ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the potential of humour in questioning the inanity of stereotyping Muslims and Pakistanis in a post-9/11 world. It examines the ways in which the popular romance genre 'can potentially serve as a site on which Pakistani women writers refashion and reconfigure their role in their country's nationalist imaginary'. The book discusses how the Pakistani women novelists Qaisra Shahraz, Shaila Abdullah, and Kamila Shamsie respond to the challenges and subsequent implications of nationalist ideologies for gendered expressions of sexuality and agency. It focuses on multiple modalities of gender, nationalism, class, religion, sexuality, and generation. The book describes how Yousafzai's image of a wounded victim was appropriated by the 'neo-imperial project of cosmopolitan interest, sympathy, charity, and "rescue" within the context of the War on Terror'.