Claire Chambers
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3593807 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Claire Chambers |
| NOMBRES | Claire |
| APELLIDO | Chambers |
| FIRMA | CHAMBERS C |
| AFILIACIONES | University of York |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8996-4129 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 40 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 57 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 40 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2003 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
“Chip, Chip, Chip Away”
Through a postcolonial feminist lens, this paper examines the literary canon: its evolution, pedagogic purposes, and the issues of inclusion and exclusion subtending it. Scrutinising canon formation via excerpts from the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism , we expose the blind spots of the canon and their consequences. The article critiques Global North paradigms of knowledge and the epistemic violence inherent in excluding minoritised voic…
Pandemic Writing as an Ecological Force
Covid-19 fiction tends to exhibit the potential of literary discourse as an ecological force. Illuminated by cultural ecology, the essay puts Fang Fang's Wuhan Diary into conversation with Aristide's Under the Blue , Bi's Coronavirus , and Smith's Intimations , deploying texts from both Chinese and English contexts for a comparative global perspective
Prevailing Pandemic
In this introduction to the special issue we co-edited, we (Xiaohui Liang and Claire Chambers) examine how vulnerability and solidarity are portrayed in contemporary English and Chinese pandemic fiction, linking these depictions to philosophical inquiries into human resilience. Building on Platonic distinctions between Being and Becoming, we discuss how the Covid-19 pandemic unsettles notions of universal harmony, exposing global interdependencie…
Rethinking Muslim narratives
This article discusses the challenges British Muslim writers and publishers face in a largely secular literary marketplace and a society marked by Islamophobia. It explores these authors’ publication experiences, analysing examples from industry diversity initiatives and from conducting interviews with authors. Arguing that distorted representations strip Muslims of their complex humanity, while more nuanced portrayals can humanize them without r…
Some Thoughts on Afghanistan
I spent a life-changing year in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the 1990s, a visit that formed my intellectual perspective and inspired my career trajectory. Thus, I have long been fascinated by other people – especially women – who have spent time amid other cultures, and then experienced mixed feelings on returning to their native countries. Lately I have been reading the work of two adventurous women journalists, a generation apart from each other: Brit…
Brexit, the pandemic and the battle with language
This interview with the well-known poet Daljit Nagra was conducted in summer 2022 by Claire Chambers, with Rachael Gilmour providing questions in absentia due to a bout of coronavirus. In it, the three discuss such issues as ‘refugee tales’, poetic ethics and voice, the Brexit referendum’s emboldening of the far right and, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic. Above all, the conversation turns to Nagra’s bending of language via his use of ‘babu Engli…
Working with community interviewers in social and cultural research
Working with community or peer interviewers can provide valuable access to the lived experiences of individuals and communities who researchers are unlikely to reach. However, the ethical and methodological issues involved in working with community interviewers has received relatively little attention in social and cultural geographical research. In this paper, we reflect on our work with community interviewers in qualitative research about the s…
Infection rebellion in Bina Shah's Before She Sleeps
In her 2018 novel Before She Sleeps Bina Shah depicts an oppressive, dystopian society. This has emerged as one consequence of an uncontrollable virus outbreak which resulted in a disproportionate ratio of men to women. In such a gender-imbalanced world intimacy is commodified, allowing women some means of revolt in a misogynistic and fertility-obsessed world. Shah explores the horrifying aftermath of pandemics, identifying opportunities for the …
Pericoronial writing from China and the diaspora
This article analyses what Margaret Atwood calls the literature of ‘ustopia’. The portmanteau term brings together the utopia and dystopia categories because Atwood argues that one contains the germ of the other. Ustopian writing is a body of work that is helpful when it comes to understanding current destruction to lives and livelihoods, and imagining our post-coronavirus future. The present article thus explores four works of ustopian writing f…
Halal dating
Young Muslims in the UK are making space to gain greater control over their personal lives through the diction of ‘halal’ and ‘haram’ when reflecting on and negotiating personal relationships. This article explores the significance of ‘halal dating’ within the lived experiences and sexual relationships of young British Muslims. It draws upon 56 in-depth interviews conducted with young (16–30 years) British Muslims of Pakistani heritage. This rese…
Place and Postcolonial Ecofeminism
