Sadia Abbas
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780823257850
- eISBN:
- 9780823261604
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823257850.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter examines the work of Nadeem Aslam. Aslam almost compulsively engages the divisions within Cold War Islam and is attentive to their swirled and ruptured (post)colonial histories. The ...
More
This chapter examines the work of Nadeem Aslam. Aslam almost compulsively engages the divisions within Cold War Islam and is attentive to their swirled and ruptured (post)colonial histories. The crisis engendered by imperial-theological geopolitics is present in every one of his novels, Season of the Rainbirds (1993), Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), and The Wasted Vigil (2008). In Aslam’s novels baroque is a form of exacerbation and of hyper-aestheticism. It is a principle of lateness, of repetition, and of rereading. Cold War histories, devotional aesthetics, literary forms are infolded, inverted, revealed to be caught in a cycle of seemingly inescapable yet endlessly torqued iteration.Less
This chapter examines the work of Nadeem Aslam. Aslam almost compulsively engages the divisions within Cold War Islam and is attentive to their swirled and ruptured (post)colonial histories. The crisis engendered by imperial-theological geopolitics is present in every one of his novels, Season of the Rainbirds (1993), Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), and The Wasted Vigil (2008). In Aslam’s novels baroque is a form of exacerbation and of hyper-aestheticism. It is a principle of lateness, of repetition, and of rereading. Cold War histories, devotional aesthetics, literary forms are infolded, inverted, revealed to be caught in a cycle of seemingly inescapable yet endlessly torqued iteration.
