In an essay I wrote a year ago in response to the New York Times author Ross Douthat's eschatological critique of Shahzia Sikander's duo of strong female statues—accessible viewing to passersby since they occupied pride of place in two iconic public spaces of New York City—I expressed my deep unease at what could only be described as Douthat's (2023) extremist stance. I called his position and essay “extremely dangerous—inviting ‘in’ to civic discourse, voices of hate inciting violence against the statues, and by extension, their creator.” It took a short eighteen months for my warning to be realized through the grotesque beheading of one of the pair of statues that together comprised the artwork named Havah . . . to breathe, air, life. At 3 a.m. on July 8, 2024, a man with a hammer decapitated the eighteen-foot sculpture of a majestic female form that was now on...
Be. Very. Careful. Who. You. Invite. In: A Warning, an Invitation, Destruction, and Creation in the Art of Image-Making Available to Purchase
Fawzia Afzal-Khan is professor of English, a University Distinguished Scholar (2009 – 10), and former director of the Women and Gender Studies Program at Montclair State University (2009 – 15). She is currently a visiting professor in the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Princeton University. In addition to publishing numerous scholarly and journalistic essays, poems, plays, and a memoir, Lahore with Love: Growing Up With Girlfriends Pakistani Style (2010), she has authored three books of scholarly criticism, including Cultural Imperialism: Genre and Ideology in the Indo-English Novel (1993); A Critical Stage: The Role of Secular Alternative Theatre in Pakistan (2005); and Siren Song: Understanding Pakistan through Its Women Singers (2020); and edited two scholarly anthologies, The PreOccupation of Postcolonial Studies (2000); and Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out (2005).
Fawzia Afzal-Khan; Be. Very. Careful. Who. You. Invite. In: A Warning, an Invitation, Destruction, and Creation in the Art of Image-Making. Public Culture 1 January 2025; 37 (1 (105)): 5–14. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-11714128
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