“The Respectable Courtesan: Reading Malka Pukhraj’s Performative Memoir, Song Sung True

• In Event: “Uprising Textualities”: Mobilizing Knowledges, Stories, and Performances, in South Asian Resistant Art.”

Abstract

Malka Pukhraj’s memoir can be read as “an interrogation of the many things” that “ ‘queer’ can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (Sedgwick qtd in Bateman) . Pukhraj thus signifies a persona as a singer and a woman at a particular historical juncture in South Asia which resists a monolithic definition of Muslim/woman/singer/nation, suggestive of a decolonial fluidity.

Presenter

• Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Montclair State University