In her profound and powerful book, Shazia Rahman reads against the grain of a range of texts by Pakistani women artists. These novels ostensibly seem to have little to do with ecofeminism. However, the close attention Rahman pays to industry’s incursions into nature, food, and water means I will never look at Pakistani literature or film in quite the same way again. Rahman gives us the repeated phrase “the place that is Pakistan” (1–22). This is …
Critical collaborative storying
This article works at the intersection of creative, participatory and critical research. It explores an emergent qualitative methodology that is creative and participatory but not is always as critical as it might be: collaborative storytelling or storying. Understandings of critical collaborative storytelling and (more generically and inclusively) storying are developed through an account of a series of storying workshops. In these workshops, a …
Mobilizing Pakistani heritage, approaching marriage
This paper examines the ongoing significance of Pakistani heritage in the lives of young British Pakistani Muslims. Drawing upon interviews with 56 women and men, it explores the link between Pakistani heritage and young peoples' lives, focusing upon marriage. \n \n \n \nPakistani heritage is widely regarded as a constraint and an anachronism, which young people are jettisoning in favour of religious or secular identities: as Muslims, British, or…
Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels
Taste the Difference
This chapter concerns Euro-American and Middle Eastern food in 2010s novels by two British Arab writers, Leila Aboulela and Robin Yassin-Kassab, alongside the Anglo-Iranian Yasmin Crowther. A practising Muslim as well as an acclaimed author, Aboulela structures Minaret around Islam’s five pillars. The chapter explores three of these pillars in particular (fasting, charity, and pilgrimage) as loci at which food and self-denial are prominent. Next …
‘Mobile Phones and the Internet, Mate’
In his novel about the Egyptian Revolution, The City Always Wins (2017), Omar Robert Hamilton shows that the alternative media possess mass engagement and global reach, while threatening power. However, over the course of his novel Hamilton traces the crushing of the ‘Twitter revolution’ and the rise of a disillusionment and despair among the revolutionaries. This downward trajectory is typified both in the appellative journey from Hamilton’s non…
Sexual misery’ or ‘happy British Muslims
We begin this article with a close look at some contemporary pictures of sexual life in the Muslim world that have been painted in certain sections of the Western media, asking how and why these pictures matter. Across a range of mainstream print media from the New York Times to the Daily Mail, and across reported events from several countries, can be found pictures of ‘sexual misery’. These ‘frame’ Muslim men as tyrannical, Muslim women as downt…
Diary of some good in a bad year
Restless Bedfellows
Restless Bedfellows:Theatre, Theology, Religion, and Spirituality Claire Maria Chambers (bio) THEATRICAL THEOLOGY: EXPLORATIONS IN PERFORMING THE FAITH. Edited by Wesley Vander Lugt and Trevor Hart. Cambridge, UK: Lutterworth Press, 2015; pp. 296. RECKONING WITH SPIRIT IN THE PARADIGM OF PERFORMANCE. By Donnalee Dox. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016; pp. 282. UNSETTLED TOLERATION: RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCE ON THE SHAKESPEAREAN STAGE. By B…
Britain Through Muslim Eyes
What did Britain look like to the Muslims who visited and lived in the country in increasing numbers from the late eighteenth century onwards? This book is a literary history of representations of Mus
Reevaluating the Postcolonial City
This foreword begins with a survey of the field of postcolonial studies, from its points of departure to its current situation and future directions. We 10 suggest that the field has long sought to problematize borders, particularly those that separate academic disciplines. The foreword also highlights the material consequences of border crossing for people of colour and other 'Others', examining Caryl Phillips’ case study of the migrant David Ol…
Transcultural Consumption through a "Queer" Narrative
Although Korean director Choo Min Ju translation and adaptation of Scottish playwright Douglas Maxwell's coming-of-age drama Our Bad Magnet may look like a straightforward case of East-to-West intercultural appropriation, this essay argues that Choo's insertion of a new romantic narrative between two male characters not only "queers" the text, but offers the Western observer an alternative entrance into the discussion of appropriation that queers…
‘The heart, stomach and backbone of Pakistan
Although much research has been undertaken on Indian cities, particularly Bombay/Mumbai, Calcutta/Kolkata and Delhi, Pakistani urban environments have not been subjected to anything like the same degree of scrutiny. There exists a long and rich history of artistic and textual interpretations of the city of Lahore, but this body of work has gone largely unappreciated in academic scholarship. To redress this critical gap, the article examines ficti…
Epistle and Episteme
To interpret—that is, read—the art object is to encounter it as social space. But how do readers inhabit such spaces when they are not “places” at all? Through self-reference rather than representation, Korean artist Yee Sookyung's The Very Best Statue refuses to function as a sign, instead creating a thoroughfare. In comparison with Edwina Sandys's Christa and Orlan's Self-hybridizations, Yee's work sends open letters to an indeterminate public,…
Performing Religion in Public
Sexual misery’ or ‘happy British Muslims
