 Thank you very much for inviting me and thank you everyone for coming to listen. I'm very excited to be here also because my research has always been very interdisciplinary but I don't find a lot of opportunities to talk to different audiences. So today I'm excited to be able to talk to you and I'm also looking forward to your comments and your questions in the tutorial and I hope that this will be something that will be useful for my research as well. So our lecture is entitled, Diasporic Literature Between Adaptation and Resistance, Kamila Shamsi's Home Fire. In my research I have come to think more and more about the relationship between adaptation and resistance especially in related to postcolonial literature and diaspora literature, not as a tension between a need to adapt and the necessity to resist but more and more as a dialectic that is formative on both sides. So actually in this title there is a bit of a pun, a word play on the word adaptation because whenever we think of diaspora we think of the need to adapt to conform which is in tension with another need to resist, to have a claim to be who you are, to have a claim on your identity. However in literature adaptation is not necessarily equal to conform to adapt to a situation but it goes hand in hand with resistance because it can be and I hope to show in this lecture that adaptation itself can be and is for many writers today or many theater people today a form of resistance itself. Sorry. So Home Fire as I also wrote in the blurb and you have read it is a contemporary retelling, a contemporary version of Sophocles' strategy from 442 BCE from the perspective of British Muslims in a post-911 world and in relation to UK's anti-terror laws especially denaturalization which is in this novel revoking of British citizenship particularly when an individual joins ISIS. I wanted to remind a little bit of Sophocles' Antigone and Antigone is the daughter of notorious edipus who has been haunting modernity as well not only antiquity but also modernity as well. So as you see edipus had four children and after he died somehow cursing his sons the sons were engaged in a battle for power. Etiocles at the time of the battle was the king of Thebes various Polynesians had a similar claim on the city so he joined forces with Argos and he attacked Thebes. At the end of this war which resembles very much our understanding of a civil war today the sons of Edipus, Etiocles and Polynesians killed one another and Creon their uncle became the new king and he published an edict saying that Etiocles as king will be given a what we would today might call a state funeral with full honors whereas Polynesians is a traitor and his body will be left to rot in front outside the city walls so he wouldn't be admitted into inside the city walls and he would not not only be admitted into the city but also he would be refused burial. So as you can see it's very easy to draw a parallelism between Polynesians and all the people who are accused with charges of being enemies of the state today. So that's why in the epigraph of Shamski's novel there is an allusion to Shimasini's version of Antigone called a burial at Thebes where he says the ones we love are enemies of the state so this is where we start from in home fire as well but what happened after this proclamation was that Antigone one of the sisters decided to bury her brother did not obey the edict and symbolically performed funeral rites on the body and he was punished by Creon to be buried alive in a cave tomb where she could await her death. However he was confronted by this wise blind seer Tiresias and then in the very end he tried to evade the dire consequences of his decision by giving the body burial and releasing Antigone but he's too late and not only has Antigone committed suicide in the world but also his very son and Antigone's fiance Heyman has committed suicide next to her and upon hearing her son's death Eurydice his wife has also committed suicide so what he is left with Creon in the end is he's left shattered all alone having most all his family so Camilla Shemsey was proposed by a theater director in London Jatin Darvarma to adapt Antigone to talk about the plight of British Muslims in the UK today and she could immediately see the residents and the play talked to her immediately but she thought that she could only do it in the novel form because she is a novelist so she changed plans and she changed the medium of expression from a play into the novel and she also asked herself some questions in reworking the tragedy so the first one is thought like okay we can't have this today you can't leave a body let's say outside London even only for hygiene purposes but what would be the contemporary equivalent of prohibiting a burial and then in thinking about the recent political developments she said like what does this mean it means to say in life or in death you have no claim over this land and then she could see the residents with the home home office decision of revoking citizenships of dual nationals or naturalized citizens when they act against the interests of the United Kingdom and without a public hearing so these people cannot even defend themselves and so to be to be banished in life or in death and secondly she asked the question as a diaspora writer herself as an immigrant in the UK who had recently got her citizenship and was feeling more at ease like she was maybe for a very long time for the first time she was feeling secure and then in the news there is this decision that you know okay you're a citizen but we have the right we preserve the right to revoke your citizenship anytime so there is this double tiered idea of citizenship where some people are citizens forever