Moussa Pourya Asl
Biographic Data
| ID | 160346 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Moussa Pourya Asl |
| GIVEN NAMES | Moussa Pourya |
| FAMILY NAME | Asl |
| SIGNATURE | ASL M P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Universiti Sains Malaysia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8426-426X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 27 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The politics of loneliness
This study reimagines loneliness as a socio-politically embedded and relational experience. It examines how gendered, class-based, and diasporic power dynamics shape loneliness in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Oleander Girl, a diasporic novel selected for its focus on female subjectivity. Drawing on Foucault's notion of biopower, Sartre's theorization of existentialism, and Butler's conceptualization of precarity, the analysis reveals loneliness a…
Cartographies of the tactic
This article explores the politics of quotidian resistance in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Oleander girl (2013) using Michel de Certeau’s theorization of tactics and strategies. It conceptualizes space and time as active, contested terrains where subaltern agency is enacted through subtle, embodied, and affective practices. The protagonist, Korobi Roy, resists patriarchal, caste-bound, and diasporic-nationalist constraints not via overt confronta…
From Confinement to Counter-Geography
Focusing on the spatialized experiences of Afghan women, this article examines Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns through Edward Soja’s theory of spatial trialectics to explore how space operates simultaneously as an instrument of patriarchal control and a locus of insurgent agency. Drawing on Soja’s triadic model—Firstspace (material geographies), Secondspace (ideological constructions), and Thirdspace (lived and resistant practices)—the…
Precarity and Estrangement
Decoding violence against women
The rising prevalence of harassment in Middle Eastern countries is mirrored in literary works from the region. However, extracting data from these texts to understand the typology and frequency of the cases poses a significant challenge due to human cognitive limitations and potential biases. Thus, this study aims to use natural language processing (NLP) approaches to propose a machine learning framework for text mining of sexual harassment conte…
Computational analysis of dystopian elements in the partition fiction
Despite the growth of digital humanities, the specific application of computational methods to analyse literary themes and elements remains underexplored. This study aims to use machine learning algorithms for text classification on seven novels about the partition of India. The article has a dual objective: firstly, to develop and implement an innovative opinion mining framework that leverages machine learning techniques to identify and classify…
An Archetypal Reading of The Arabian Nights
The Arabian Nights is a literary masterpiece that has captivated readers for centuries with its magical elements, mythical creatures and traditional patterns of archetypes. This study delves into the underlying similarities and differences among the types of archetypal characters depicted in two tales, “Three Apples” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves”. The focus is on the notion of mythic hero, exploring the use of archetypal symbols, images, c…
Gaze, objectification, and identity formation in life writings of Iranian women in diaspora
The condition of permanent visibility that imposes on women the passive role of spectacle is often considered to be the state of women in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Most scholarly works on the status of women in contemporary Iran stereotypically perceive them as unresisting objects of institutional and voyeuristic gazes, and thus overlook the nuances of women’s participation within the prevailing dynamics of looking. This article explores the …
Mapping Violence against Women in Pakistan
This study explores the intersecting factors contributing to violence against women in Pakistan as depicted in contemporary literary works by women writers.Drawing upon Johan Galtung's typology of violence, we aim to examine the dynamics of direct, structural, and cultural violence within Fatima Bhutto's The Shadow of the Crescent Moon (2013).The novel is particularly suited for this analysis as it delves into the lives of Pakistani people amidst…
Narrative strategies of transrealism
The rise of transrealism in the second half of the twentieth century embellished the literary landscape in America with a new mode of expression that offered new understanding of time, space, identity, and social values and norms. This study situates the American novelist Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano within this literary context to map out the qualities that distinguish it as a transrealistic fiction. We argue that through innovative coalescence …
Beyond Orientalism
The representation of Islamic societies in life narratives by Western voyagers has long been a subject of criticism for their allegedly prejudiced and demeaning portrayal. These narratives are often accused of perpetuating Orientalist discourses and reinforcing Islamophobia. This article problematizes such myopic perspectives by demonstrating how a western-produced travelogue can move beyond hackneyed cultural clichés on the Orient and present an…
Reimagining spatiality in South Asian diasporic literature
The examination of power, space, and identity formation within diasporic literature has garnered significant attention due to the escalating global mobility of migrants across the world. This article studies the complex integration of spatial hierarchy, civil violence, and gendered responses to power representations in Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, The Lowland (2013). We utilise Henri Lefebvre's theories to dissect the spatial dynamics of the novel acro…
