Azfar Hussain

Dr Azfar Hussain is director of the graduate programme in social innovation and professor of integrative/interdisciplinary studies at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, US. He is also summer distinguished professor of English and Humanities at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB) and vice-president of US-based Global Center for Advanced Studies.

Beyond martyrdom and momentum: The matrix of the 1969 mass movement

In the history of Bangladesh’s formation and its war against the military-bureaucratic regime of Pakistan, the 1969 mass uprising is a significant milestone.

6d ago

Uprising, unity, and uncertainty: Power, protest, and politics in 2024

To speak of politics in 2024 is also to recall the entire history of political culture that has unfolded in Bangladesh since 1972.

1m ago

Our Victory Day and the questions of equality, justice, and human dignity

Bangladesh's hard-won independence, achieved through the Liberation War in 1971, remains the most defining political event in our history.

1m ago

Fakir Lalon Shah: Subjects, sites, and signs

Lalon is an exemplary anti-casteist, anti-patriarchal, anti-colonial figure in undivided Bengal in the19th century.

3m ago

89th Birthday of Serajul Islam Choudhury: Bangladesh’s premier public intellectual

Serajul Islam Choudhury is the author of more than a hundred books and numerous essays.

7m ago

Labour, Life, and Liberation: The Emancipatory Significance of May Day

May Day is customarily credited with originating in 1886 from the eight-hour workday movement in the United States, but the Polish-German Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg provides a distinct perspective on its genesis.

9m ago

Of poetry, philosophy, politics, and praxis

When we cease to have rhythm, we are dead. And we cease to have poetry, we are spiritually dead, one way or another.

10m ago

Of place and places: Perspectives, positions, and propositions

To speak of place is to speak of the topical, the toponymical, and the topographical.

12m ago
May 28, 2022
May 28, 2022

Kazi Nazrul Islam and “World Literature”: Some Questions and Concerns

Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976) has been customarily characterized as a rebel poet, particularly, if not exclusively, because of his 1922 poem called “Bidrohi” (the Rebel)—a poem that fiercely stages his political, linguistic, even metrical rebellion all at once.

April 23, 2022
April 23, 2022

Shakespeare—Our Contemporary in the Time of Coronavirus?

The question was already raised by some: Did Shakespeare write mainly for children? So-called "pop" Shakespeare criticism answered that question in the affirmative. 

March 14, 2022
March 14, 2022

More than a pastoral poet

Today—March 14—marks the 46th death anniversary of Jasim Uddin (1903-1976). Popularly called “palli kabi” (folk poet), Jasim Uddin is also considered a major Bangla poet.

February 21, 2022
February 21, 2022

Our Language Movement: Moments, Momentum, Milieu

Our Bhasha Andolan—the Language Movement—was undoubtedly a major event in our political history.

February 17, 2022
February 17, 2022

Jibanananda Das: Tropes, Tensions, Tendencies

Today—February 17—marks the 123rd birth anniversary of Jibanananda Das (1899-1954), recognised today as one of the greatest Bengali poets of all time.

January 25, 2022
January 25, 2022

Michael Madhusudan Datta: Resistance, Rebellion, Rupture

Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824-1873) is widely regarded as the first modern Bangla poet. Well before Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), Madhusudan is even reckoned as the first rebel poet in Bangla literature, although he is by no means a revolutionary like Nazrul.

November 17, 2021
November 17, 2021

Our foremost peasant leader and revolutionary

He was described as an epic hero. His life was intimately involved in the land, labour and language of the poor peasant.

October 17, 2021
October 17, 2021

Fakir Lalon Shah: Love, life and liberation

One cannot decisively introduce—much less sum up—the life and work of Fakir Lalon Shah (c. 1772-1890).

August 29, 2021
August 29, 2021

Kazi Nazrul Islam: Poetry, Politics, Praxis

The only major Bengali poet to have come from the rural proletariat and the first one to have raised—in public—the demand for the total independence of colonial India in 1922, Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976) enacts insurrectionary ruptures and breaks with certain old traditions in Bengali poetry while inaugurating new ones.

January 23, 2021
January 23, 2021

Kashinath Roy: A teacher, poet and mentor of extraordinary stature

My teacher Professor Kashinath Roy (1947—2021)—poet, short story writer, essayist—died on January 17, at 74. Or did he die?