but for some people they will always feel vulnerable at some point it will always be contingent upon other things so what she did is that she asked herself a question she said like in all the countries that I have lived there has been there has been a time when we could evade unwanted consequences but something happened or something didn't happen we kept silent we didn't act when we had to act and things really got out of hand so how do we come to that moment when the consequences will be inevitable what do we do or not do and keep silent so that we can no longer evade unwanted consequences so the example of Creole wanting to stop the tragedy from coming in the very last minute but he's too late was a good example to think this pivotal moment in history that Shanxi felt herself and like all of us in in that moment when this alleged war on terror turned against the country's own citizens and how did she do it eventually in terms of the plot structure so the novel centers around the tragedy of a second generation Pakistani Muslim family and their children particularly their children so there are twins 19 year old and he can pervade the twins are raised by their elder sister Isma when their mother and grandmother died the father was always an absentee father who was a jihadist and eventually he was killed on on his way from he was he was in a prison and background of Afghanistan and he was killed on the way to Guantanamo and nobody knows exactly how and recently the brother Parvez has joined ISIS in Syria so in the background what Shanxi did to the story of Antigone is that in Antigone you have this story of incest and related to incest you have a very strong feeling of shame in the background so what Shanxi did is she took this sentiment of shame but she didn't repeat the pattern of incest because she found she found it perhaps a little bit at odds or maybe a bit outdated concerning her own point of emphasis in the novel so she replaced it with the story of jihad who provides the family with a father who they are ashamed to tell the story of so you still have this sentiment of shame but in a very very contemporary politicized way the novel uses free indirect discourse which is sometimes confused with stream of consciousness technique in which you just like jump into the minds of the speakers and you follow their patterns of thought free indirect discourse is kind of different you have the perspective of one character you have the character as a focalizer to your narrative but you are not actually inside you do not have full access to the interiority of the individual but you have some form of access to the perspective of the individual so for example when a comment is made you know that this comment is not like the writers or the narrator's comment but this comment comes from the character that has that is being focalized at that moment so we have five characters and the narrative switches between their perspectives the first and these characters all correspond to a character in Sophocles he's Antigone as well so Isma is like Ismini the sister with the common sense but here she is the elder sister not the younger sister and after looking after and raising her siblings she now decides at the opening of the story she has taken the decision to live her own life so she is leaving for a PhD in sociology in Massachusetts US but she is stopped for interrogation at the airport in at Heathrow so on page one immediately we are in a very politicized environment and the interrogation starts with like very strong racial profiling and she is scared she is anxious she doesn't know if she will be allowed to board a plane she knows that she is going to miss her plane but she is not even sure if she will be eventually able to go so from page one we are introduced into the anxiety the second generation immigrant feels because she belongs to a muslim culture and how events outside her have an effect on her immediate daily experience as well and after she goes to the US she meets Ayman where she is a bit in love with it but then things doesn't work out but she knows she knows Ayman because his father is a Pakistani British politician who is a bit notorious in Wembley and he his family is also from Wembley and that's where they know him but they think that by assimilating into the mainstream British culture and he has somehow betrayed his own heritage his own roots for the sake of conforming and has put them all in a vulnerable position by not signing with them so Isma is a bit reluctant in her relationship with Ayman which is exacerbated when his father Karamat Lone is appointed as Britain's first home secretary from a Pakistani origin and then we also get to understand that the reason of the interrogation and also the reason of a big sadness in the family was Parvez's recruitment by Isis and Anika is trying to bring him back safely home and to save her twin eventually but Ayman returns to the UK only to meet Anika who is a law student and they start a relationship together only to find out in the end that Anika approached him with the hope of being able to help her sister sorry her brother because his father is the home secretary but their relationship has reached such a point that they are now literally in love and this love has turned into something much stronger than she has anticipated but Ayman is shocked to find out about this and at that moment the narrative switches to Parvez and we find out how he has been also kind of like infatuated by the recruiter from Isis kind of like a father figure that he has never had and he is he is kind of duped into a promise of a new country where there will be no discrimination no racial profiling where he can where he can be himself and in spite of all