Parking Lines: Zarina Hashmi and the Arts of Dispossession

A lecture by Aamir Mufti, associate professor of comparative literature at University of California, Los Angeles.
Aamir Mufti pursued his doctoral studies in literature at Columbia University under the supervision of Edward Said. He was also trained in Anthropology at Columbia and the London School of Economics, and his research and teaching reflect this disciplinary range. 
His areas of specialization include: colonial and postcolonial literatures, with a primary focus on India and Britain, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Urdu literature in particular; Marxism and aesthetics; Frankfurt School critical theory; minority cultures;  exile and displacement; refugees and the right to asylum; modernism and fascism; language conflicts; global English and the vernaculars; and the history of Anthropology. His most recent contribution to the study of secularism is a book,  Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton University Press). Current work includes two book projects—one concerning exile and criticism and the other, the colonial reinvention of Islamic traditions. He edited “Critical Secularism,” a special issue of the journal boundary 2 and has also co-edited Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (University of Minnesota Press). His work has appeared in such periodicals as Social Text, Critical Inquiry, Subaltern Studies, boundary 2, the Journal of Palestine Studies, Theory and Event, and the Village Voice.