and work as platforms for facilitating a dialogue between local and diasporic scholars of popular genre.
1. Translation - led by Dr Peter Cherry
A workshop on translation of Turkish and Arabic popular fiction with translators, representatives from publishers; a discussion on Turkish soap operas' popularity within Turkey and abroad with invited academics, journalists and actors; collaboration with students taking modules on world literature, migration in contemporary world fiction and translation studies.
2. Education - led by Dr Amy Burge
A workshop with local educational partners, National Literacy Trust, policymakers; collaboration with students on third-year module Muslim Women's Popular Fiction.
3. Literature and Decoloniality - led by Dr Aroosa Kanwal
A workshop and online discussion with translators, researchers, educators and students on indigenous literary traditions and contemporary Muslim women's Anglophone genre writing.
4. Text and Image - led by Dr Esra Santesso
A workshop with graphic novelists and cartoonists (potentially Ozge Samanci, Huda Fahmy, Deena Mohamed, Leila Abdelrazaq), comics scholars, on popular visual genres and Islamic feminism.
5. Mobilities - led by Dr Lucinda Newns
A workshop with academics and authors about how works of popular and genre fiction have travelled across borders and enabled migrant, indigenous, minority ethnic and decolonial perspectives to emerge in the global literary marketplace.
In the second year, the network will host an international conference to bring together researchers from local nodes and elsewhere, encouraging collaboration across languages, disciplines and genres. The conference programme will include scheduled time for researchers to meet previously identified research partners and structured space and workshops in which network members can plan for future collaboration (for example, the preparation of co-authored articles for the edited book, or planning for future funding bids).
| Description | A two-day Pakistan Workshop on Muslim Women's Popular Genre |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
| Results and Impact | The Department of English successfully held a two-day Pakistan Workshop as part of the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council's 'Muslim Women Popular Genre' project. A unique project in every sense of the term, this project aims at excavating the forgotten, ignored, erased, unread, unheard, works by Muslim women in general and Pakistani women in particular, who are creating a diverse array of hitherto unacknowledged fiction in not only Urdu and English but also in the diverse languages that constitute Pakistan's rich cultural and linguistic spectrum. This project specifically aims to identify Pakistani women experimenting in the speculative genre and to develop a strong critical discourse around it. In this two-day workshop a rich array of key note speeches, talks and panel sessions were arranged not merely by Pakistani authors dabbling in the speculative genre but also with critics and scholars, both based in Pakistan and abroad. The first session was titled 'New Market, New Readers: The Scope for Pakistani Speculative Literature'. The expert was Professor Graeme Harper who is Dean at The Honors College Oakland University. He has a doctorate in Creative arts and in Philosophy from the University of technology, Sydney and the University of East Anglia respectively. He has a rich global experience in various academic roles across the UK, Australia and the USA. His talk titled "Creative Writing as Global Exchange: Women Writing Pakistani Popular Fiction" covered the scope of Pakistani Speculative Fiction in terms of its international receptivity in non-Pakistani cultures. The second session of the first day was titled 'Politics of Marginalization of Literatures in Local Languages'. In this bilingual session, the panellists Ms. Farheen Khalid, Ms. Fatima Usman, Ms. Safia Shahid & Mr. Shoaib Khaliq foregrounded the reasons why Pakistani Women's Speculative Fiction in Pakistan's multi-lingual canvas remains a rarity. As playwrights, writers and critics writing in the local languages of Pakistan, the speakers emphasised the scope and potential of women writers to go beyond the constraints of realism and domestic issues to highlight broader issues of a globalised range. At the end of the day, the first key note address of the workshop was delivered by Dr. Sarah Ilott who is Senior Lecturer in English and Film. She is currently writing a book on Screening Multicultural Britain: Race, Racism and British Comedy, forthcoming with Palgrave in 2023. She is co-lead of the Centre for Migration and Postcolonial Studies (MAPS) at Manchester Met and a member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies (MCGS). Externally, she is on the organising team of the comedy and gender research network 'Mixed Bill' and a member of the Postcolonial Studies Association. Dr. Ilott talked about the role of British rom-coms in subverting conceptualisations of Muslim women's agency in Great Britain and discussed the scope of popular genres to project alternative conceptions of Muslim women in contesting Islamophobia. The second day of the workshop started with a