the media coverage on the headings and the violence and everything he wants he probably wants to believe and lives for Syria but he's like very immediately disillusioned tries to escape manages to escape as far as to Istanbul and he wants to reach the British jealousy in Istanbul and claim a passport for himself and at that moment the narrative switches to Anika and her grief because Parvez is killed in Istanbul while trying to reach the British embassy however Anika's part is really really very short and like cut in between by other forms of media like newspaper coverage social media and things like other forms of narrative somehow resembling the chorus in ancient tragedy and then we switch to Koramat who has revoked Parvez's citizenship and refuses the repatriation of his body and claims that because he is a dual national with Pakistan that his body should be buried there upon hearing this Anika is really indignant she immediately travels to Karachi to start a protest next to her brother's dead body in front of the British deputy high commission in Karachi and in the end just like Creon, Koramat is confronted not by a blind seer but Terry who is halfway between Tiresias and Eurydice the wife and Creon's wife in the tragedy who tells him to set things right so he makes up his mind but again only too late Amon turns up in Karachi to support Anika but he is trapped by a man who locks the suicide vest around him Anika runs towards Amon and the Noel ends in the moment when there is this anticipation that the suicide vest will blow up but the lovers just are locked in an embrace and the narrative ends leaving the rest up to our imagination now I want to switch to this politics of adaptation of like adapting Antigone so I wanted to start with a definition of adaptation and I find Linda Hutchins work a theory of adaptation very useful in that sense so very very briefly she describes adaptation as an openly acknowledged and extended reworkings of particular other texts and just like Benjamin said storytelling is always if storytelling is always the art of repeating stories adaptations are also about how stories travel they have this palimpsestuous quality about them there is always this idea of the former text kind of haunting the newer historically newer texts but there's also this intertextuality between them this this two-sided relationship that not only goes from like this originary text to the new text but also backwards informing like for example in this instance informing our reading of Sophoclesy's Antigone as well so forever changing both so I think this idea of plurality of texts this intertextuality brings about a non-hierarchical quality and Hutchins also says that in adaptations there's always a creative and interpretive act of appropriation and salvaging so I when I think of adaptation I generally set it aside from appropriation because appropriation kind of has this idea of this originary text that is somehow more privileged hierarchically that informs on the on the adaptation and also it is somehow forced to conform to new rules so I think it is very restrictive in both the adapted text and the adaptation itself but the salvaging quality that says at play in adaptation I think what happens especially in adaptations that have a political agenda also adaptation can be in any direction it can involve a change of medium or genre like in this example we have an adaptation from an ancient tragedy to a novel or even a change of context from antiquity to modern and also like parodies are also some are also forms of adaptation and much has been written on postcolonial adaptations of Greek tragedies which I think Shemsey's novel is one of them and these postcolonial most what I realize as in my research is that like most of these postcolonial adaptations are also diaspora works of diaspora literature and playwrights and authors rework Greek tragedies to to comment on their own political presence because they find a political relevance with their own contexts and the the first question that emerges when somebody writes an adaptation from a postcolonial perspective is why do you adapt a canonical tragedy especially from the western canon so the question is can adaptations decolonize the classics can adapting classics be a subversive action itself or or is it like order of lords famous question will the master's tool ever dismantle the master's house can you with a work from the western canon ever ever serve a revolutionary act or something so the first question is the western canon but what happens is that postcolonial writers generally do not see great tragedies as western as parts of western canon so postcolonial writers who adapt great tragedies scrutinize and counter the eurocentrism at play in the west's appropriation of ancient Greece as their own cultural property but the western canon itself is is a quite recent invention but it's also a carnivore that will appropriate anything that serves itself image so today when we say the western canon we not only find the great Greek classics but also Russian novels or women writers who hadn't been canonized before much of postcolonial literature etc so we we can expand these examples and also that the western tradition somehow canonized Greek tragedies does not mean that they cannot have resonances outside the west indeed in the colonized world they were even like during the colonial education system they were somehow seen from free from colonial stigma because of their somehow like strange un-Englishness and many many theater theater practitioners preferred Greek tragedies over British tragedies like for example they wouldn't adapt Shakespeare because they saw well of course there are many many exceptions to this but especially