Review

Shazia Sadaf and Aroosa Kanwal’s recently published book-length study of “emergent 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” approach – aided by contemporary Pakistani fiction – towards “existing conceptions of the world […] developed [and] reinforced by the global North” (p. 2).Footnote 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.Footnote 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 scholars – particularly 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, the urban and rural life, social construction, and interhuman, cyborg, and planetary relationships of the future by inviting us to understand anglophone writers as responsive not simply to (neo-)colonialism, Western centrism, secularism, and Islamophobia, but also to how these factors intersect with the problems and opportunities of our age – climate change, pandemics, AI, space exploration, and shifting interests in spirituality and gender performativity.

As Sadaf observes in her reading of Sameem Siddiqui’s short story “Air-Body,” in which a Desi Karachiite “aunty” in late middle age rents a young American Pakistani man’s body in order to reconnect with her lesbian lover in Washington, the cyberspace imagined “In this case […] also becomes ‘a heterotopia of compensation – a space for economic, social, or sexual redress’ (Chun, 245), especially for a homosexual Pakistani woman” (p. 144). However, this heterotopia, opened by the Air-Body rental, also “presupposes a certain level of privilege, […] and is indicative of the coloniality of cyberspace,” in which more affluent Pakistanis have access to the technology that enables them to satisfy their sexual needs and step “outside the cultural-religious constraints of an average” man or woman (p. 145). So, the not-so-distant futures into which fictions like Siddiqui’s open windows – in Sadaf’s close reading – can be seen as both “optimistic about the positive potential of future technologies” and “curious” about their capacity to unsettle stereotypes and engender social change, while also being attuned to the inequalities virtual technologies perpetuate in the contemporary transnational Pakistani context (p. 147).

All this noted, Contemporary Pakistani Speculative Fiction and the Global Imaginary is not without some limitations. As Sadaf and Kanwal themselves acknowledge, their project places an emphasis on “predominant” Islamic (rather than non-Islamic religious minoritarian) perspectives because, they say, there remains too little published work by minority authors (p. 2–3). The book does, however, explore how contemporary speculative fiction incorporates djinn mythology based on knowledge from the Qu’ran, hadith, and Sufi Islamic tradition, along with figures from local folklore such as the pichal pairi and churail, in stories that serve to “dismantle,” in Sadaf’s words, “misconceptions” of this “predominant” “Islam as rigidly monotheistic” and sectarian, rather than syncretic and porous (p. 17–18). The study is also, Sadaf and Kanwal note, “delimit[ed]” to fiction written in English, not work in translation. The authors argue this focus is justified by their interest in investigating anglophone fiction’s dual capacity to address both Western and English-educated Pakistani audiences, inviting the former to “participate in the process of decolonization” mentioned earlier and reconnecting the latter with “familiar folklore and religious stories of their childhood,” assumedly “lost under the burden of a dominant Western education” (p. 2–3, 16). However, it would be fascinating, in another volume, to consider how speculative writing in Urdu and other languages compares when it comes to imagining Pakistani futures. Sadaf and Kanwal’s study is attentive to how the anglophone writing considered reclaims elements from “the long and fertile history of oral folklore, fantasy yarns, and mythological tales of the South Asian region,” as well as Islamic traditions, but does not address this writing’s relationship to traditions of speculation in Urdu or South Asian vernacular literary canons (such as Dastangoi storytelling or fantasy epics such as Tilism-e-Hoshruba, recently translated by Musharraf Ali Farooqi) or related interpretations, which could have been attended to with more critical care (p. 3). Lastly, Sadaf and Kanwal also delimit their study to fiction only, suggesting that other “speculative mediums like films and graphic novels” present “viable avenues of enquiry open for future scholarship” (p. 3). This ground-breaking study’s various “curtailment[s]” – a result, presumably, of authorial expertise, a lack of publishing space, and of course the interests of “global” academic publishers, alongside adherence to the conceptual parameters noted above – also nevertheless underscore the legitimacy of Iftikhar Dadi’s observation in the inaugural issue of Critical Pakistan Studies: that there remains a need to address a continuing “death of scholarly engagement” connecting other “cultural arenas” and regional “linguistic spheres” to wider critical conversations on Pakistani culture (Dadi in Rizvi, Akhter, Khan and Dadi 2023, p. 12).Footnote ³

