Books
The Wor(l)d in Question: Essays in Political Economy and Cultural Politics (Dhaka: Samhati Publications, 2008).
What kind of world do we live in? What does the world of money and markets offer us in the twenty-first century? Can media, like money and Vodka, do crazy things? How do power and knowledge operate in our world? Whose power? Whose knowledge? Do we need to change our world? If yes, what kind of theory and practice—and praxis—do we need?
Global in scope, interdisciplinary in character, and theoretically engaged, Azfar Hussain's The Wor(l)d in Question asks and addresses the above questions, among many others. The book thus makes provocative, challenging, and radically significant interventions in the fields of political economy and cultural studies. Taking issue with certain 'post-al' (postmodernist-poststructuralist-postmarxist-postcolonial) theories--while also confronting and contesting liberal myths and ideas about theory and practice--The Wor(l)d in Question seeks to stretch the borders and boundaries of both Marxist political economy and contemporary cultural studies.
Azfar Hussain stretches and even crosses those borders and boundaries in order to orchestrate certain links among the theoretical, the historical, and the political in the interest of radical social change. His book also seeks and forges new and necessary links between class struggle and other forms of struggle in the new millennium. For making such links, then, Hussain evolves and mobilizes a cluster of new concepts and categories, while accentuating the need for a new vocabulary of both political economy and cultural studies.
Enacting a productive dialectic between political economy and culture, The Wor(l)d in Question—in its several essays—advances at least three major arguments. First, we cannot make sense of our world if we fail to understand how macrostructures of production relations and power relations such as capitalism, imperialism, racism, and patriarchy function today and how they have been profoundly interlinked way more than before. Second, in a world characterized by those macrostructures of production relations and power relations, land, labor, language, and the body constitute four fundamental and interconnected material sites of both oppression and opposition—sites of class struggle and other forms of struggles. Third, any emancipatory theory and practice cannot bypass those four sites of struggle, while emancipation itself comes to mean the total liberation of the land, labor, language, and the body of the global oppressed. To advance such arguments, the book renews certain analytical tools of Marxism, while drawing conceptual resources from the “third-world” radical tradition of engaging praxis from Mao and Fanon and Che, to Jordan and el Saadawi and Freire, to Lorde and Fatema Billah.
Like (4)The Politics of Subjects, Sites, and Scenes: Micronarratives and Other Essays (forthcoming from Samhati Publications, Dhaka)
The book—in its several experimental, mixed-genre pieces—examines and theorizes a whole host of ethnic and ‘third-world’/indigenous literary and cultural productions to fashion an anticolonial hermeneutic of resistance.
Reading About the World (New York: Hartcourt Brace, 1999)
Co-edited with Paul Brians et al, this two-volume reader—meant for undergraduate General Education/Humanities courses—is an anthology of a wide variety of historical and literary writings from ancient and medieval times.
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