Dr Kazmi’s research examines memory, nostalgia and affect in modern South Asian Muslim literature and culture. Her work centres on twentieth-century Indo-Muslim writing. She reads it in the context of the sectarian violence and cultural disintegration that followed Partition. She draws on postcolonial theory, memory studies, affect theory, global modernisms and decolonial feminist thought. Through these lenses she studies South Asian Muslim and diasporic writers, including Qurratulain Hyder, Ahmed Ali, Intizar Husain, Khadija Mastur, Attia Hosain and M.G. Vassanji. A central strand of her research traces how South Asian modernism emerged in Indo-Muslim writing, and how it connects with Anglo-American modernism. Her wider work covers two further areas. The first is the representation of Muslim women, gender and respectability (sharafat) in South Asian fiction. The second is architectural memory and urban space in literature and film.
Current projects
Writing Muslim Women in South Asia: co-editing, with FatimaDaughter of the Prophet Muhammad and his first wife, Khadīja bint Khuwaylid. Also wife of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib and mother of al-Ḥasan and al-Ḥusayn. Naveed and Sheelalipi Sahana, a book edition of the special issue of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. It will appear in Routledge’s Special Issues as Books series (forthcoming).