We begin this article with a close look at some contemporary pictures of sexual life in the Muslim world that have been painted in certain sections of the Western media, asking how and why these pictures matter. Across a range of mainstream print media from the New York Times to the Daily Mail, and across reported events from several countries, can be found pictures of ‘sexual misery’. These ‘frame’ Muslim men as tyrannical, Muslim women as downt…
Postcolonial Science Fiction
An Interview with Leila Aboulela
Leila Aboulela is an acclaimed Sudanese writer who currently resides in Abu Dhabi. Writing is her main career, and she also cares for her two young children. The daughter of a Sudanese man and an Egyptian woman, Aboulela was born in Cairo in 1964 but grew up in Khartoum.1 Egypt and Sudan were both colonized by Britain yet had very different experiences of colonial occupation, illustrated by the fact that Sudan was governed under joint British and…
The absolute essentialness of conversations
Amitav Ghosh is a writer of Bengali‐Indian origin, who has lived a peripatetic life in Europe, South Asia and the United States, and has published six fictional or semi‐fictional texts. He also wor
Working with community interviewers in social and cultural research
Working with community or peer interviewers can provide valuable access to the lived experiences of individuals and communities who researchers are unlikely to reach. However, the ethical and methodological issues involved in working with community interviewers has received relatively little attention in social and cultural geographical research. In this paper, we reflect on our work with community interviewers in qualitative research about the s…
A comparative approach to Pakistani fiction in English
This survey paper adumbrates an opening up of Pakistani fiction in order to draw comparisons with other writing by novelists of Muslim heritage. While Pakistani writers tend to be analysed as part of broader South Asian trends, Pakistan also faces west and has concerns in the Middle East, Central Asia, Europe and beyond that derive from its Muslim identity. Without overstating the idea of a universalizing umma (which can lead to neglect of the di…
Mobilizing Pakistani heritage, approaching marriage
This paper examines the ongoing significance of Pakistani heritage in the lives of young British Pakistani Muslims. Drawing upon interviews with 56 women and men, it explores the link between Pakistani heritage and young peoples' lives, focusing upon marriage. \n \n \n \nPakistani heritage is widely regarded as a constraint and an anachronism, which young people are jettisoning in favour of religious or secular identities: as Muslims, British, or…
Countering the ‘Oppressed, Kidnapped Genre’ of Muslim Life Writing
This article, informed by interviews with Shelina Zahra Janmohamed and Yasmin Hai, examines their memoirs within the larger context of life writing by young writers of Muslim heritage living in the UK. While many life writing texts about Muslim women may be categorized as ‘misery memoirs’, describing the abuse, forced marriage, or kidnapping of the passive, oppressed Muslim female, Janmohamed and Hai produce contrasting accounts of their largely …
Postcolonial feminism
Meddl[ing] with my type
Preview this article: Meddl[ing] with my type: An interview with Daljit Nagra, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/cjmc/1/1/s7-1.gif
Representations of the Oil Encounter in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason
This article analyses the handling of generic form in the middle section of Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason (1986), a section which has hitherto received little critical attention and which some readers find puzzling. In particular, it examines two literary modes used by Ghosh in representing a fictional Middle Eastern state: the picaresque and social realism. This well-demarcated textual focus forms the foundation for larger points about Gho…
Transcultural Consumption through a "Queer" Narrative
Although Korean director Choo Min Ju translation and adaptation of Scottish playwright Douglas Maxwell's coming-of-age drama Our Bad Magnet may look like a straightforward case of East-to-West intercultural appropriation, this essay argues that Choo's insertion of a new romantic narrative between two male characters not only "queers" the text, but offers the Western observer an alternative entrance into the discussion of appropriation that queers…
Postcolonial Science Fiction
The absolute essentialness of conversations
Amitav Ghosh is a writer of Bengali‐Indian origin, who has lived a peripatetic life in Europe, South Asia and the United States, and has published six fictional or semi‐fictional texts. He also wor
Representations of the Oil Encounter in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason
This article analyses the handling of generic form in the middle section of Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason (1986), a section which has hitherto received little critical attention and which some readers find puzzling. In particular, it examines two literary modes used by Ghosh in representing a fictional Middle Eastern state: the picaresque and social realism. This well-demarcated textual focus forms the foundation for larger points about Gho…
An Interview with Vikram Chandra
An Interview with Leila Aboulela
Leila Aboulela is an acclaimed Sudanese writer who currently resides in Abu Dhabi. Writing is her main career, and she also cares for her two young children. The daughter of a Sudanese man and an Egyptian woman, Aboulela was born in Cairo in 1964 but grew up in Khartoum.1 Egypt and Sudan were both colonized by Britain yet had very different experiences of colonial occupation, illustrated by the fact that Sudan was governed under joint British and…
