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Item Freedom versus Oppression: The Motif of Veil in Sabyn Javeri’s Hijabistan(UMT Lahore, 2020) Adeeba ManzoorThis research examines Sabyn Javeri’s Hijabistan and contends that the concept of veil is different in Hijabistan. Pakistani society is a male-oriented society and patriarchal values are prevalent. Sabyn Javeri has tried to portray this scenario through her collection of short stories in ‘Hijabistan’. Though Javeri touches the topics of veiling, patriarchy and suppression in Pakistani society, the main focus is circumstances in which the concept of male gaze is positioned. ‘The Laugh of Medusa’ will be used to explicate the text. The research explores the urgency for women to talk about their identities by using the weapon of writing. This research explores the distinction in male and female voices in writing. It talks about the ways in which women are suppressed through veil and their struggles to find their true identities. This research study also paves the way for other women to have their opinions and freedom in all aspects of life. The research study revolves around the ‘veiled identities’ of women who are considered as the ‘insignificant other’. In order to remove all the tags, Cixous and Javeri took a step to talk about the identity of women and gave them a chance to project their suppressed voices through writings. Javeri’s short stories inform the readers that hijab or veiling could be taken by different individuals differently. Sometimes Hijab could be taken as a symbol of oppression but at other times it can be a symbol of freedom. The study argues that Javeri’s veiled female characters are both subjugated by the hijab as well as some of them find a freedom inside this traditional attire which is akin to Cixous’ metaphor used in her seminal text.Item Examining Counter Discursivity in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness(UMT Lahore, 2020) Nabeel Ahmed MinhasThe research intends to examine Arundhati Roy‘s discourse in her novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. It aims to analyze the linguistic significance of the selected text and its role in countering the established social discourses. This study explores how author‘s use of particular words challenges and undermines the existing dominant social structures. It also evaluates how Arundhati Roy uses persuasive language to make the downtrodden sections i.e. transgenders, Dalits, Kashmiris in Indian society to reject marginalization. It is a qualitative research which employs Norman Fairclough‘s Three-Dimensional Model along with the principles of Critical Discourse Analysis. Speech Acts and Persuasive Linguistic Devices will be used to analyze the linguistic significance of the selected excerpts from the text. The analysis of the text reveals that Arundhati Roy‘s unapologetic and powerful language allowed her characters to realize their potential and consider themselves a valuable part of the Indian society.Item Transnationalism and the Paths to Violence: Religious Identities and Displacement in Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways(UMT Lahore, 2020) Muhammad Abis RazaThe aim of this thesis is to qualitatively analyze Fatima Bhutto’s novel The Runaways, published in 2018, in order to study the intricacies of the socio-political and cultural realities that lead many young people from around the world to be indoctrinated by fanatical religious organizations that preach resort to militancy as the ultimate solution to the problems of the world. The study contends that, given the complexities of transnational migrations today, one must be warned against a naïve dismissal of religious fanaticism as a simple regression toward primitive barbarism because the factors responsible for its popularity in the contemporary world include the search for a meaningful life that may or may not have its origin in an urge for spirituality. It will be seen how, as the novel traces the lives of its three protagonists, they find themselves on a rallying platform of a revolutionary Islamist organization, apparently pursuing a common militant end even though the worlds of their experiences are dramatically different from each other’s. The significance of this study lies in the fact that it draws attention to the highly controversial issue of perspectives that variously dub Jihadist ventures as either terrorism or the most dignified attempts of righting the world’s wrongs.Item The Crisis of Identity and Retention of Identity in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows(UMT Lahore, 2020) Rabia ArshadThe Crisis of Identity and Retention of Identity in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows The present study seeks to explore the theme of identity crisis faced by the characters of the contemporary fiction writer Kamila Shamsie’s novel Burnt Shadows and how they struggle hard to retain their earlier identities either cultural or religious. Kamila Shamsie is a Pakistani British writer who herself lives in diaspora and has the first hand experience of the problems of immigrants and people living in diaspora. She portrays the same in her epic novel which covers more than the half century where the characters live through historical incidents and personal events and lose their genuine identities many times but they struggle hard to retain some of the aspects of their identities. This study also sheds light on the post colonial aspect of the novel related to the quest of identity. Question of identity is one of the controversial issues of post colonial world. In the modern world with the increase of immigrant numbers, hybrid nations and countries with different cultural diversities the question of identity came to surface. That is the reason the researcher takes this question to explore in depth by using textual method and applying Stuart Hall’s theory of “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”. Hall very aptly says that identity is the least well-understood concept that is never fixed. It is not a transparent and indisputable. All the characters in the novel keep on changing their identities. They have fluid identities and adapt in their new cultures and situations but keep on struggling consciously to retain their earlier identities too. Hiroko, Sajjad, Raza and Harry James Burton are the main characters who suffer the identity crisis most and try to retain their earlier identities too in the globalised world. KEYWORDS: Postcolonial, Identity, Retention, History, Culture, Displacement, Migration, TerrorismItem A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis of Speech Acts in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Novels(UMT Lahore, 2020) Khunsha Altaf JafriThe study examines how speech acts in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels portray male hegemonic structures in place. The analysis is made by using the conceptual framework of Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) which focuses on how gendered relations of power are reproduced, negotiated and contested in