Spider-Mother: The Fiction and Politics of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein

Pioneering Indian Muslim feminist Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932) wrote speculative science fiction, manifestoes, radical reportage, and incisive essays that transformed her experience of enforced segregation into unique interventions against gender oppression everywhere. Her radical imagination links the realities of living in a British colony to the technological and scientific breakthroughs of her time, the effects of hauntingly pervasive systems of sexual domination, and collective dreams of the future, forging a visionary, experimental body of work. If her contemporary B. R. Ambedkar urged the “annihilation of caste,” Rokeya demands nothing less than the annihilation of sexism, with education as the primary instrument of this revolution. Her brilliant wit and creativity reflect profoundly on the complexities of undoing deep-seated gender supremacy and summon her readers to imagine hitherto undreamed freedoms.

Co-sponsored by the Department of English, Department of Comparative Literature, Humanities Council, and Program in South Asian Studies