Exploring Gender, Language, and National Identities: A Study of Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s Dialogic Imagination in Tum Kabīr

Abstract

This paper examines Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s collection of Urdu poems titled Tum Kabīr as a (meta-)archive that maps the affective, semiotic, and mnemonic landscapes of her dialogic poetic imagination. Through a sustained exploration of the implications of dialogism, it analyzes the interplay among different voices, texts, languages, and competing parts of the self that animate Riyāẓ’s poetic practice, using subjectivity and linguistic innovation as analytical lenses. In doing so, while remaining attentive to intersectional, transversal, and diffractive feminist frameworks, the paper situates her contributions to feminist thought within contemporary feminist engagements with the Bakhtinian idea of the dialogic imagination, particularly its ethical engagement with otherness.