panel discussion titled 'Pakistani Popular Genre: Dialogic Encounters between the Local and the Global'. The panellists included Dr. Javaria Farooqui from COMSATS University, Lahore, Professor Safeer Awan (Professor, Department of English, National University of Modern Languages), Dr. Sibghatallah Khan (Assistant Professor, Department of English, National University of Modern Languages) and Dr. Sibel Bayram (Head of the Turkish Department, National University of Modern Languages). The panellists covered a range of issues in a very dynamic discussion, including the ideological underpinnings of the speculative genre in Pakistan and the wider appeal and uniqueness of Pakistani Speculative literature by writers including Maha Khan Phillips, Sabaa Tahir and Sidra B. Sheikh, etc. The next session titled 'In Conversation with Authors' featured a star cast of notable authors of Pakistani Speculative fiction who are making ripples in the international scene including Osama Siddique, Usman T. Malik and Sadia Khatri. The panellists, all with outstanding international profiles, discussed how their works are interwoven within the broader glocal dialogues pertaining to the speculative genre and the ways in which Pakistani speculative fiction is re-imagining futures in alignment with the Muslim past and mythos. They also talked about their respective works and the alternatives pasts, presents and futures they are conjuring up. The final event of the Workshop was a keynote address by Dr. Shazia Sadaf who teaches Human Rights and Social Justice in the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. She holds a PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of London, United Kingdom, and a second doctoral degree in Postcolonial Studies from Western University, Canada, with a primary interest in the field of human rights literature. Her talk was titled "Contemporary Pakistani Speculative Fiction and Human Rights" foregrounded how Pakistani Speculative writers were presenting new conceptions of what it means to be human, Muslims and Pakistanis in a world marked by fears of the apocalypse and AI proliferation. The students were extremely interested in all events, impressing all the panellists with their insightful questions and their willingness to engage with the authors and academics invited to the event. More than 300 graduate and postgraduate students, scholars and academics attended the workshop. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://more.bham.ac.uk/mwpf-network/muslim-womens-popular-genres-13-14-december-2022/ |
| Description | Translating Women's Writing From Turkish to English |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
| Results and Impact | This was a one-day, face-to-face translation workshop led by Rakesh Jobanputra, whose experience in the field includes translations of prose and poetry by authors and poets such as Perihan Magden and Ahmet Ümit. We had over 30 applicants, and 20 were selected to attend the event. The targeted audience was advanced undergrad and postgrad students who wished to gain experience in translation. Each student focused on a woman author of their choosing, received extensive feedback on their translation, offered comments on their peers' works, collaborated on translation pieces and discussed their choice of techniques in detail. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://more.bham.ac.uk/mwpf-network/events/translating-womens-writing-from-turkish-into-english-19-... |
| Description | Website for project |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | A website for the project that gathers resources, network member information, and events. We anticipate the website will act as a repository for future events and resources. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://more.bham.ac.uk/mwpf-network/ |
| Description | Women's Genre Writing: From Turkey to the Rest of the World |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | This one-day online symposium brought together scholars of genre literature and translation studies in addition to translators and literary agents who actively work in the field. We had over 200 people who registered, and about 100 of them showed up, with numbers varying from panel to panel. The primary audience was scholars who worked on related topics along with postgraduate and advanced graduate students. The symposium included three panels with three speakers and two keynote speeches. The first panel focused on the translation market and the perception of Turkish women authors' works overseas. The second panel focused on the reception of authors who remained in the margins of canon such as Sabiha Sertel, Suat Dervis and more recently, Sema Kaygusuz. The final panel focused on authors who either translated their works or actively contributed to the translation process. The day concluded with keynote speeches by two famed translators of Turkish language literature, Aron Aji and Maureen Freely, who presented examples of their translation techniques and shared their experiences in the field. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://more.bham.ac.uk/mwpf-network/events/womens-genre-writing-from-turkey-to-the-rest-of-the-worl... |