From the dadis of Shaheen Bagh: Faiz Ahmed Faiz and the Poetics of Protest by Aamir Mufti

Talk

The widespread use of the Faiz poem popularly known as “Hum dekhenge” (“ہم دیکھیں گے”) in the pro-democracy demonstrations in India, despite opposition to it from Hindu nationalists, should make one thing clear: Faiz was the poet not of a single nation but of the undivided civilisation of the subcontinent. His verse makes it possible, at the level of image and emotion, to cross the borders of the nation-state system of South Asia, and it presents this crossing as an act of love.

Aamir Mufti is Professor of Comparative Literature at UCLA. He is the author of Enlightenment in the Colony: the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (2007) and Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (2016) and pioneering essays that rethink fundamental concepts and categories of the Western humanities from the perspective of colonized and postcolonial societies. His graduate work in Comparative Literature at Columbia University was supervised by Edward Said.

Location: Lahore Museum

Date: February 26, 2020

To view his complete talk, please visit: Aamir Mufti on Faiz Ahmed Faiz and the Poetics of Protest