The poetics of identity making
Bangladesh experienced a massive surge in humanitarian crises after the 1971 Liberation War due to the systematic use of violence at both public and private spheres. Fictional accounts of the post-conflict period depict women as subjected to institutionalised sexism and aggravated physical and mental violence. Critical studies on such narratives often reiterate a stereotypical and essentialising discourse surrounding women's identity, characteris…
Artificial intelligence approach for detection and classification of depression among refugees in selected diasporic novels
The primary objective of this research is to develop and implement an artificial intelligence (AI) approach for the detection and classification of mental breakdowns in literary texts. The study employs text analytics techniques, utilizing natural language processing (NLP) to extract and analyze data from six novels written by Afghan and Pakistani diasporic writers. The aim is to identify and classify the topics and sentiments related to depressi…
Reimagining Chinese American Identity
The Chinese immigrant and Chinese American communities have faced a long history of stigmatisation and misrepresentation due to racial bias and discrimination. This article explores the transformative growth narrative of the child protagonist in Laurence Yep’s novel Dragonwings, set against the backdrop of historical anti-Asian sentiment in the early 1900s. By adopting Said’s “imaginative geography” and Bhabha’s “third space” as analytical perspe…
Precarious Lives and Resisting Women
Urban Poetics and Politics in Contemporary South Asia and the Middle East
Gender, Place, and Identity of South Asian Women
Handbook of Research on Opinion Mining and Text Analytics on Literary Works and Social Media
"This book uses artificial intelligence and big data analytics to conduct opinion mining and text analytics on literary works and social media, focusing on theories, method, applications and approaches of data analytic techniques that can be used to extract and analyze data from literary books and social media, in a meaningful pattern
The Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic
Contemporary life writings of Iranian diaspora are often censured for promoting a universalizing, dehumanizing and hegemonic image of the nation. The common misgiving is that the narratives project Iranian women as archetypal victims and their male counterparts as essentially powerful subjects. The present study aims at problematizing this assumption by arguing that Ramita Navai’s City of Lies (2014) portrays an anti-essentialist character sketch…
A Non-Orientalist Representation of Pakistan in Contemporary Western Travelogues
Travel writings by Western visitors of the Orient have often been rebuffed for disseminating a stereotypical discourse on the people and the culture of the East. The rationale for the collective dismissal of such narratives, however, is built upon a limited canon whose myopic perspective creates a monolithic Orient. It is argued that since this dominant discourse leaves nearly no room for non-conformism, it has conveniently overlooked a large bod…
Gender, Place, and Identity of South Asian Women
Opinion Mining and Text Analytics on Literary Works and Social Media
Truth, Space, and Resistance
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)
The Objectifying Gaze
With the recent prevalence of white supremacist discourses in the United States, Asian Americans have unavoidably been subjected to xenophobic gazes and tendencies. The white gaze has traditionally enjoyed the privilege to objectify and fix the diasporic subject both racially and ethnically, foregrounding a relationality that naturalizes the immigrant as the inferior subject. The Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen recounts similar unset…
Urban Poetics and Politics in Contemporary South Asia and the Middle East
Mapping Violence against Women in Pakistan
This study explores the intersecting factors contributing to violence against women in Pakistan as depicted in contemporary literary works by women writers.Drawing upon Johan Galtung's typology of violence, we aim to examine the dynamics of direct, structural, and cultural violence within Fatima Bhutto's The Shadow of the Crescent Moon (2013).The novel is particularly suited for this analysis as it delves into the lives of Pakistani people amidst…
Precarious Lives and Resisting Women
Fabrication of a desired truth
Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013) explores effects of the 1967 Communist Naxalbari uprising in West Bengal India. Irrespective of the glowing reviews the author earned for her truthful representations, the novel presents the pro-Communist uprising in a particular discursive regime that establishes a particular way of remembering and forgetting. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of ‘subjugated knowledges,’ this essay seeks to examine the epistemic heg…
The poetics of identity making
Bangladesh experienced a massive surge in humanitarian crises after the 1971 Liberation War due to the systematic use of violence at both public and private spheres. Fictional accounts of the post-conflict period depict women as subjected to institutionalised sexism and aggravated physical and mental violence. Critical studies on such narratives often reiterate a stereotypical and essentialising discourse surrounding women's identity, characteris…
Truth, Space, and Resistance
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)
Gender, space and counter-conduct
Thus far, studies on the politics of gendered identities and spatial (in)justice in the Islamic Republic of Iran have mainly focused on the negative role of spatialization in the formation and perpetuation of a heteropatriarchal normativity. Little attention has been paid to the dialectical relationship between space and power as well as to the possibilities of women’s agency in challenging, contesting and reconstructing gendered spaces. This art…
