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afterword Minorities, Literatures, and Recursive Leaps of Faith We remain strangers, many meetings hence We shall becomes lovers again, how many congregations hence? faiz ahmed faiz, 1971 These lines were authored by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, whose poetry belongs on the same shelf as Bertolt Brecht, Pablo Neruda, and Nazim Hikmet. Faiz’s biography is inscribed with political frontiers and boundaries, which he crossed and altered, transforming himself and his readers in the process. He was born in undivided India in 1910 and chose to stay in what became Pakistan after the partition of the country in 1947. He was a scholar of English, Urdu, Arabic, and Persian literatures, even though his poems were mostly composed in Urdu. In 1971, following the further division of the Indian subcontinent—this time into Bangladesh—Faiz wrote one of his most famous poems,“Dhaka se Vapsi Par”(On Returning from Dhaka), about the atrocities committed by the majority Sunni Muslims on Shia Muslims and Hindus in the early 1970s. The state apparatus of General Yahya Khan, the military leader of Pakistan, orchestrated the massacre and rape of religious minorities not just in the city of Dhaka but in all of East Pakistan, contemporary Bangladesh . Indira Gandhi, the former prime minister of India, privileged the politics of religious difference as she—assisted by the Indian Armed Forces—engineered the new national boundaries of Bangladesh. The drama of postcolonial brutality, appearing first as a tragedy during the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1947, reappeared as a farce, as religious differences were reaccentuated and reinforced and familiarity replaced by hatred and violence. I read the above-cited opening couplet of the poem as a statement on the pathos of divided communities. On behalf of the victimized minorities , Faiz asks the majority—to which he himself belongs—for reasons for the perpetual neglect, suppression, exploitation, and estrangement of minorities. He calls for an end to exclusion, to estrangement, and seeks ★   familiarity. Familiarity through congregation becomes the prerequisite for tolerance, recognition, even acceptance of difference. Faiz’s plea for familiarity and hospitality and his emphasis on the necessity of congregation resonate—albeit differently—in Derrida’s work On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2001). Especially in the section “On Cosmopolitanism” (3–24), Derrida reflects on cosmopolitanism as a concept and strategy to reflect upon questions of home and belonging. Derrida emphasizes “l’être-soi chez soi” (being at home with oneself)— “l’ipsété meme” (the other within oneself, 17)—and elaborates upon the limitations imposed upon the “law of hospitality” that pervert and obstruct the very inclusion of Others into a host society (16f.). Building upon Hannah Arendt’s accounts of “violations of hospitality” (16), Derrida argues for a reconsideration of Immanuel Kant’s famous Definitive Article in View of Perpetual Peace:“the law of cosmopolitanism should be restricted to the conditions of universal hospitality” (19). Derrida reveals the limitation of Kant’s proposition, which stops at the right to hospitality as a “right to visitation” (Besuchsrecht) and not a “right to residence” (Gastrecht, 21). In order for cosmopolitanism to transpire from a utopian principle to ethical practice, for Derrida, hospitality surfaces as the prime prerequisite to counter exclusion (22f.). Questions pertaining to hospitality for immigrants in the host society have been at the center of a number of scholarly debates and discussions for over two decades now. These questions have long been cast in terms of the ethics and politics of multiculturalism, both inside and outside the academic community. Multiculturalism as an academic discipline offered modes to surmise a systematic understanding of a social reality made of numerous linguistic, ethnic, and national frontiers and boundary lines, sharing the lived space of a city or a nation. In the Anglo-American academy, developments in perspectives on sociopolitical recognition of minority ethnic cultures can be credited on the one hand to a number of scholars of Euro-American heritages, who have pursued their critical and interrogative intellectual training as citizens from the tumultuous events in Europe and North America in the 1960s and have persistently put forth daring and stimulating questions. Charles Taylor’s definitive work Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (1994) brought to the fore the necessity of a state-sponsored acknowledgement of cultural, linguistic, and religious differences in a society like Canada. Will Kymlicka’s debatable , albeit provocative, engagement with Multicultural Citizenship (1995) shifted the focus from the politics of recognition to a politics of participation through distinct societal cultures of polyethnic rights,especially in 184...

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