Author: Fawzia Afzal-Khan

Im a postcolonial cultural studies/performance studies transnational feminist scholar. I grew up in Lahore, Pakistan, spent some childhood and adolescent years in different parts of Africa, did my Phd in English literature at Tufts university, and have been a tenured full professor at Montclair State University in NJ for over 2 decades where I also served two terms as the Director of the Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies Program. I have taught as Visiting Professor of the Arts at NYUAD, held Fulbright fellowships in my native Pakistan, have been a WEB Dubois scholar at Harvard and currently a Visiting Professor in the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Princeton. My latest monograph is Siren Song: Understanding Pakistan Through its Women Singers (OUP 2020), which is based off a short award-winning documentary film of the same title I made with the help of an NEH grant in their Building Bridges Through Film funding category.
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Prompts for Blogposts

Prompts for Blogposts: Empire of Spies

 

(Adapted from Anna Kornbluh, Northwestern U)

 

CONNECTIONS to pursue in your Blogposts:

one -two pages of casual writing (min 300, max 600 words) responding to one of the following prompts (a different one of your choice for each unit)

 

The goal of the reflections is to have ideas; the writing need not be fully polished

 

  • Describe something you learned from class discussions in this unit that you didn’t know just from doing the assigned readings.

 

  • Connect something you learned in class through readings/discussions in the unit you are writing about, to something you are learning in another of your classes this semester.

 

  • Compare assigned readings from two different texts by same author we read/discussed in a unit, or between two authors from two different units; make connections between the two.  Do they share themes?  Forms?  Tone?  Historical context?  Do you find them equally interesting?

 

 

  • Look back at the very first paragraph of a text we read by one of the writers under discussion, and discuss how the opening lays the groundwork for the rest of the work/other writings by same author.  Quote specific lines, phrases, or images to back up your claims.

 

  • What are some sentences you found interesting in this unit’s readings?  What made you notice these?  What do you notice in the passages/sections from to which these sentences belong?

 

 

  • Using quotes from this unit’s texts, persuade someone (friend or foe, your grandma or your senator) to change their mind about something important.

 

  • Compose a five song playlist to accompany an assigned reading from this unit, and write a few sentences for each song, explaining your choices and their connection to the reading/s.

 

 

  • Describe an idea you had in response to the readings/discussions for our class – any idea, about literature, the writer/s under discussion, or the world, or yourself.  How might you pursue this idea, in your studies or elsewhere?  Could this idea be a new direction in life? How might it become the basis for a new public policy or public mindset?

 

  • Choose a passage (no more than 10 lines) from one of the readings this unit and rewrite it, changing at least one of the literary aspects such as: person (change from first to third-person or vice versa), tense (change from past to present etc), focalizing character (i.e. write it from a different character’s perspective), style (adjectives, diction, description, tone). Then write a paragraph or two about the effect of your changes (on you, possibly on other readers).

 

 

  • Compose a yelp review to strangers, or a letter to a specific person, or a tiktok style video, recommending a text (film/video/short story/travelogue from this unit’s reading.

 

  • Find an image – a painting, a photograph, a graphic drawing – something that already exists because a human made it – that would make a good illustration for this unit’s readings.  Explain why you think that.

 

  • If you could assign this unit’s reading to anyone – your professor of another class, your lover, your boss, aliens from another planet, the president of another country – who would it be and how would they benefit from it? (you don’t have to discuss all of the assignments—pick and choose!)

 

  • You go on vacation with one character from a text on our syllabus (could be one of our “spies”! Or someone they write about or film representation of them).  Who is the character, what do you two have in common (or how do you differ), where do you travel, is it enjoyable?  Refer to the text (s) you choose for evidence in explaining your trip.

 

 

  • Is there an idea or image or line from our readings that has stuck with you for more than the week or unit when it was discussed?  What are you continuing to think about it?  Why do you think it has had this effect?

 

 

  • Final Connection Blog Entry: (extra credit)

 

Read over your entire portfolio of blogposts and describe the progress you have made in thinking and writing about the material assigned in the class.  If you opted to co-write 2 or more reflections, be sure to consider that process too.  What are some of your favorite ideas you’ve had in this class?  What would you like to know more about?