in Africa there was this idea of rejection of British literature but somehow Greek tragedies because of their because of this feeling of un-Englishness were somehow seen as a exception and also even though they were part of the colonial curricula they were not they were not equated with works of British literature likewise Camilla Shemsey says I don't think Antigone is part of the western canon and to support her argument she says you know this myth has traveled to India long before the British Empire during the time of the in the Greek kingdoms but I even if it didn't travel I think this questioning of the western canon is in itself like the decolonizing Greek tragedy like a decolonizing Greek tragedy movement is is an important aspect of many post-colonial adaptations so another work I find very useful is the politics of adaptation contemporary African drama and Greek tragedy by Astrid van Weyenberg so I tried to summarize what are the possible politics at plain adaptation so in this work van Weyenberg does not try to determine the politics of adaptation but she talks about possible politics that might be at at work so she says okay writers turn to Greek tragedy to comment on the political present and by offering Greek tragedy as theirs they also undermine Eurocentric claims to ownership and authority and also adaptation is not a historically linear and unidirectional relationship in which the pretext remains an authoritative source that somehow oppresses the new text but we we can think of it we can think of all these texts as constellations in which different texts context and traditions relate to one another non-hierarchically and simultaneously and Greek tragedy has been part of the colonial education's colonial curricula and in the past it was used to legitimize British dominance that's true but this also means that these works are not external to these author's cultures but that have but they have been part of their education and hence they are part of their own culture as well one theory about adapting canonical works is the idea of canonical counter discourse coined by Helen Tiffin to refer to adaptations as primarily as ways of writing back to the empire as anti-colonial strategies and dismantling Eurocentric literary hegemonies so how does the canonical counter discourse work so by rewriting the characters the narrative the context and or the genre of the canonical script it provides the author with another means of interrogating the cultural legacy of imperialism and offers renewed opportunities for performative invention these are not however so this is also what shem sivas in a way these are not however strategies of replacement there is no attempt to merely substitute a canonical text with its oppositional reworking counter discourse seeks to this deconstruct significations of authority and power exercised in the canonical text to release its stranglehold on representation and by implication to intervene in social conditioning i also think that by rewriting Antigone Shemsi is is also engaged in a similar gesture so by uh so she is also countering any uh any interpretation which kind of like for example Antigone has been a work taken up with taken up by philosophers like Hegel and in psychoanalysis by Lacan but she's generally seen as an ethical agent and for example in Hegel's reading kind of puts equal emphasis on the figures of Antigone and Creole and sees them as equally valid parts of an argument like according to Hegel Creole is right but Antigone is also right and there is this clash between them however in these immediately politic politicized adaptations you don't have the same dynamic so they they immediately like the way Shemsi does they immediately shift the center of gravity within the text itself to scrutinize the forms of power that throughout like the western traditional thought has been legitimized in a way however Astrid von Weyenberg is critical of this idea of the canonical counter discourse because she says the idea of writing back to the canon could end up reaffirming the canon's original location in the west and it kind of makes uh these so she's writing about theater plays she says it makes these plays uh look like their primary function is uh decolonization but there's so much more to it. So how does Shemsi adapt Antigone? So my simple answer would be strategically I think she does it quite strategically and she's also even though she thinks and I agree with her that Antigone is not part and parcel of what is defined as western canon but still she uses she uses the legitimation acceptability and the historical validity of uh being part of a canon of canonical traditions adaptation by providing an accepted form helps carve out an epistemic space for suppressed narratives so taking out the established plot structure of a classical tragedy to hold out as a parable to a contemporary problem is I think what she does here so she she uses Antigone as a parable to scrutinize what it means to be a citizen and to belong in the UK today and by doing this she immediately changes the rule of the game as I said by shifting the center of gravity within the text so she is not just updating or modernizing Antigone but she is definitely changing the central conflict or problematic at the heart of the tragedy so instead of the simple burial issue we now have another question that is equally relevant here it is this question that she asked and I read before how do we come to that moment when the consequences will be inevitable so this adaptation for white shemsi with a tool for resistance in the discursive field so to go back to the politics of the novel the starting point is Theresa May's sentence citizenship is a privilege not a right so in the novel