5 - Feminist Literary Ethics and Censorship

Summary

“Feminist Literary Ethics and Censorship,” is devoted to historically contextualizing the work of feminist Urdu poets of the 1970s and 1980s in Pakistan. It argues that the burgeoning of feminist Urdu literature in this period represents a revitalization of the progressive literary movement, which is often schematized as having come to an end by 1950s or 1960s. The chapter begins by tracing the genealogies and the long history of South Asian Muslim women’s writing in Urdu, the gender politics and patriarchal modes of Urduphone progressive intellectual spaces, and Pakistani nationalism. Then it turns to the life, work, and context of the Urduphone intellectual and feminist poet and writer Fahmida Riaz (1946–2018) who was at the vanguard of feminist politico-literary transformations in Pakistan.