- Comparative Literature/UCLA
350 Humanities Building
405 Hilgard Avenue
Box 951536
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1536 - +1 310-825-9503
Aamir R Mufti
University of California, Los Angeles, Comparative Literature, Faculty Member
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Comparative Literature, Secularisms and Secularities, Muslims in Western Europe, Modern Jewish History, Indian studies, Orientalism, and 37 morePolitical Islam, Sociology of Religion, Anthropology, Contemporary Art, Postcolonial Studies, Literary Theory, Jewish Studies, German Literature, World Literature, Minorities, Secularization, Indian Literature, Exile, Partition of India, English as a global language, Postsecularism (Sociology), Palestinian Culture, English as the World's Language, World Englishes, Edward Said, Minority Rights, Postcolonial Theory, South Asian Studies, Migration Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology of Religion, Literature, English Literature, Literary Criticism, Politics, Comparative Politics, Religion and Politics, Middle East Politics, International Politics, South Asia, India, and History edit
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History, Cultural History, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Sociology of Culture, and 49 moreSociology of Religion, World Literatures, Comparative Literature, Anthropology, Comparative Politics, English Literature, Social Anthropology, Romanticism, Globalization, Political Theory, Literature, Sociology of Language, Postcolonial Studies, Indian studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, South Asian Studies, Literary Criticism, English language, Politics, English, South Asian History, History of English Literature, Literary Theory, World Englishes, Globalization And Postcolonial Studies, Neoliberalism, Indian English Literature, Postcolonial Theory, Urdu Literature, Sociology of Literature, World Literature, Social History, Modern Indian History, Postcolonial Literature, South Asian Literature, Hindi/Urdu, Indian Literature, Cultural Anthropology, Southeast Asian Politics, Anglophone Literature, Indian Writing in English, Literary translation, Orientalism, Literary studies, English language and literature, Cultural Globalization, Partition of India, Global Anglophone Literature, and Anglophone Studies
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Sociology, Political Sociology, Sociology of Religion, Comparative Literature, Anthropology, and 25 moreComparative Politics, Political Philosophy, English Literature, Social Anthropology, Jewish Studies, Social Sciences, Political Theory, Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Religion and Politics, Social and Cultural Anthropology, South Asian Studies, Literary Criticism, Political Science, Politics, Literary Theory, Minority Studies, Indian English Literature, Politics of Secularism, Secularisms and Secularities, Cultural Anthropology, Comparative Literary Criticism, Citizenship, Secularism, and Anthropology of Religion
... Mufti / Fanatics in Europa 21 leagues around the table were nodding thoughtfully. With growing panic, I realized I had no idea what they were talking about, in perfectly compre-hensible English, except that Jill and Bob were often... more
... Mufti / Fanatics in Europa 21 leagues around the table were nodding thoughtfully. With growing panic, I realized I had no idea what they were talking about, in perfectly compre-hensible English, except that Jill and Bob were often being uttered in the same sentence as Islam ...
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1. With September 11th, we are told, everything changed. This refrain has acquired the numbing force of a cliché in the months since the attack on the World Trade Center. America will never be the same again; irony has become... more
1. With September 11th, we are told, everything changed. This refrain has acquired the numbing force of a cliché in the months since the attack on the World Trade Center. America will never be the same again; irony has become unsustainable; patriotism is in. ...
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... of "firsts" (five, by my count) - which, he feels, should have made my work on Rushdie (and presumably that of Sara Suleri and ... of actual complicities between the two, ranging from eleven years of CIA... more
... of "firsts" (five, by my count) - which, he feels, should have made my work on Rushdie (and presumably that of Sara Suleri and ... of actual complicities between the two, ranging from eleven years of CIA sponsoring of the Afghan fundamentalist parties, to Irani "contragate" dealings ...
