Contemporary Pakistani Speculative Fiction and the Global Imaginary: Democratising Human Futures. Shazia Sadaf and Aroosa Kanwal (New York, Abingdon: Routledge, 2024). Pp. 170. ISBN: 9783256427.
Year: 2026
Type: book-review
Abstract: Pakistani speculative fiction in English" contains five carefully woven chapters on highly contemporary novels and short fiction (published in the main between 2015-2022), which draw on a fascinating range of largely new critical scholarship in order to probe how this writing "speak[s] to the world" and why it is valuable to listen, "as we speculate about humanity's future in perhaps the most precarious period of our existence on the planet" (p. 1).There is a definite decolonial intention here.The scholarship of Matthew Wolf-Meyer is invoked from the outset to underscore the "importance of democratizing speculation about the future" and adopting a "sceptical" approachaided by contemporary Pakistani fictiontowards "existing conceptions of the world [ : : : ] developed [and] reinforced by the global North" (p. 2). 1 As such, the book is in tune with the earlier work of Kanwal, a prolific scholar best known for her Karachi Literature Festival Award-winning monograph on Pakistani writers' "re-inflect[ion] and renegotiat[ion]" of Muslim identities in the context of post-9/11 stereotyping and Islamophobia.2 Contemporary Pakistani Speculative Fiction and the Global Imaginary also benefits significantly from Sadaf 's expertise in human rights and social justice, as it investigates the role of anglophone Pakistani writing in "anticipating future rights" in a world unevenly impacted by "rapidly changing technological and environmental factors" and the "epistemological and ideological fronts" associated with Western "cognitive majoritarianism" (p.4-5).The result of this collaboration is an undoubtedly original first study of how Pakistani speculative fiction in English, if not in other genres and languages, contributes to the imagining of both global and local human futures.What seems particularly significant about this volume, however, is how, by drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from Anthropocene, indigenous, and posthuman, as well as ethics, gender, and Islamic studies, it broadens the range of analytic frameworks available to Pakistan studies scholarsparticularly in literary studies -when interpreting speculative texts.Thus, this work opens up ground for new, complex readings of how such scholars imagines, from a Pakistan perspective,
Source: Critical Pakistan studies.
Author: Madeline Clements
Institution: Teesside University
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,550
OpenAlex ID: W7123350683
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