Meddl[ing] with my type
Preview this article: Meddl[ing] with my type: An interview with Daljit Nagra, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/cjmc/1/1/s7-1.gif
British Muslim Fictions
Through interviews with leading writers (including Ahdaf Soueif and Hanif Kureishi), this book analyzes the writing and opinions of novelists of Muslim heritage based in the UK. Discussion centres on
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in Zanzibar in 1948, but emigrated to Britain in 1968, in part impelled by the hardships and state-sponsored terror that he and his family experienced there in the 1960s. A few months after Zanzibar peacefully achieved independence from British colonial rule in 1963, it underwent a revolution, which was inflected by African, socialist, and Muslim ideologies, and in which the country was forcibly brought together with Ta…
Salman Rushdie and Indian historiography
Salman Rushdie and Indian historiography: writing the nation into being." Contemporary South Asia, 19(3), pp. 348–349
A comparative approach to Pakistani fiction in English
This survey paper adumbrates an opening up of Pakistani fiction in order to draw comparisons with other writing by novelists of Muslim heritage. While Pakistani writers tend to be analysed as part of broader South Asian trends, Pakistan also faces west and has concerns in the Middle East, Central Asia, Europe and beyond that derive from its Muslim identity. Without overstating the idea of a universalizing umma (which can lead to neglect of the di…
British Muslim Fictions
Postcolonial feminism
Performing Religion in Public
The Common and the Holy
Countering the ‘Oppressed, Kidnapped Genre’ of Muslim Life Writing
This article, informed by interviews with Shelina Zahra Janmohamed and Yasmin Hai, examines their memoirs within the larger context of life writing by young writers of Muslim heritage living in the UK. While many life writing texts about Muslim women may be categorized as ‘misery memoirs’, describing the abuse, forced marriage, or kidnapping of the passive, oppressed Muslim female, Janmohamed and Hai produce contrasting accounts of their largely …
Joseph Anton
‘The heart, stomach and backbone of Pakistan
Although much research has been undertaken on Indian cities, particularly Bombay/Mumbai, Calcutta/Kolkata and Delhi, Pakistani urban environments have not been subjected to anything like the same degree of scrutiny. There exists a long and rich history of artistic and textual interpretations of the city of Lahore, but this body of work has gone largely unappreciated in academic scholarship. To redress this critical gap, the article examines ficti…
Epistle and Episteme
To interpret—that is, read—the art object is to encounter it as social space. But how do readers inhabit such spaces when they are not “places” at all? Through self-reference rather than representation, Korean artist Yee Sookyung's The Very Best Statue refuses to function as a sign, instead creating a thoroughfare. In comparison with Edwina Sandys's Christa and Orlan's Self-hybridizations, Yee's work sends open letters to an indeterminate public,…
Britain Through Muslim Eyes
What did Britain look like to the Muslims who visited and lived in the country in increasing numbers from the late eighteenth century onwards? This book is a literary history of representations of Mus
Reevaluating the Postcolonial City
This foreword begins with a survey of the field of postcolonial studies, from its points of departure to its current situation and future directions. We 10 suggest that the field has long sought to problematize borders, particularly those that separate academic disciplines. The foreword also highlights the material consequences of border crossing for people of colour and other 'Others', examining Caryl Phillips’ case study of the migrant David Ol…
Transcultural Consumption through a "Queer" Narrative
Although Korean director Choo Min Ju translation and adaptation of Scottish playwright Douglas Maxwell's coming-of-age drama Our Bad Magnet may look like a straightforward case of East-to-West intercultural appropriation, this essay argues that Choo's insertion of a new romantic narrative between two male characters not only "queers" the text, but offers the Western observer an alternative entrance into the discussion of appropriation that queers…
Diary of some good in a bad year
Restless Bedfellows
Restless Bedfellows:Theatre, Theology, Religion, and Spirituality Claire Maria Chambers (bio) THEATRICAL THEOLOGY: EXPLORATIONS IN PERFORMING THE FAITH. Edited by Wesley Vander Lugt and Trevor Hart. Cambridge, UK: Lutterworth Press, 2015; pp. 296. RECKONING WITH SPIRIT IN THE PARADIGM OF PERFORMANCE. By Donnalee Dox. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016; pp. 282. UNSETTLED TOLERATION: RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCE ON THE SHAKESPEAREAN STAGE. By B…
Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels
Taste the Difference
This chapter concerns Euro-American and Middle Eastern food in 2010s novels by two British Arab writers, Leila Aboulela and Robin Yassin-Kassab, alongside the Anglo-Iranian Yasmin Crowther. A practising Muslim as well as an acclaimed author, Aboulela structures Minaret around Islam’s five pillars. The chapter explores three of these pillars in particular (fasting, charity, and pilgrimage) as loci at which food and self-denial are prominent. Next …
Sociology (28 obras) · Art (24 obras) · Political science (20 obras) · History (19 obras) · History (16 obras) · Literature (15 obras) · Law (14 obras) · Aesthetics (11 obras) · Gender Studies (10 obras) · Law (10 obras)