An Unscientific Writing of Islamic Modernism: Reading the Object in Ismat Chughtai
by Emily Durham
Date: Thursday, February 18
Time: 4-5:30 PM
Place: Social Sciences #609
Abstract:
Ismat
Chughtai remains today as one of the most noted authors of Progressive
Realism, in part because she was charged for obscenity for her short
story, "The Quilt." She was also the product of a fairly radical--and at
times quite unpopular--experiment in Muslim women's education, which
included the pedagogical novels and pamphlets of Nazir Ahmed and
Rashidul Khairi and, ultimately, the founding of the Aligarh School for
Girls by the Islamic Modernist Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. This talk looks at
the way Chughtai's extension of that radical inclusion into the act of
writing, taking as its object all aspects of the natural world, begins
to dismantle many of the categories that a scientific rationalization
might create, opening a rhetoric of the object that does not assume the
hierarchical distance of the scientific observer, and thus creating the
potential of a new world of engagement in its reception.
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