Sadia Abbas  (English, Rutgers University) explores responses to the colonial construction of religious subjects in South Asia. Undertaken in an effort to manage colonized populations, this construction is captured and continued by the postcolonial state, the most well-known example of which is Pakistan’s blasphemy law. Intricate contestations of religious iconography of the state and of the construction of religionized subjects circulate in a variety of media (videotaped speeches and documentaries and paintings) and texts (novels and poetry). This talk examines how these circulations attempt to create a “poetic” collectivity alternative to the juridical one instituted by colonial law and the postcolonial state.

This event is co-sponsored with the Department of Anthropology Colloquium Series.

Sadia Abbas is assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark, where she specializes in postcolonial literature and theory, the culture and politics of Islam in modernity, early modern English literature—especially the literature of religious strife—and the history of twentieth-century criticism. She is author of the forthcoming book At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament (Fordham University Press).