there is a Pakistani Muslim home secretary Karamat Lon as like he is a Tory politician and the novel was published in 2017 and it was quite in that sense foreshadowing the appointment of Sajid Javed in 2019 who revoked a lot of citizenship we can I can show you the chart that shows that they the radical increase and the number of revocations between 2016 to 2017 and by the time of Javed's appointment the numbers were much much higher and also I'm sure you have talked about this a lot during during the semester but he has also revoked Shamima Begum's citizenship and as you know so I have put three recent news articles here so the one about Begum I found it well I could spend another hour talking about this news in the telegraph because it it says exclusive pictures Shamima Begum seen in western clothes as she as she seeks break with IS past so we could spend a lot of time talking about this but I have to stick with Shamsi but I have to say that she has been a source of inspiration for her novel and she has actually written about her in The Guardian as well another recent news was the UK considering sending not only the people the people whose citizenship status they have revoked away in their neocolonies but also asylum seekers abroad to be processed just like they are sending their unwanted plastic outside the UK and Europe so it's I think it kind of it kind of corresponds to an idea of a very disturbing actually idea of a human waste and an understanding of somehow what I might call neocolonial dumping so in the novel it finds expression in two times when Karamat as he is drinking his coffee from a paper cup he sends the paper cup flying in the direction of the rubbish bin it hits the rim bounces up plummeted into the receptacle and then he thought take out the trash keep Britain clean so it's it's really significant because at this moment he's thinking of the revoking of citizenship so at that moment he immediately associates the process with keeping Britain clean and then Anika's cousin accuses Anika of creating a scene in Pakistan and then at that moment he says and then your government thinks this country can be a dumping ground for its unwanted corpses so when citizenship becomes a privilege instead of a basic human right it creates a human waste to be transported to neocolonies I said and this starts from its former colonies and extends to what they call poorer countries or developing countries or whatever euphemism they like and for example Turkey my country of origin has all has already been serving as a limbo for asylum seekers today and I cannot imagine how worse this condition could get so now I want to move on to diasporic themes in home fire who might be more of an interest for you and this discussion around citizenship opens up the question of belonging that we see a lot in diaspora literature so there's a lot of border crossing it starts in Heathrow airport goes to Massachusetts U.S. then back to London then from London to Istanbul and Raqqa and back to Istanbul back to London and then to Karachi and all the characters are second or third generation immigrants almost all of them come from British Pakistani origin except Aiman who has a father who is a British Muslim but also a mother who is an Irish American so what is home in home fire it's not just the central theme but it's a central problem the photo you see in the slide well the illustration that you see in the slide is from the time of the world war one and the name home fire comes from the song keep the home fires burning during world war one referring to the role of women to make sure that the homes stay where they are in working conditions so that when their men return they find that they are welcome back in their homes so this is quite ironic because in Shemsey's novel we do not have this instead we have a home which is on fire that's historically ablaze burning down on the way to being extinct the the woman in the family can no longer wait for their men when they go abroad to fight their jihadist wars and it's also ironic that the novel opens with the theme of a loss of home so as I said the novel opens with the loss of home Isma going to the US letting out the family home to be able to pay the mortgage and the twins are kicked outside basically and they have to stay with their neighbor and even though their neighbor Antinousine is very welcoming it's still not the way like it feels in their own homes but there is no way that they can they can financially sustain their new home so for finance it starts with financial reasons their loss of home and then the questions that arise from this idea of a loss of home that is also very characteristic of diaspora novels is that where do these characters belong where is home do they have a place of origin to which their character are they as karamat loan claims actually Pakistani a country where they have never even visited in their lives and they just happen to have an identity card and culturally speaking they have no idea they have no feeling of belonging or another question can they relocate in a new home in somewhere new like his mother's so this this idea of belonging related to citizenship status also raises the question of Britishness in the novel Isma is asked do you consider yourself British in the interrogation she says I am British but do you consider yourself British so she doesn't know how to reply this question without sounding evasive and Shamsi says you know it's about how some people are unequivocally and irrevocably British no matter what they do while for others it's more complicated so Isma is a very clever girl and in in class the way she responds to Dr Shah also talks about how how these new laws of revoking people's citizenship also