Beyond Orientalism
The representation of Islamic societies in life narratives by Western voyagers has long been a subject of criticism for their allegedly prejudiced and demeaning portrayal. These narratives are often accused of perpetuating Orientalist discourses and reinforcing Islamophobia. This article problematizes such myopic perspectives by demonstrating how a western-produced travelogue can move beyond hackneyed cultural clichés on the Orient and present an…
Reimagining spatiality in South Asian diasporic literature
The examination of power, space, and identity formation within diasporic literature has garnered significant attention due to the escalating global mobility of migrants across the world. This article studies the complex integration of spatial hierarchy, civil violence, and gendered responses to power representations in Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, The Lowland (2013). We utilise Henri Lefebvre's theories to dissect the spatial dynamics of the novel acro…
Nihilation of Femininity in the Battle of Looks
The panoptic gaze is vested in with a constitutive impact upon the subjectivity of individuals. Feminist scholars like Luce Irigaray have charged that the metaphor of vision is intimately connected with the construction of gender and sexual difference. By pointing to the masculine logic of Western thought, Irigaray confirms that a woman’s entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies her inevitable confinement to passivity. This essay aims to ex…
Circulation of the Discourse of American Nationalism through Allegiance to Consumer Citizenship in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake
This essay examines South Asian American writer Jhumpa Lahiri’s literary engagement with the re-Orientalization and sexualization of a collective subject described as Indian diaspora within the context of contemporary consumer culture. The essay explores the relationship between Lahiri’s best-selling novel, The Namesake (2003) and its contemporary society by taking the point of view that diasporic literary writing is an example of a Foucauldian s…
Practices of Counter-Conduct as a Mode of Resistance in Middle East Women’s Life Writings
Middle East women life writings have been downplayed for their oversimplified representations of female subjects as purely passive, submissive and unresisting. This article explores the allegation in three contemporary memoirs by Jean P. Sasson (1992) (the ghostwriter of Saudi princess Sultana), Zainab Salbi (2005) and Manal al-Sharif (2017) who recount similar observations on subordinated women’s daily experiences in phallocentric Arab communiti…
Sexual Politics of the Gaze and Objectification of the (Immigrant) Woman in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies
Gayatri Spivak’s repeated accusations against the hyphenated Americans of colluding in their own exploitation is noteworthy in the context of diasporic writers’ portrayal of immigrant women within the prevailing discourse of anti-Communism in the United States. The woman in South Asian American writings is often portrayed as still stuck in the traditional prescribed gender roles imposed by patriarchal society. This essay explores Jhumpa Lahiri’s …
Fabrication of a desired truth
Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013) explores effects of the 1967 Communist Naxalbari uprising in West Bengal India. Irrespective of the glowing reviews the author earned for her truthful representations, the novel presents the pro-Communist uprising in a particular discursive regime that establishes a particular way of remembering and forgetting. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of ‘subjugated knowledges,’ this essay seeks to examine the epistemic heg…
Foucauldian rituals of justice and conduct in Zainab Salbi’s Between Two Worlds
This article explores the Iraqi-American life writer Zainab Salbi’s memoir Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny; Growing up in the Shadow of Saddam (2005) in the light of a Foucauldian framework to examine both visible and invisible tactics of power once exercised by Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime. The Foucauldian analysis of juridical forms and sovereign power as features of governmentality and political rationality are useful in under…
Leisure as a Space of Political Practice in Middle East Women Life Writings
Middle East women’s active participation in resisting against socio-political impositions and constraints has received scant attention in the existing scholarship within the field. Much of the literature is focused on the socially victimized, subjugated and passive state of the female subjects in facing patriarchal authoritarianism and repression. In contrast, this article aims at exploring the subjected women’s investment in multifarious acts of…
Spaces of Change
Stereotypically depicted as unresisting and passive victims of oppressive power, Saudi women are generally considered as unable to effect changes to the patriarchal sociopolitical status quo. This article studies the Saudi woman life writer Manal al-Sharif's Daring to Drive (2017) to demonstrate the various ways in which the subjugated women instigate social transformations by resisting against the prevailing male dominated system. To this end, M…
The Politics of Space
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees (2017) explores hardships and aspirations of non-Communist Vietnamese led between two contradicting geographical imaginations. This article draws upon Foucault’s theories of “other spaces”—heterotopia, utopia and dystopia—to examine the socio-political constructs of space in the manufacturing and diffusion of desired knowledge(s) throughout the collection. It is argued that the particular arrangement of spaces tog…
Expertise and Explicitation in English Translations of the Holy Quran
