Sexuality as Liberation? The Work of Salvation Narratives in Neoliberal Times
By Dina Siddiqi for AlalODulal.org
“[T]he connection between mosques, Muslims and conservative parents is ‘common sense’ in Euro American imaginations.” Continue reading “Sexuality as Liberation? The Work of Salvation Narratives in Neoliberal Times”
AlalODulal Editorial Board condemns in the strongest terms the violence that left at least 11 Urdu Speaking people (“Biharis”) dead. Anthropologist Dina Siddiqi’s research on the conditions of “stranded Pakistanis” (inaccurately called “Biharis,” but more accurately “Urdu speakers”) after 1971 is newly relevant. In the current discourse around the 1971 war, the fate of the Urdu speakers at war’s end is elided. It is one of the zones of silence because it does not fit with the Bangladeshi discourse around the war. Nor does it fit Pakistan’s convenient discourse, especially after a 2008 high court decision granted them Bangladeshi citizenship. We at AlalODulal feel it is crucial to highlight those left behind in multiple nation projects.
Continue reading “Left Behind By the Nation: ‘Stranded Pakistanis’ in Bangladesh”
This 2009 article revisits the figure of the ‘third world sweatshop worker’, long iconic of the excesses of the global expansion of flexible accumulation in late twentieth-century capitalism. I am interested in how feminist activists concerned with the uneven impact of neo-liberal policies can engage in progressive political interventions without participating in the ‘culture of global moralism’ that continues to surround conventional representations of third world workers. Continue reading “Dina Siddiqi: Do Bangladeshi factory workers need saving? Sisterhood in the post-sweatshop era”
