ABSTRACT
The life narratives suggest an alternative to the suffering-centred mode of advocacy that is upheld by scholars as the only way of articulating and claiming human rights. Rather than focusing exclusively on the corporeality, victimization, and physical pain of sufferers of human rights violations, the texts discussed narrativize their pleasurable lived experiences and “happy memories” prior to the fact of violence. The “pleasurecentric model” of advocacy provides human rights workers at an international level with alternative and creative ways of representing human rights victims – as more than depersonalized and dehumanized bodies in pain. The responses within the field of Anglophone fictional and non-fictional life narrative emanating from Azad Kashmir are limited and a body of literary work paralleling the work of Kashmiris from Indian-administered Kashmir is not present within Pakistan-administered Kashmir, or within the Kashmiri-Pakistani diaspora at the present moment.