Where the study excels, however, is also where it aligns with Critical Pakistan Studies’ dual aims of shifting the ways the “world views and imagines Pakistan” away from those offered by narrow paradigms based on democratic failure or religious radicalism, instead casting a closer light on wider aspects of “Pakistani ‘experience.’”Footnote ⁴ Through detailed analyses, particularly of short fiction by lesser known authors such as Usman T. Malik (“Mud Flappers,” 2022), Nihal Khan (“The Smokecense of Pluvistan,” 2020), and Sameem Siddiqi (“Ilyas’ Egg,” 2019), as well as novels by more established writers and cultural figures such as Sami Shah (Boy of Fire and Earth, 2017) and Shazaf Fatima Haider (A Firefly in the Dark, 2018), this study makes a compelling case for attending to how this writing deploys a combination of “Desi” folkloric traditions, “Islamic eschatology and [djinn] mythology,” and localized experiences of climate change, “androcentric culture,” and opportunities afforded by AI and cyberspace to decolonize (Western) perspectives and offer a vital “social commentary” in its vision of near and far (Pakistani) futures (p. 10, 12, 77, 104, 145).

The variety of critical voices Sadaf and Kanwal engage with is too diverse (and, at times, eclectic) to summarize with any justice here. Yes, there are some stalwarts of “Western” critical and cultural theory – Judith Butler is deployed to comment on the “precarious life” of women in Bina Shah’s “post-apocalyptic dystopian feminist novel,” Before She Sleeps (2020), for example – but Contemporary Pakistani Speculative Fiction and the Global Imaginary demonstrates the value of combining Northern with Southern theory to read these speculative Pakistani texts (p. 106–7).

In the chapter “Unreading Patriarchy through Pakistani Fantastica,” focused on feminist utopian articulations of “alternative modes of sexual and social organisation” that are simultaneously informed by Islamic frameworks but also critical of their cultural and social realization, Kanwal “take[s] a cue from Hibba Abugideiri’s ‘gender-critical hermeneutics that guide […] new interpretations of Islamic womanhood’” and “Amina Wudud’s notion of gender jihad, which suggests women’s participation in all aspects of ‘Muslim practice, performance, [and] policy construction’” (p. 104–5). In the same chapter, Kanwal also identifies Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s foundational “feminist utopian novel Sultana’s Dream” (1905) as a point of inspiration for Sadia Khatri’s story “The City of Mitr” (2020), which envisages a city where women “have learnt to navigate their access to precisely the public spaces largely associated by men” (p. 111). Kanwal’s reading of how the women in Khatri’s story – in a mode of “gender performance” “entirely different” from that possible in the dystopian world of Shah’s Before She Sleeps – “reclaim […] public spaces through acts of loitering” is informed by an awareness of Khatri’s own involvement in the 2005 “Girls at Dhabas” social media-based campaign and Mumbai-based scholar Shilpa Phadke’s 2011 book on women’s relationship to public space in patriarchal contexts, Why Loiter: Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets (p. 114–145).Footnote ⁵

In this sense, Sadaf and Kanwal’s book offers perspectives on Pakistani fiction which are attentive to the ways in which this writing speaks to experiences – particularly of those minoritized as a result of gender, sexual orientation, and indigeneity – within Pakistan, but also informed by interdisciplinary perspectives that are very much “critical and ‘at large.’”Footnote ⁶ Thus, this work should contribute to both the “broaden[ing] of analytic frames” in the study of speculative fiction rooted in South Asia and the wider understanding of the importance of attending to Pakistani voices in reimagining our future as humans, and indeed the future of our shared planet.Footnote ⁷