Kashmiri Life Narratives

Rakhshan Rizwan is a writer and scholar working at the intersection of creative and scholarly practice. She is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with Utrecht University in the Netherlands and has a PhD in Comparative Literature. She has been a guest researcher at the Tilburg Law School. Her research interests include human rights and literature, postcolonial novels, decolonial legal fictions and minority rights and representation. She is author of "Local Flows: The Pleasurecentric Turn in Human Rights Advocacy in South Asia" (Tilburg Law Review, 2017) and "Repudiating the fathers: Resistance and Writing Back in Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator" (Kashmir Lit, 2013). Her poetry pamphlet, Paisley (2017) was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Prize.

"Kashmiri Life Narratives: Human Rights, Pleasure and the Local Cosmopolitan is a welcome text in the growing field of Critical Kashmir Studies. It shines a light on the marginalization of the Kashmiris, their political travails and human rights violations haunting the region. By analyzing English literature, especially fiction that is emerging in Kashmir, this book uniquely culls a human rights narrative to bare the political dispute and the grave aftermath that Kashmiris face every day. The content in the book is rich, analysis compelling, and the writing is excellent. While the book pivots around Kashmir, the analysis of human rights narratives in the English literature has a broader appeal. This is a book for people particularly interested in Kashmir but will be of general interest for those who love literature as a means of truth-telling."--Professor Ather Zia, University of Colorado Boulder"Taking up such tropes of liberal thought as self-development, market freedom, and the pursuit of pleasure, Rizwan argues with great political acuity for access to localized artistic life as the basic right claimed by thinkers in war-torn Kashmir. This elegant book offers essential reading to scholars of human rights, historical trauma, and praxes of survival."--Dr. Esha Niyogi De, UCLA, US, Author of Empire, Media, and the Autonomous Woman

• Introduction: The Poet and the Cassette Player Chapter 1 Mobilizing Pleasure through Genre: Curfewed Night and Our Moon Has Bloodclots as Kashmiri BildungsromaneChapter 2 Literary Fiction as an Alternative to a Human Rights Report: The Case of Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator Chapter 3 Imagining Local Cosmopolitanism and Cultural Human Rights in Sudha Koul’s The Tiger Ladies Chapter 4 Palatable Fictions: Negotiating Narratives of Consumption and Subalternity in Jaspreet Singh’s Chef Chapter Five Portable Pleasures and Papier Mache: Strategic exoticism in Mirza Waheed’s The Book of Gold LeavesConclusion