Doing history right: Challenging masculinist postcolonialism in Pakistani anglophone literature

According to Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, a figure based on Paul Klee’s painting of the Angelus Novus, History is not an accident (1942: Thesis IX). Indeed, we must move away from an attachment to what he calls ‘erotic historicism’ – or the impulse to see history through the eyes of mysticism – into the phase of historical materialism, in order to grow up and do history ‘right’. That is, be able to connect present to past and past to present so as to move to a futurity that may be more hopeful than what has gone before. Adding a feminist lens to this Angel of History suggests that one can learn to read/uncover the buried remains in the gaps and fissures of official narratives that constitute History with a capital H – thus giving voice to the marginalised and the forgotten (who are often women, and the dark ‘others’ of History).