Search
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Fawzia Afzal-Khan is professor of English at Montclair State University, and a University Distinguished Scholar. She was Director of the Women and Gender Studies Program from 2009 to 2015, and spearheaded a change in nomenclature to Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, effective as of autumn 2015. She has published several books of scholarly criticism, including the single-authored monographs Cultural Imperialism: Genre and Ideology in the Indo-English Novel (Penn State Press, 1993) and A Critical Stage: The Role of Secular Alternative Theatre in Pakistan (Seagull Press, 2005). She is co-editor of The PreOccupation of Postcolonial Studies (Duke University Press, 2000), and Editor of the best-selling anthology, Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out (Interlink Books 2005). Her controversial memoir, Lahore with Love: Growing Up With Girlfriends Pakistani Style, was published by Syracuse University Press in 2010. Afzal-Khan is a trained vocalist in North Indian Classical music, a published playwright and poet, and has worked as an actor and performer for Ajoka Theatre Troupe of Pakistan, as well as with the experimental theatre collective Compagnie Faim de Siecle of which she was one of the founding members. Her one-woman show Scheherezade Goes West and plays Sext of Saudade (co-written with Annie Lanzillotto) and Jihad Against Violence (co-written with Bina Sharif) have been published in The Drama Review (TDR) and performed at universities and other venues in the United States as well as internationally; her solo show, Scheherezade Goes West, has been performed most recently at the Smithsonian Institute of Washington DC as well as at the James Stewart Theatre, Princeton University. Her latest iteration of the play Jihad Against Violence, subtitled Oh ISIS Up Yours! was performed in excerpted form, with Arabic translation, in Tangiers, Morocco in 2014, and will be get a full production at the Silk Road Theatre Company in Chicago during their 2016–17 season. She serves as Contributing Editor on The Drama Review and is Founding Chair of the South Asian Feminist Caucus of The National Women’s Studies Association of North America, where she also served as a member of the Governing Council. She was recently named on the Editorial Advisory Board of a new peer-reviewed e-journal published by City University New York called Arab Stages. She is currently working as Creative Director and Producer on a documentary film about Pakistani women singers, for which she won a development grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities in 2011, and has a book in progress on the same subject, a chapter of which was first published in Performing Islam. Her most recent publication in PI (February 2016) is her article entitled ‘The politics of pity and the individual heroine syndrome: The case of Mukhtaran Mai and Malala Yousafzai’.