Asif Iqbal

Biography

Asif Iqbal is the author of Bangladesh in Anglophone and Vernacular Literature: Cultural Imaginings of a Postcolonial Nation (2025) from Routledge. The book, as a study of three historical junctures—the 1947 Partition, the East Pakistan era (1947–1970), and the 1971 War—illuminates Bangladesh’s creation from a comparative framework that includes Anglophone writers, such as, Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, Kamila Shamsie, and Zia Haider Rahman, as well as Bengali writers Shawkat Ali, Akhteruzzaman Elias, Selina Hossain, and Shahidullah Kaiser. The book, therefore, sets Anglophone literatures in dialogue with Bengali critical, historical, and literary texts to recast the framing of South Asian cross-border entanglements and fractures in literary postcolonial studies. Iqbal has also been published in South Asian Review, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Crossings: A Journal of English Studies and in the Routledge volume Transcultural Humanities in South Asia: Critical Essays on Literature and Culture (2022). His forthcoming publications include a critical introduction to the collaborative translations of “Bangali Mussalmaner Mon” ("The Bengali Muslim Mind") authored by the maverick Bangladeshi intellectual Ahmed Sofa, for Horizontal Translation: An Experiment with South Asian Literature (Bloomsbury Academic’s Literatures, Cultures, Translation Series), and an article on Syed Manzurul Islam’s Song of Our Swampland (2011) in the Routledge volume Nation and Narration: South Asian Literature and the Making and Remaking of National Consciousness.