I (can’t) See You: Politics of In/visibility in the Writings of Ishtiyaq Shukri
Iqra Raza
Publication: Volume 4 Issue 2
Abstract |This paper seeks to study the shift in representation of the Muslim body (within the context of War on Terror) from figuration of an embodied autonomous subjectivity to a disembodied one haunting through the remnants of its presence, via a close textual analysis of Ishtiyaq Shukri’s novels The Silent Minaret (2005) and I See You (2014). The paper seeks to explore the notions of power and resistance that inform Shukri’s concerns wherein spectrality operates both as a mode of resistance against surveillance mechanisms and as the culmination of the neo-colonial Empire’s necropolitics. It will particularly explore the implications of spectrality for bodies located within the neo-colonial epistemological project that reduces the status of the ‘othered subject’ to that of an object. Conceptualizing spectrality as the dominant mode of the post 9/11 novels, the paper engages with Derrida’s work on mourning in relation to specters which call attention to the anomaly that plagues the present and, in doing so, offers a new paradigm for an understanding of the post 9/11 Muslim experience.
Keywords | Spectrality, Historiography, Mourning, Ishtiyaq Shukri, South African Anglophone writing, Muslim Experience, War on Terror, Derrida
Iqra Raza (iqraraza10@gmail.com) is a postgraduate student of English Literature, affiliated with University of Delhi’s St Stephen’s College, India. Her areas of academic interest include South African Muslim Writing, postwar Japanese art and literature, art and literature from conflict zones, visual studies, and cultural studies. She is also a writer, an artist, and a Haijin—a Haiku poet—who has won three international awards for her poetry.