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In his three novels, Season of the Rainbirds (1993), Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) and The Wasted Vigil (2008), Nadeem Aslam fuses conventional postcolonial themes and literary techniques with a distinctly British sensibility. Born in Pakistan in 1966, he came with his parents to Britain at the age of fourteen, where the family settled in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, and has described himself as ‘a Pakistani man living in Britain’. Yet, elsewhere, Aslam is described as ‘Pakistani-British’. This personal history embodies his dual positioning as both British Asian and postcolonial migrant author. In many senses, Aslam, rather than embodying the qualities of British Asian literature, is part of the publishing storm surrounding postcolonial writers that developed in the 1990s. He is evidence of how, to consider British Asian authors simply in relation to an ethnic literature (whether defined as British Asian, Black British or postcolonial) is to neglect wider paradigms in contemporary literary fiction: not just British, but also international.

While not itself the subject of a controversy, Nadeem Aslam’s 2004 novel Maps for Lost Lovers, the focus of Chapter 5, thematises and explores the politics of minority offence and the binary of individual freedom versus cultural censure and censorship that has framed responses to controversies surrounding artistic representations of Islam and Muslims. In tracing the presence and complication of this binary in Maps for Lost Lovers, the chapter explores how far the novel gets beyond the gendered culturalist discourses that have underpinned pronouncements on the ‘failure’ of multiculturalism from both left and right. It argues that despite contextualising the oppressors’ behaviour within their own disempowerment in Britain, the novel appears to present just two alternative positions: individual withdrawal and dissent from community, culture and faith, or complicity with the community’s oppressive practices whose victims are primarily its women and children. The potential for a positive communitarianism formed around religious culture is constantly deflected or stymied, often through a focus on the abuse of women, so that a thoroughgoing multiculturalism predicated on a ‘politics of recognition’ and a commitment to gender equality are held in tension.

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.

This article locates Nadeem Aslam’s 2004 novel Maps for Lost Lovers within a European politico-legal argument about religious free expression under Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, demonstrating the novel’s engagement with the norms and lived experience of democratic pluralism under pressure. Maps for Lost Lovers is an intervention into the public argument about pluralism and assimilation in the United Kingdom, a narrative that illuminates the prescriptive regimes and structuring epiphenomena of law in post-9/11 Britain. Maps is an agenda-setting narrativization of a legal regime, and specifically a richly textured and individuated account the failures of democratic pluralism and social relations within an incompletely secularized polity. Like Aslam’s other fiction, Maps for Lost Lovers seeks to cultivate those habits of thought that can lead to collective engagement and political change.

This chapter examines how novelists and poets explore the sacrificial reckonings of the ‘war on terror’ in terms of relations between faith (social and religious), sympathy, and bearing witness. It discusses Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) and two books of poetry: Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004) and Juliana Spahr’s this connection of everyone with lungs (2005). Both poems balance matters of aesthetics and ethics by comparing modes of bearing witness: watching spectacles of war through television, and testifying to responsibility for others’ lives. The chapter relates those to the contrasting kinds of sacrifice attributed to armed services personnel and jihadi ‘martyrs’. It then discusses how these modes of sacrifice and witnessing are examined in recent novels: Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008) and The Blind Man’s Garden (2013); Lorraine Adams’s The Room and the Chair (2010); and James Meek’s We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (2008).

Chapter 9 focuses on female imprisonment and on women’s confinement in patriarchy. The chapter starts with a consideration of real-life female imprisonment and its reflection in one literary example (Alice Walker’s The Color Purple). This is followed by a discussion of the panopticon metaphor in Angela Carter and Sarah Waters, analysing these authors’ feminist and lesbian takes on Foucault. A third section concentrates on domesticity and the body in so far as they are perceived as metaphorically confining, contrasting Susan Glaspell’s Trifles with Nadeem Aslam’s novel Maps for Lost Lovers. A final section returns to Emily Dickinson and Glaspell, focusing on the predicament of the woman writer; it notes how the female artist can escape from the straitjacket of feminine decorum only by ending up in the role of another gynophobic stereotype: that of the hysteric or the madwoman.