This article traces various social media expressions during the ongoingpandemic and asks the overarching question: how one should understand,express and practice compassion and empathy in this new context of global– yet differential and graded – uncertainty, loss and suffering? It focuseson the unfamiliar shift of entire populations across the globe from physical,tangible spaces to a virtual, online presence and the consequent issueof what norms, rules and ethics govern this online area of expression andaction during a pandemic. Caught between an either-or narrative betweena display of privileged quarantine living, a sense of empathy for the marginalizedor a downright lack of it, the article observes that social mediaresponses to the pandemic produce a ‘competitive performative compassion.’It argues that such compassion becomes fetishist and results in thevery thing that the expressed compassion was meant to counter, that is,continued unequal suffering.

With the advent of the Progressive Writers Movement, Urdu Literature was marked with a heightened form of social realism during the Partition of British India in 1947. Joginder Paul, once a part of this movement, breaks away from this realist tradition in his Urdu novella, Khwabrau (Sleepwalkers), published in 1990. Sleepwalkers shifts the dominant realist strain in the form and content of Urdu fiction to open a liminal “third space” that subverts the notion of hegemonic reality. Sleepwalkers is based on a time, many years after the Partition in the city of Karachi, and focuses on the “mohajirs” from Lucknow who construct a mnemonic existential space by constructing a simulacrum of pre-Partition Lucknow (now in India). This paper examines the reconceptualization of spaces through the realm of political nostalgia and the figure of the refugee subject “performing” this nostalgia. This nostalgic reconstruction of space, thus, becomes a “heterotopia” in Foucauldian terms, one that causes a rupture in the unities of time and space and the idea of nation-hood. The refugee subjects’ subversion of the linearity of time opens a different time in the narration of a nation that necessitates that the wholeness of the “imagined” physical space of a nation be questioned.

This essay studies two literary texts on Kashmir, The Collaborator (2011) by Mirza Waheed and Curfewed Night (2010) by Basharat Peer and analyzes the discourses of power and covert and overt forms of violence that the works present. It first contextualizes events from the last three years that have occurred in Kashmir to present forms of violence Kashmiri subjects undergo in the quotidian of life. Thereafter, it situates the two works by the Kashmiri writers in the growing body of writing in English on Kashmir and historicizes the conflict. The essay, thus, argues that the selected literary works represent Kashmir as a unique postcolonial conflict zone that defies an easy terminology to understand the onslaught of violence, and the varied forms of power. As analyzed in the article, one finds a curious merging of biopolitics and necropolitics that constructs the characters as “living dead” within this emergency zone. For this, the theoretical trajectory of the essay is mapped out to show the transition from Foucault and Agamben’s idea of biopolitics to Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics. Thereafter, essay concludes how the two texts illustrate Agamben’s notion of the bare life is not enough to understand subjects living in this unique postcoloniality. The presence of death and the dead bodies go beyond bare life and shows how that bodies become significant signifiers that construct a varied notion of agency.

This chapter focuses on a Partition film titled Khamosh Pani and argues that it subverts patriarchal religio-nationalism and re-envisions the totalized history of the two national constructs through the liminal figure of the female protagonist Ayesha. It also focuses on the "Recovery Act" of Partition to argue for a nuanced understanding of agency in understanding Ayesha's subjectivity. Ayesha/Veero's final plunge into the silent waters serves as a moment of agentic revelation that reminds us that the author in the chapter refuses to be pinned into fossilized religious-ethnic identities and transgresses the boundaries of a statist notion of religious identity. The reception of the film was controversial and one may argue that the film presents a monolithic version of Islam under the reign of General Zia ul Haq in Pakistan. The chapter shows the women characters' resistance and agency in constructing a varied account of Islam in the film that goes against any notions of an essentialized understanding of the Islam.

Thomas Mann’s novella, Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig) was published in 1912, and written during a time when cholera as a fatal disease had made its presence felt in Italy in 1911 and caused a series of fatalities. This article focuses on the notion of tropicality, and the diseased body and what it means in terms of imagining the colonized spaces as represented in the novella, through the discourse of nineteenth century imperial medicine. The historical context of the 1911 cholera epidemic in Italy is indeed significant in the contextualization and the production of the text. Yet, as the paper argues, the disease of cholera works in a larger metaphor to enable a colonial discourse that serves as a cautionary reminder of barring contact zones, “the horrors of diversity” as Mann’s text states when first describing the emergence of Asiatic cholera in the text.

What do we do when we talk about, or think of, the West? Consciously or unconsciously, we envisage the West in terms of its binary opposite: the East. But what is the East; and where exactly is the East located?

The term ‘East’ has always been in vogue in the Eurocentric visions, usually conjuring ideas of mysticism and certain cultural and ideological differences between the East and the West. Lately it has also been loosely synonymous with a new age interest and invention of ‘eastern yoga’ and discovering the spiritual self through what is constructed as the East. But locating the spatial denomination of the term raises some curious problems. Which part of the world shall we unanimously agree is the East? East of what?