"An All-weather, All-terrain Fighter": Subaltern Resistance, Survival and Death in Mohammed Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Mirza, M

doi:10.1177/0021989414537287

"An All-weather, All-terrain Fighter": Subaltern Resistance, Survival and Death in Mohammed Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Mirza, M

Authors

Dr Maryam Mirza maryam.mirza@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor

Abstract

Victor Li’s theory of necroidealism draws our attention to the tendency in literary works and writings by Subaltern Studies historians to romanticize the dead subaltern so that in death he or she emerges as an “exemplary, heroic symbol of resistance”. In these works, the “ambiguity of struggle” of the living subaltern contrasts sharply with the idealized heroism of his or her dead counterpart. The eponymous protagonist of Mohammed Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is an untouchable, lower-class Christian woman in contemporary Pakistan who is determined to survive and surpass her subaltern status but dies a brutal death, following which her father makes a case for her canonization. This article is an in-depth analysis of the depiction of Alice’s multifaceted subalternity and the strategies of resistance that she deploys as well as an evaluation of the portrayal of her death to demonstrate that the novel unequivocally rejects an idealization of both subaltern life and death.

Citation

Mirza, M. (2015). "An All-weather, All-terrain Fighter": Subaltern Resistance, Survival and Death in Mohammed Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 50(2), 150-163. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989414537287

Journal Article Type	Article
Online Publication Date	Jul 15, 2014
Publication Date	2015-06
Deposit Date	Oct 24, 2018
Publicly Available Date	Jan 11, 2019
Journal	Journal of Commonwealth Literature
Print ISSN	0021-9894
Electronic ISSN	1741-6442
Publisher	SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	50
Issue	2
Pages	150-163
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989414537287

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Copyright Statement
Mirza, M (2014). 'An all-weather, all-terrain fighter': Subaltern resistance, survival and death in Mohammed Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 50(2): 150–163. Copyright © The Author(s) 2014. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.