Place and Postcolonial Ecofeminism

While news reports about Pakistan tend to cover Taliban attacks and bombings, and academics focus on security issues, the environment often takes a backseat in media reportage and scholarship. In particular, Pakistani women’s attachment to their environment and their environmental concerns are almost always ignored. Shazia Rahman traces the ways in which Pakistani women explore alternative, environmental modes of belonging, examines the vitality of place-based identities within Pakistani culture, and thereby contributes to evolving understandings of Pakistani women—in relation to both their environment and to various discourses of nation and patriarchy. Through an astute analysis of such works as Sabiha Sumar’s Khamosh Pani (2003), Mehreen Jabbar’s Ramchand Pakistani (2008), Sorayya Khan’s Noor (2006), Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing (2003), and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009), Rahman illuminates how Pakistani women’s creative works portray how people live with one another, deal with their environment, and intuit their relationship with the spiritual. She considers how literary and cinematic documentation of place-based identities simultaneously critiques and counters stereotypes of Pakistan as a country of religious nationalism and oppressive patriarchy. Rahman’s analysis discloses fresh perspectives for thinking about the relationship between social and environmental justice.  

"Boldly focusing on eco-cosmopolitanism, vernacular and official landscapes, animalization, and bioregionalism, Rahman highlights the tensions between ecocriticism and feminism that have produced a vulnerable position for ecofeminism. The author's new perspective on postcolonial Pakistani studies is welcome."—M. Roy, Choice, "As a welcome infusion of a new and urgent critical voice into Pakistani literary criticism, Place and Postcolonial Ecofeminism makes its most significant contribution to ecocriticism through its focus on the environments of Pakistan."—Cara Cilano, Bloomsbury Pakistan, "Place and Postcolonial Ecofeminism fills an important gap in scholarship in not only Pakistani Literatures specifically, but South Asian Studies in general. It also significantly extends the scope of both feminist and ecocritical scholarship, offering an alternative vision of empowerment for women and the subdominant sections of society that eschews two competing, hegemonic, and limiting, frameworks based on religious nationalism and US imperialism. . . . This pioneering approach from an ecofeminist perspective is sure to pave the way for more such explorations."—Chitra Sankaran, ISLE, "[Place and Postcolonial Ecofeminism] offers much to think about and discuss, including a greater engagement with social and ecological issues so important to Pakistan's development and climate change."—Muneeza Shamsie, Dawn, “Shazia Rahman brings a fine literary critical sensibility to a postcolonial, ecofeminist reading of contemporary Pakistani novels and films. Her ethically charged book offers a fresh . . . engagement with cultural production from Pakistan, an enormously important part of South Asia that is nevertheless often neglected in postcolonial studies.”—Ananya Jahanara Kabir, author of Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971, and Modern South Asia

Shazia Rahman is an associate professor of English at the University of Dayton.