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The Islamic furor surrounding the publication of The Satanic Verses (SV) and, since February 1989, the personal fate of its author, Salman Rushdie, continue periodically to generate interest and to produce debate in the Western media. The... more
The Islamic furor surrounding the publication of The Satanic Verses (SV) and, since February 1989, the personal fate of its author, Salman Rushdie, continue periodically to generate interest and to produce debate in the Western media. The latest round came in the wake of ...
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This essay focuses on contemporary India and the rise to near hegemony of “Hindutva power,” which works through both the transformation of the exercise of sovereign power and the inculcation of a distinct habitus, or structure of... more
This essay focuses on contemporary India and the rise to near hegemony of “Hindutva power,” which works through both the transformation of the exercise of sovereign power and the inculcation of a distinct habitus, or structure of predispositions, in more and more sectors of society. This Hindu supremacist and nationalist habitus marks a far-reaching transformation not only of democratic political culture but of religious belief and practice as well. But despite their sense of inevitability, these developments are part of a scene of contestation and the staging of prodemocracy and anti-fascist dissent.
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Cultural Studies, Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Islamic Studies, Secularization, and 11 morePolitics of Secularism, Islam, Language, Secularisms and Secularities, Gender and Islam, Literary studies, Communication and Culture, Islam and Secularism, Critical Inquiry, History and archaeology, and Anthropology of Religion
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Critical Theory, History, Cultural History, Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature, and 15 moreAnthropology, Comparative Politics, International Relations, English Literature, Jewish Studies, International Relations Theory, Literature, Cultural Theory, Literary Theory, Exile, Cultural Anthropology, Edward Said, Exile Literature, Homeland, and Israel Palestine
Jugaad continues Iftikhar and Elizabeth Dadi's extended artistic investigation of informality in the Global South, which arguably constitutes the majority experience of this vast region. Development became a central problematic for... more
Jugaad continues Iftikhar and Elizabeth Dadi's extended artistic investigation of informality in the Global South, which arguably constitutes the majority experience of this vast region. Development became a central problematic for Africa and Asia in the wake of political decolonization of the mid twentieth century, encompassing the ambition for formal planning of large-scale infrastructure and state intervention in human development. But this project was always incomplete and resonated in complex ways with the tenacious growth of informal living and working arrangements whose legacies can be traced back to the colonial era. Informality is amplified in contemporary globalization that is often understood as a process in which transnational brands and lifestyles replace their local analogs. But this view overlooks globalization's shadows—the largely invisible processes of labor, production, and consumption that transpire in the vast informality of the Global South. This is a r...
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Psychology and Criticism
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World literature advocates have promised to move humanistic study beyond postcolonial theory and antiquated paradigms of national literary traditions. Aamir Mufti scrutinizes these claims and critiques the continuing dominance of English... more
World literature advocates have promised to move humanistic study beyond postcolonial theory and antiquated paradigms of national literary traditions. Aamir Mufti scrutinizes these claims and critiques the continuing dominance of English as both a literary language and the undisputed cultural system of global capitalism.
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... In the decades following the 1857 Rebellion, for instance, the classical tradition of lyric poetry, and in particular the ghazal form, became the site of fierce contention about the prospects of a distinct... more
... In the decades following the 1857 Rebellion, for instance, the classical tradition of lyric poetry, and in particular the ghazal form, became the site of fierce contention about the prospects of a distinct ''Muslim'' experience in Indian modernity. ...
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This essay argues that the “postsecular” tendency in contemporary humanities and social sciences relies disproportionately on contemporary political Islam to make its case for a “return of religion.” Furthermore, postsecularism generates... more
This essay argues that the “postsecular” tendency in contemporary humanities and social sciences relies disproportionately on contemporary political Islam to make its case for a “return of religion.” Furthermore, postsecularism generates a highly misleading view of political Islam as an unmediated and unproblematic return to the tradition of (Sunni) Islam, making it difficult to see that political Islam is in fact a result of the great transformation of Muslim societies under colonial rule.