With universals of translation budding into an interesting field in translation studies, discussing the nature of translation universals and explicitation as one of the universals of translation emerges as one important strand worthy exploring. In this paper, first of all, the notion of explicitation in translation is introduced, followed by the probable relations between expertise and explicitation discussed in two Arabic-English translations of…
Micro-Physics of Discipline
Contemporary life narratives by or about Middle Eastern women often portray the female body as the object of oppressive ethical and political governmentalities. This article focuses on the writings of a generation of secular and Muslim women, whose works describe the condition of women as subjugated by sovereign states and disciplinary governments, to examine the politics of space in the workings of the complex interactions between gender and pow…
Panoptic spaces and the framings of South Asian diaspora in Jhumpa Lahiri’s selected short stories
This article carries out a (con-) textual analysis of cultural crossings, with a particular focus on the notions of assimilation and syncretism, in certain of Jhumpa Lahiri’s diasporic writings. By situating two of her short stories “This Blessed House” and “The Third and Final Continent” within the social-political context of the post-1960s America—when the country witnessed the re-emergence of Orientalism and the rise of a conflicting social ph…
The Objectifying Gaze
With the recent prevalence of white supremacist discourses in the United States, Asian Americans have unavoidably been subjected to xenophobic gazes and tendencies. The white gaze has traditionally enjoyed the privilege to objectify and fix the diasporic subject both racially and ethnically, foregrounding a relationality that naturalizes the immigrant as the inferior subject. The Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen recounts similar unset…
The Objectifying Gaze
With the recent prevalence of white supremacist discourses in the United States, Asian Americans have unavoidably been subjected to xenophobic gazes and tendencies. The white gaze has traditionally enjoyed the privilege to objectify and fix the diasporic subject both racially and ethnically, foregrounding a relationality that naturalizes the immigrant as the inferior subject. The Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen recounts similar unset…
Gender, space and counter-conduct
Thus far, studies on the politics of gendered identities and spatial (in)justice in the Islamic Republic of Iran have mainly focused on the negative role of spatialization in the formation and perpetuation of a heteropatriarchal normativity. Little attention has been paid to the dialectical relationship between space and power as well as to the possibilities of women’s agency in challenging, contesting and reconstructing gendered spaces. This art…
Gender, Place, and Identity of South Asian Women
Handbook of Research on Opinion Mining and Text Analytics on Literary Works and Social Media
"This book uses artificial intelligence and big data analytics to conduct opinion mining and text analytics on literary works and social media, focusing on theories, method, applications and approaches of data analytic techniques that can be used to extract and analyze data from literary books and social media, in a meaningful pattern
The Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic
Contemporary life writings of Iranian diaspora are often censured for promoting a universalizing, dehumanizing and hegemonic image of the nation. The common misgiving is that the narratives project Iranian women as archetypal victims and their male counterparts as essentially powerful subjects. The present study aims at problematizing this assumption by arguing that Ramita Navai’s City of Lies (2014) portrays an anti-essentialist character sketch…
A Non-Orientalist Representation of Pakistan in Contemporary Western Travelogues
Travel writings by Western visitors of the Orient have often been rebuffed for disseminating a stereotypical discourse on the people and the culture of the East. The rationale for the collective dismissal of such narratives, however, is built upon a limited canon whose myopic perspective creates a monolithic Orient. It is argued that since this dominant discourse leaves nearly no room for non-conformism, it has conveniently overlooked a large bod…
Gender, Place, and Identity of South Asian Women
Opinion Mining and Text Analytics on Literary Works and Social Media
Truth, Space, and Resistance
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)
Artificial intelligence approach for detection and classification of depression among refugees in selected diasporic novels
The primary objective of this research is to develop and implement an artificial intelligence (AI) approach for the detection and classification of mental breakdowns in literary texts. The study employs text analytics techniques, utilizing natural language processing (NLP) to extract and analyze data from six novels written by Afghan and Pakistani diasporic writers. The aim is to identify and classify the topics and sentiments related to depressi…
Reimagining Chinese American Identity
The Chinese immigrant and Chinese American communities have faced a long history of stigmatisation and misrepresentation due to racial bias and discrimination. This article explores the transformative growth narrative of the child protagonist in Laurence Yep’s novel Dragonwings, set against the backdrop of historical anti-Asian sentiment in the early 1900s. By adopting Said’s “imaginative geography” and Bhabha’s “third space” as analytical perspe…
Precarious Lives and Resisting Women
Sociology (27 works) · Aesthetics (21 works) · Art (21 works) · Gender Studies (21 works) · History (20 works) · Political science (19 works) · Law (15 works) · Literature (14 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Politics (14 works)