Place and Postcolonial Ecofeminism

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

• INTRODUCTION: The Place that is Pakistan: A Postcolonial Ecofeminist LensONE: Punjab: Eco-cosmopolitan feminismTWO: Thar: BioregionalismTHREE: Bengal: Vernacular LandscapeFOUR: Karachi: Pakistani Eco-cosmopolitanismFIVE: Displacement: AnimalizationCONCLUSION: Social and Environmental Justice: Pakistan, Climate Change, and Women

“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 “This is an urgent and consequential book on the deep entanglements between gender politics and environmental justice. Shazia Rahman brings into conversation for the first time an impressive array of ecological thought leaders and Pakistani writers and film makers. Impressive, vital work.”-Rob Nixon, author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor “By foregrounding attachments to Pakistan as a place-comprising land, sea, plants, and animals-Place and Postcolonial Ecofeminism probes the important but overlooked relationship between women and the environment through a critical analysis of patriarchal structures of land ownership and social control that underpin the political and moral economy of Pakistan. Reading novels and feature films against the grain from an ecological perspective reveals the myriad ways of environmental belonging experienced by women at key moments in Pakistan’s history. Innovative in its use of methodologies in environmental humanities and postcolonial analysis, Place and Postcolonial Ecofeminism is a welcome intervention to the incipient debate on women and ecological degradation in Pakistan and will enrich understandings of self, place, and belonging beyond the narrow confines of the postcolonial state’s official nationalism.”-Ayesha Jalal, Mary Richardson Professor of History and director of the Center for South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies at Tufts University“This book addresses the silence in the environmental humanities and in the academy regarding Pakistani women’s literary and cinematic fictions. Rahman conducts a nuanced analysis of Pakistani women’s lives, particularly in terms of how they engage with land, animals, ecology, and sense of place. She delves into the ways that Pakistani literature and cinema are revealing alternative, environmental ways of belonging that women create to counter dominant discourses of religious nationalism and global Islam.  This book will be required reading not only among ecocritics, but among feminist, postcolonial, ethnic, Pakistani, and American studies scholars as well.”-Joni Adamson, professor of English and director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University “Shazia Rahman constructively redirects much current scholarship on Pakistani literature and film. Her focus on women’s narratives, understood broadly, and the environment is not only timely in terms of scholarly trends but also necessary, given the increasingly stark risks Pakistanis and others around the world face due to environmental neglect and degradation.”-Cara Cilano, professor of English at Michigan State University