FACULTY
Ambreen Hai
Associate Professor of English Language and Literature
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Office: Wright 212 |  |
Phone: 585-3311 |
As a middle-class child class growing up in Pakistan I was not encouraged to read English "storybooks." Fiction was an escape from "real life," I was told—and in some sense it was: what relevance could Enid Byton, Jane Austen or Romantic poetry have to my ordinary Karachi life, itself seemingly unrecorded and unworthy of narrative? But in retrospect I cannot help thinking that immersing myself in literature—learning to extend imaginative and political sympathies, going beyond oneself, developing critical faculties—was one of the best ways I learned to deal with life. And eventually my training in colonial literary-cultural histories and feminist and race theories led me back to seeing my culture and the home I left behind in ways I could not have seen otherwise. At home we spoke Urdu, but in the English convent school I went to, a leftover of colonial days, English was the only language we were permitted to speak. At an early age English took over as my first language, but Urdu and its poetic presence and cultural legacies remained an inevitable force that affected how we thought and read in English. So I guess I was a comparatist from the beginning without knowing it, living and translating between often conflicting cultural and thought systems, though it was only later that I became aware of the politics of language and "national" literatures.
As an undergraduate, I studied philosophy and economics at Wellesley. It was not until my senior year that I realized I could not live without literature, and returned to being an English major. I studied Latin, French and Old English before going on to complete a Ph.D. in English at Yale. But those early disciplines have remained important to me, rooting my interest in literature in broader philosophical and theoretical questions as well as in a material understanding of the workings of economics and politics. At Smith I teach Anglophone postcolonial literatures (primarily from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia) that have emerged from the context of British imperialism, which draw upon vastly different cultural and historical traditions and require approaches carefully grounded in history, politics and critical theory. I am increasingly interested in incorporating postcolonial literatures in translation into my courses. I also teach contemporary literary theory, 19th- and 20th-century British literature, as well as Introduction to the Study of Women and Gender (SWG 150). I have recently proposed a new course, Postcolonial Women Writers, that I am very much enjoying teaching in fall 2008. Most recently, I teach a seminar on South Asian national and diasporic autobiographies. In all of these I am delighted to welcome comparative literature majors.
My recent book, Making Words Matter: The Agency of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (forthcoming Ohio University Press, 2009), focuses on Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster and Salman Rushdie, and examines how, in the context of colonization, an anxiety about their own agency shapes colonial and postcolonial narratives, and why that anxiety is manifested or worked out through the imagining of the text as a human body. Apart from shorter encyclopedia pieces on writers such as Salman Rushdie, Sara Suleri, Bapsi Sidhwa and Tsitsi Dangarembga, I have published essays in scholarly journals such as English Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, Literature Interpretation Theory, Twentieth-Century Literature and Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism.