rhetorically make people un-British so she draws attention to the epistemic violence that has created first of all rhetorically so she says the 77 terrorists were never described by the media as British terrorists so they were either British of Pakistani descent British Muslim or my favorite British passport holders always something interposed between their Britishness and terrorism like was Karamat Karamat law in a public speech invites British Muslims to assimilate into the mainstream culture you are we are British he says don't set yourselves apart in the way you dress the way you think the outdated codes of behavior you cling to the ideologies to which you attack your loyalties because if you do you will be treated differently so he says assimilate conform because we because he would say probably we because there is no space for your difference so actually the moment I saw Shamima Begum's photo in her quote-unquote western attire which is basically a jumper nothing else a t-shirt and a jumper I immediately thought of this speech by Karamat law but here we do not have the usual diasporic theme of a return to a previous home or the fantasy of a return to somewhere and even though it says there is a search for a home it's central to the novel the narrative is totally de-centered there is no return home so in this sense I think James Clifford's ideas in the diasporas are quite relevant then he says that for for Asian immigrants it's not generally shaped by the idea of a return back somewhere but it's more de-centered it's more about creating diverse communities wherever they are so Clifford says the transnational connections linking diasporas need not be articulated primarily through a real or symbolic homeland de-centered lateral connections maybe as important as those formed around the teleology of origin or return as a shared ongoing history of displacement suffering adaptational resistance maybe as important as the projection of a specific origin so this is I think what we have here but in a home fire we also see the characters especially the sisters insistence on their difference and claim to a right to a home I could talk more about this but I don't want to miss out on other parts so I'm moving on so this search for a home and disillusionment I said is central but where do they belong my own answer to this question is that they maybe they belong in the UK but their loyalties do their loyalties are not devoted to even a country I think I think it lies more in in smaller places so instead of a country not even a city I think it's like they're very family home on Preston road Wembley in the north of London so it's that particular I think loyalty lies in smaller scale in home fire it lies in the family it lies in the memory it lies in the individual it lies in the body but they look for a home so Isma tries to start a new life in the US but she cannot even afford a home that she would like to have and the home that she finds only reminds her of the surveillance that she went through in the airport Parvez tries to find a new country so he is duped by the promise some something like a promised land but he's totally disillusioned immediately there is Antinas himself but you're just a guest there you don't belong it's temporary and Anika looks for a home in the in the person of Ayman and his Nottingham flat similarly Ayman looks for a home in Anika and the cult the cultural heritage that he is being denied by his father but they they they are also denied to realize this potential because of the unfolding events the loan the Karamat loans family home is the only home in the novel perhaps but this is also after the appointment after his appointment as a home secretary he is also losing his home there is increased security there is a panic room the trees are being cut for for security reasons and I think Karamat loans home in home fire is is very much a metaphor for the country after all he's the home secretary and his home is like a is like a projection of the country's state for the sake of increased security what the country at that moment is giving up is just like the loan family to giving up their feeling of their feeling of belonging their their homey feeling their feeling of maybe not state security but their feeling of being safe in their own skin so I think the Kamila Shamsi is also critical of the way the country for claims to security is made to feel more unsafe at that time as opposed to all these places there are also a lot of non places which are also characteristic of diaspora narratives you have airports you have interrogation room you have for example istanbul is as a transition point and not as a local in itself the british consulate in istanbul or the high high commission in karachi these are like idealized places like a country that you cannot reach that is supposed to be there but you cannot enter it is like there is always a denial at work so I talked about epistemic uh violence and this this is also referred as in theory epistemic injustice and this epistemic violence and this epistemic injustice call for uh epistemic resistance so why can't there be any reconciliation with the home on fire why can there be no return to the press and road home why cannot things work out I think home fire tells us that the injustice the characters are facing here are largely initiated by uh discursively by a system that denies their authentic existence as themselves there is this uh part of racism that there's no that gives no discursive space for their own experience of britishness that also James Kulifar talks about a different experience of britishness but there is no space within the boundaries of the novel and they are only asked to conform and assimilate and there is