Birth—1958
Where—Lahore
Education— Tufts University, Kinnaird College for Women

Bibliography

• Siren song: Understanding Pakistan through its women singers(OUP, 2020)

• Lahore with Love: Growing Up With Girlfriends Pakistani Style (2010)

• A Critical Stage: The Role of Secular Alternative Theatre in Pakistan (Seagull Press, 2005)

• Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out Olive Branch Press (2004)

• Cultural Imperialism: Genre and Ideology in the Indo-English Novel (Penn State Press 1993)

She is author of two books of scholarly criticism, 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 memoir: Lahore with Love: Growing Up With Girlfriends Pakistani Style was published in 2010.

She is a cultural materialist who works at the intersection of Feminist Theory, Cultural and Performance Studies, and Postcolonial Studies. She created and teaches the first course on writings by and about Muslim Women at MSU, and has published extensively on this topic. She is author of 5 books, her latest a controversial memoir entitled Lahore With Love; Growing Up With Girlfriends Pakistani-Style. She is a frequent contributor to Counterpunch and Express Tribune, and a published poet and playwright.

She is a Contributing Editor to TDR (The Drama Review), and serves on the Advisory Board of SAR (the South Asian Review), and on the Editorial Board of Arab Stages.

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. She serves as Contributing Editor on TDR (The Drama Review) and is Founding Chair of the South Asian Women’s Caucus of NWSA (The National Women’s Studies Association of N America), where she also serves as a member of the Governing Council.

Her current research work is focused on Pakistani Popular Culture, with a focus on Pakistani Female Singers. She won an National Endowment of the Humanities grant in 2011 to make a trailer for a documentary on this subject, called “From the Melody Queen to the Muslim Madonna: Pakistani Female Singers 1947-Present”.

She is winner of a Fulbright fellowship to Pakistan for AY 2015-16, and on sabbatical leave for this year.

Siren song: Understanding Pakistan through its women singers
The severance of India and Pakistan in 1947 politicized not just religious identities but linguistic identities as well. I would argue that in her book Siren Song: Understanding Pakistan through Its Women Singers, Fawzia Afzal-Khan explores the constitutive elements of the post-independence sense of the nation..

Lahore With Love: Growing Up With Girlfriends Pakistani Style
“A man’s memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become,” says Fawn M. Brodie and nothing describes Fawzia Afzal-Khan’s commendable memoir, Lahore With Love, more aptly.

Shattering the Stereotypes: An Interview with Fawzia Afzal-Khan by Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal
Fawzia Afzal-Khan teaches at Montclair University and is a poet, a playwright, a singer and an actor. She draws on both her academic tenure in the US and her insider’s experience of alternative street theatre groups in Pakistan to develop her critical insight for the secular theatre there