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On 12 March, Dr Barnita Bagchi (Modern and Contemporary Literature) organizes a book launch and discussion with Rakhshan Rizwan.

Kashmiri Life Narratives

Rizwan presents her new book  (2020), which takes as its central focus writings published circa 2008 by Kashmiris living in the Valley of Kashmir, India or in the diaspora. The book argues that literature has been an important medium for promoting the rights of marginalized Kashmiri subjects within Indian-occupied Kashmir and in shifting discussion about Kashmir from the political board rooms to the international English-language book market. This book also shows how Kashmiri life narratives deploy a language of pleasure rather than of physical pain, torture, and victimization to represent the state of having and losing rights. Rizwan proposes that human rights agents may seek to induce pleasure as a means of conducting advocacy, and inspiring sympathy and vicarious gratification in their target audiences.

Rakhshan Rizwan

Rakhshan Rizwan is a literary critic and poet who works at the intersection of creative and scholarly practice. She is a researcher affiliated with ICON and has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ. She has been a Witteveen Research Fellow at the Tilburg Law School. Her research interests include human rights and literature, decolonial legal fictions and minority rights and representation. Her poetry pamphlet, Paisley (2017) was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award and the Michael Marks Poetry Prize. Her recently published debut collection of children’s poetry, My Sneezes are Perfect (2021) chronicles the joys and difficulties of life under the pandemic and is narrated from the perspective of a young child.