‘In the New Century’: This anthology edited by Muneeza Shamsie maps Pakistan’s literary evolution

Anthologies play a crucial role in consolidating, interpreting, and promoting literary canons, particularly in postcolonial contexts where cultural production has often been fragmented by political upheaval and linguistic hierarchies. In the New Century: An Anthology of Pakistani Literature in English, compiled and edited by writer Muneeza Shamsie, is one of the most ambitious and significant such projects in the landscape of Pakistani Anglophone letters. As a successor to Shamsie’s earlier compilation, A Dragonfly in the Sun, this volume builds upon decades of scholarship and curatorial engagement, situating itself both as a retrospective of a transformative 20-year period (1997-2017) and as an implicit argument about what Pakistani English literature has become, and where it might yet go.

From genesis to canon

The anthology is prefaced by a meticulously researched introduction that traces the growth of Pakistani English literature from its hesitant beginnings to the dynamic field it represents today. The narrative of this development is framed around two seminal figures, Shahid Suhrawardy and Ahmed Ali, whose mid-century efforts set the groundwork for later generations. Yet it was in the 1960s, Shamsie argues, that the literature began to acquire a truly contemporary voice, largely through the innovations of Zulfikar Ghose, who settled in Britain, and Taufiq Rafat, who remained in...

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