Subverting the Trope of “Agentic West and Passive Rest” in Shadow of the Crescent Moon and The Miraculous True Story of Nomi Ali

Abstract

The white Western feminism essentializes “Third World” women as monolithic passivity in binarist relationship with Western women’s supposed agency, a colonial theoretical position on eastern women. Mohanty subverts this universalization of Eastern women’s praxis in homogenized colonial discourses which conceptualize eastern women’s situation with totalizing indifference to the diversities of their socio-cultural life. Employing Mohanty’s theoretical stance on white western feminism’s essentialism, this article analyzes two works of Pakistani literature in English The Shadow of the Crescent Moon (2015) and The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali (2019). The article focuses on how these works place their female subjects with varying agencies into their particular historical political praxis and portray agentic individuals who lay claim to their body and sexuality on one hand and demystify the West’s essentialism on the other.