Faculty Member, Liberal Studies/Interdisciplinary Studies
College of Interdisciplinary Studies
About
Born in Bangladesh— “the biggest ghetto of the world,” as some political economists put it—Azfar Hussain had grown up in landless peasant and working-class communities before he moved to the capital of Bangladesh to attend his first college and Dhaka University. There he received his B.A. (Honors) as well as his M.A. in English with distinction. He had worked as a magazine editor, as a member of a national-level left activist alliance, and as a university teacher of English before he came to the United States on a Fulbright fellowship to do his M.A. at Washington State University (WSU). He wrote his Master’s thesis on the Italian Marxist-Leninist theorist-activist Antonio Gramsci and earned his second M.A. in English, again with distinction, while he received from WSU his Ph.D. in English. His interdisciplinary dissertation titled “The Point is to (Ex)Change It: Toward a Political Economy of Land, Labor, Language, and the Body” earned him the WSU English Department’s Postdoctoral Blackburn Fellowship in 2003.
Publications
Azfar Hussain has published—in both English and Bengali—nearly a hundred academic, creative, and popular pieces, including translations from five languages such as Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, and Arabic. Interested in theory in the largest sense—while believing that politics, poetics, and praxis need to be organically orchestrated together in the service of radical social change—Hussain has written on a wide range of topics from Native American poetics and politics to critiques of postmodern-poststructuralist-postcolonial theory to Marxist political economy to third-world literatures to “globalization” and imperialism. In addition to editing and guest-editing numerous issues of journals and magazines both in the U.S. and outside it, Hussain has co-edited a two-volume reader called _Reading About the World_ (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999). He is the author of _The World in Question: Essays in Political Economy and Cultural Politics_ (Dhaka: Samhati Publications, 2008) and _The Politics of Subjects, Sites, and Scenes: Micronarratives and Other Essays_ (forthcoming from Samhati, 2009).
Teaching
Azfar Hussain has taught courses in several disciplines, departments, and universities. He has taught at Jahangirnagar University (in Bangladesh), Washington State University, Bowling Green State University, North South University (in Bangladesh), and Oklahoma State University. Currently he teaches liberal studies/interdisciplinary studies at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. He has taught undergraduate courses not only in English and Humanities but also in American Studies, Women’s Studies, and Comparative Ethnic Studies—always with a pedagogical accent on the interplay between the theoretical, the historical, and the political. He has taught courses in writing and rhetoric; comparative mythology; English and American literatures; literary, critical, and cultural theory; the literatures of Asia, Africa, and Latin America; the cultural politics of race and ethnicity; the rhetoric of political economy, and introduction to comparative ethnic studies. Also, he has taught graduate seminars on the discourses of nation and empire; comparative literature; contemporary literary theory; and translation studies.
Research Interests
Azfar Hussain’s current research interests lie in theorizing and examining—with activist agendas in mind—how political economy affects culture and how culture in turn affects political economy at both local and global levels, while his interests also reside in critiquing the commodity fetishism syndromes and U.S. exceptionalism that characterize certain versions of ethnic, literary, and cultural studies today. The other areas of Hussain’s research interests encompass social and spatial engineering; imperialism and globalization-as-globaloney; Arab and South Asian studies; American studies (with a particular focus on Latin America); third-world feminisms; Marxism-Leninism-Maoism; critical theory; American literature (with a particular focus on Native American, African American, Chicano/a, and Asian American literatures); world literature; political ecology; mass movements, and decolonization. Hussain is particularly interested in recuperating and re-reading such neglected “third-world” figures as Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, Begum Rokeya, Jose Marti, Jose Carlos Mariategui, Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, Aime Cesaire, Kwame Nkrumah, and Maurice Bishop—among others—while Hussain continues to react against what he calls “the coffeeshop dialectics” of the pseudo-left and against the empty iconization and T-shirt semiotization of Che Guevara in the U.S.
Contact Information
Department of Liberal Studies/
Interdisciplinary Studies
1 Campus Drive
240 Lake Ontario Hall
Grand Valley State University
Allendale, MI 49401
USA
405-385-1241 (cell)
616-331-8172 (office)