this team of cruelty which anika calls unforgiving that it doesn't only reject parvays as a so-called terrorist but also if this the system stigmatizes the whole family and muslim community at large and nobody nobody feels safe their narratives are suppressed and they feel like second class citizens and this placement becomes the outcome of resistance to such violence so gayatri spiewak was the first person I think to talk about this aspect of imperialism epistemic violence as she said like you know in her very very famous candy subaltern speak it was not it was she says never a problem of if they could speak the problem is who would listen and more recently madafrikar wrote about epistemic injustice in uh injustice this is uh that is distinctively epistemic consisting in a wrong don't done to someone specifically in their capacity as a novel so testimonial injustice refers for example when uh when is my isn't the interrogation room and asked does this jacket belong to you meaning did you steal it so her her testimony is um is not given credibility because of who she is and secondly there is hermeneutical injustice when the interpretive resources of the society make it make that person more vulnerable to injustice it's like for example when you suffer sexual harassment in a culture that still lacks the conceptualization of the crime so in as I said in home fire there are many many instances or when like uh when parviz was trying to escape isis and to go into the british consulate the press still presented him as a potential attacker even though it was known that he was running away or just because she was having a relationship with a man and it has whole testimony and grief suffers from a credibility deficit and when she like in the middle of her grief with her brother's dead body in front of the british high commission in karachi the home secretary watches her from his screen and he thinks she's trying to impress the world he refuses to acknowledge her grief so hoza medina also writes about the epistemology of injustice and resistance and he says epistemic injustices call for epistemic resistance so finally I propose to read home fire itself as an act of epistemic resistance by refusing to conform to the discourse imposed by the state and insisting on preserving their own difference and ikan isma in their own ways I think perform acts of epistemic resistance and this is also a modern take on antigeny speech acts so what what antigeny does in populacy's tragedy she cannot she does not like literally bury her brother but she symbolically buries her brother by pouring some dust on the body and you know in ancient griefs pouring libations uh as part of the funeral practices but then what what more she does is uh judith butler writes at length about this in antigeny's claim is that when she is addressing crayon the king she says sorry crayon says do you accept or deny that you did it and she says i don't deny anything so for butler antigeny's resistance and antigeny's rebellion primarily lies in her speech acts so she discursively fights back crayon so i think in home fire the alternative discursive space opened up by anika and isma is a similar instance but even though just like antigeny anika rejects her sister's help here i think uh there is they are more united in spirit as uh as isma prepares to leave in support of her sister just to be on her side but more than what happens inside the novel i think this novel itself is a is an act of epistemic resistance and the adaptation itself makes space for it so by adapting antigeny to make space for the silenced narratives of british muslims in a post-911 western world shamsi's novel performs an act of epistemic resistance so the politics of resistance offered by the adaptation of classical tragedy is by rewriting antigeny shamsi singles out the dynamics of rebellion within an oppressive system and she also shows that this has a history as far back as 2500 years and here the ethical the novel also shows that the ethical is political as distinctive from philosophical interpretations of the tragedy that i told you about which read antigeny from an ethical point of view so for hagel she's the ethical agent for lacan she is um the she symbolizes the ethics of psychoanalysis but here this is immediately political adapted from a postcolonial perspective in the diaspora this adaptation shows how the ethical is conditioned by the political which constitutes the act of epistemic resistance also miranda fricker writes that uh epistemic injustice even though it's in the field of ethics is always immediately political by nature so i want to stop here thank you very much for listening to me ekin thank you very much for this incredibly inspiring lecture which i think has helped us to really as a last lecture of the term to rethink so many of the topics we dealt with from a new perspective from a perspective that brought together philosophy literature theater diasporic scholarship so it was incredibly inspiring incredibly rich uh eye opening and i think that whoever hasn't read home fire probably will immediately go and buy the book and read it uh and who people have read it like myself have found so much food for thought in your lecture to rethink the value and the powerfulness and the potential uh the unsettling potential of the of this incredible novel and of the author so really i cannot thank you enough um and i think i am interpreting the um the students feelings about this as well and really thank you again and see you later at the tutorial at four o'clock i would also say i would also like to say thank you to all i'm also reading the comments in the chat box thank you very much for listening to me and good luck with your phd as well thanks