Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the work of Punjabi-language Lahore-based short story writer Zubair Ahmed to understand the configuration of pre-partition memories that haunt the author's present.

Paper long abstract:

The short stories of Lahore-based writer, Professor Zubair Ahmed, are constructed around a creative and intimate re-framing of the political, social, and affective worlds of modern post-colonial Pakistan, in conversation with a larger internal and external world. Memories animate this affective landscape, as do the personal and the political, the embrace of the fragments and hauntings a pre-partition past with a partitioned present. Ahmed's work also provides a window into the activities of a little-known language movement that seeks to reconfigure language politics in the Pakistani Punjab and which connects to a broader transnational linguistic and literary movement that seeks to enliven and empower the Punjabi language across borders. Work in this arena suggests emergent possibilities for a new experience of the contentious border that separates the Pakistani Punjab from the Indian Punjab, built both out of memory and out of the present.