society. In order to apply this approach, I have chosen the novels, Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and Americanah (2013) as the primary texts. The research question designed in this study asks: how the female characters in the selected novels carve out their space despite the dominion of the male hegemonic structures. Various factors like male control, sovereignty and the subjugation of women play a significant part in the preeminence of patriarchal setup presented in the novels. However, the females create an emancipatory space for themselves and make some fruitful efforts such as retaliatory strategies to reverse the cycle of male domination. Speech acts theory has been used for the purpose of analysis in which I have used expressives, imperatives, directives, commissives, emphatics and assertives as the major speech acts. The research aims to find out how these speech acts depict the concept of male hegemony .The theory of FCDA helps in the analysis of the texts and it foregrounds the idea of female characters creating a free space for themselves.Item Creative Nonfiction: The Pursuit of Knowing Oneself(UMT Lahore, 2020) Shahan PervezThis study is a defense of creative nonfiction, also known as the fourth genre. It also promotes creative nonfiction which is a thriving and well known genre in North America and elsewhere, but is virtually unknown in Pakistan. It is argued that creative nonfiction is the pursuit of knowing oneself. Through reading creative nonfiction, true accounts of people’s lives, the reader gets to know himself or herself better. The study investigates how creative nonfiction helps us know ourselves as human beings and as Pakistanis. In order to do this the study analyzes the personal essays of D. H. Lawrence, Phillip Lopate and Salman Rashid, three authors from three different continents: Europe, America, and Asia, through the lens of creative nonfiction. The study uses two methodologies: auto/biography as a research method and creative writing as a research method. This study reveals that creative nonfiction is the pursuit of knowing oneself and it should be given the importance accorded to fiction, drama and poetry. It deserves to be recognized as the fourth genre of English Literature here in Pakistan.Item A comparative acoustic analysis of English vowel nasalization by Urdu and Pashto speakers in Pakistan(UMT Lahore, 2020) Fateh-e-Hina KhalilThe present study investigates the process of English vowel nasalization by speakers of Urdu and Pashto languages. The comparative analysis of English vowel nasalization by both language speakers is carried out. The study adopts an acoustic approach to investigate the issue. Since English, Urdu, and Pashto have different phonemic inventories, phonotactic constraints, and syllabification patterns, it was hypothesized that speakers with Urdu and Pashto as their L1, tend to apply their L1 phonotactic constraints while speaking English. To test the hypothesis, five short and five long vowels were selected. A word list of targeted long and short vowels was prepared for the present study. Selected words were taken both in the oral and nasal contexts. The participants were asked to articulate the word list embedded in a carrier phrase to mitigate the coarticulatory effect. The produced speech sample was recorded and analyzed using the speech processing software PRAAT. The Analysis revealed that traces of nasalization were more evident in the speech of Pashto speakers, both in oral/nasal context, than in the speech of Urdu speakers. It was further revealed that the nasality affected the length of English long and short vowels as spoken by Urdu and Pashto speakers. These effects of nasality were more evident in the case of nasal consonants at the initial position than on the final position of words.Item Human Trafficking and the Subversion of the American Dream: A Study of Transnational Victimhood in Kim Purcell’s Trafficked(UMT Lahore, 2020) Muhammad Muneeb DanialThe aim of this study is to explore the theme of human trafficking in Kim Purcell‟s novel Trafficked (published in 2012) in relation to the betrayal of hopes of economic prosperity. It will be seen how the subversion of these hopes in the course of a transnational journey into horrifying excesses of dehumanization entraps an individual irredeemably in disturbing political, economic and psychological dilemmas. Trafficked (2012) brings into focus the pervasive international problem of human slave labour, especially from poverty-stricken countries like Moldova, Romania and some regions of Russia, lured by dreams of better economic opportunities into a country like the USA. The research aims at showing the deep-rooted links between transnationalism and contemporary practices of slavery at the same time that it fixes a sociological as well as psychoanalytic lens on the plight of the ensuing victims of dehumanization. Hannah, a seventeen-year-old Moldovan, in being transported to Los Angeles, the USA, agonizingly discovers the betrayals of the American Dream through firsthand experience of misery – physical molestation and humiliation, a paranoiac sense of fear and helplessness, as well as debt bondage – that bars her from the basic human rights of deliberation and movement. This parallelism of psychological and social displacements highlights how the protagonist‟s loss of the right to her own name after crossing borders merge together transnational political, economic and social problems into an overwhelming existential threat.Item Fictional Representations of the Indian Subcontinent’s Partition: A Comparative Study of Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan and Gulzar’s Two(UMT Lahore, 2020) Jaweria AhmadThis thesis aims at analyzing two historical novels by famous Indian authors—Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (published in 1956) and Gulzar’s Two (published in 2017)—each dealing with events surrounding the tumultuous Partition of India in 1947, with a view of assessing the processes of oversimplification in fictional narratives that distort or partially misrepresent the historical situations they portray. It is contended that these novelists, while producing historical fiction, which should be seen as a junction of two contrary approaches to truth conditions of discourse, allow their stories to project latent ideological biases through the selectivity of their focus in spite of the fact that they may claim to draw on documented facts. Both the novelists clearly imply the unnecessary or undesirable nature of the Partition through their presentation of a time of idyllic peace between Indian communities before the Partition followed by a senseless and uncalled for wave of savage communal riots. In doing so, the meaning of their narratives is propelled by a complete neglect of all the historical reasons that led a great many politicians to feel the need of the Partition. Because of this, they present a distorted picture of Indian politics by targeting the Partition simply as the cause, rather than the effect, of communal discord among Indian nations.