Nazia Manzoor
Dr Nazia Manzoor teaches English at North South University. She is also Editor, Daily Star Books and Literature. Reach her at [email protected].
Dr Nazia Manzoor teaches English at North South University. She is also Editor, Daily Star Books and Literature. Reach her at [email protected].
When Gayatri Spivak ends her groundbreaking essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) with a definitive statement “the subaltern cannot speak”, a section of literary criticism took that dictum literally—accepting the “cannot” to represent mutism or an inability to speak.
As we close the curtains on the first month of the new year and step into the second, here at Star Books and Literature, we are thinking back on the year we had.
No amount of activism is enough to bring an end to gender-based violence when women’s and girls’ lives are considered less than that of their male counterparts.
This week, then, we're thinking: music and books, music and literature. In print and online, we're dreaming in tunes, dancing with words, daring to merge the two.
Teachers are no longer the valued, moral arbiters of society that we once deemed them to be.
What codes of safety and protection can ensure women’s right to, well, exist?
In two of the more prominent fictional works that are part of the diasporic South Asian literary production, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, food is presented as a conceptual apparatus that makes palatable the tensions of ‘multiculturalism’ and offers a critique of class barriers—if not always at the level of economics, but at the level of consciousness.
Reading moves you. The movement is emotional—you feel moved as you read, you feel moved by what you read. To read is to be moved—by the sheer joy and ecstasy on the pages, by the pain and heartache in the letters,
Few experiences in life can prepare us to be more sensitive, more inclusive, and generally kinder human beings than reading.