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Ato Quayson (AQ) conducted this interview with Aamir R. Mufti (AM) via email in August 2015. Question AQ: Aamir, thanks for agreeing to do this interview. It is a great delight to have your thoughts included in this special issue on... more
Ato Quayson (AQ) conducted this interview with Aamir R. Mufti (AM) via email in August 2015. Question AQ: Aamir, thanks for agreeing to do this interview. It is a great delight to have your thoughts included in this special issue on Jewish studies and postcolonialism. I want to start off by inviting you to talk about your book Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture. Could you tell us a little bit about what motivated you to write that book? What were the conversations you were interested in contributing to? Answer AM: Thanks for the opportunity to participate in this very important special issue. The intersections of Jewish cultural studies and the postcolonial intervention continue to preoccupy me in my current work. With Enlightenment in the Colony, I wanted to contribute toward generating a renewed discussion of the forms of social vulnerability associated with “minority” status in modern society, one that would avoid the false resolutions of liberal multiculturalism. I wanted to ask what kinds of social crisis were created by the existence of groups and social imaginaries that could not be assimilated into narratives of national life. And I wanted to pose the question across the historical divide between metropolitan and colonial societies. The most immediate influence on my way of thinking was the work of Edward Said and those European thinkers who had been most influential for him— Theodor Adorno, Erich Auerbach, but also Hannah Arendt, whose influence Said often seems to disavow in a classic “anxiety of influence” manner. But equally important were a range of South Asian thinkers and writers—such well-known figures as Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Aijaz Ahmad, and Gauri Viswanathan, but also people like Faiz Ahmed Faiz and the “progressive” writers and intellectuals who did much of their work in Urdu. Specifically, the book originated in an attempt to reopen the question of the Partition of India and to think the problem in a new way. Partition studies had been dominated either by a rational-choice type of framework looking at competing (“Hindu” and “Muslim”) elites within the colonial state, or a developmentalist one that offered the social “backwardness” of Muslim elites as an explanation of Muslim political separatism.
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C. P. Cavafy was a writer of the British Empire whose situation resembles that of other colonial writers and should be examined in that context, as well as in the light of the contradictory logic of Orientalism-Anglicism. In the modern... more
C. P. Cavafy was a writer of the British Empire whose situation resembles that of other colonial writers and should be examined in that context, as well as in the light of the contradictory logic of Orientalism-Anglicism. In the modern West's interest in the late Hellenistic era, philhellenism and Orientalism become one. Cavafy responds to imperial philhellenism by rejecting its triumphalism and exploring matters of colonial displacement. The emphasis on Hellenistic states in fragmentation displaces the canonical veneration of classical antiquity. Cavafy looks at empire topographically from its margins and chronologically in the process of its decline. In these colonial peripheries, to be a Hellene is primarily to be a philhellene. Cavafy's historical vignettes resonate with life in the modern empire, and his drawn parallels between Hellenistic and British Empires highlight the institutional fragility of empire as a form.
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Critical Theory, History, Cultural History, Sociology, Cultural Studies, and 23 morePolitical Sociology, Social Theory, Comparative Literature, Anthropology, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Political Philosophy, English Literature, Social Anthropology, International Relations Theory, Social Sciences, Political Theory, Middle East Studies, Literature, Political Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Theory, Political Science, Politics, Literary Theory, Social History, Middle East Politics, and Cultural Anthropology
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Comparative Literature, Eighteenth-Century literature, Literature, Identity (Culture), Colonialism, and 11 moreLiterary Theory, Post-Colonialism, National Identity, British Empire, World Literature, British Imperial and Colonial History (1600 - ), Contemporary Literature, Indian Literature, Anglophone Literature, Orientalism, and English as a global language
... My concern here has been with the disciplinary conditions in comparative literary studies that appear to me to be obstacles to its emergence. ... See Emily Apter, “Global Translatio: The 'Invention' of Comparative... more
... My concern here has been with the disciplinary conditions in comparative literary studies that appear to me to be obstacles to its emergence. ... See Emily Apter, “Global Translatio: The 'Invention' of Comparative Literature, Istanbul, 1933,” Critical Inquiry 29 (Winter 2003): 253–81. ...
