Rehumanizing Muslim Subjectivities Postcolonial Geographies, Postcolonial Ethics

In Rehumanizing Muslim Subjectivities, Kanwal (Quaid-e-Azam Univ., Pakistan) dissects ongoing major global human tragedies, such as unimpeded genocide, torture, violence, and discrimination in China, Iraq, Kashmir, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Palestine. The author confronts the international community's utter silence and exposes its rare lip service to systemic victimization, dehumanization, body-crushing, and total annihilation of Muslim communities. Deploying various critical theoretical approaches, Kanwal's book highlights the overlooked literary works of writers who, in their turn, arduously endeavor to make visible the agony of the invisible and give voice to the voiceless. Kanwal shares key narratives from plays, novels, autobiographies, reportage, and diaries, and deftly conducts a contextualized analysis of critical themes: citizenship, refugees, asylum, camps/encampments, human rights, dispossession, loss (including mourning non-human structures), violence, and the de-subjectification of refugees and their traumas. The uniqueness of this book lies in its effort to accentuate creative writing by Muslim authors, from the Rohingya people in Myanmar to the Uyghur community in China. The writers share a personal stake in their experience of dehumanization enterprises and tell their own harrowing stories. Learned and stylistically accessible, this book serves as an important reference for postcolonial, ethnic, and cultural studies.

--H. Bahri, The City University of New York, York College