Moussa Pourya Asl

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Affiliate at University of Oulu

Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013) explores effects of the 1967 Communist Naxalbari uprising in West Bengal India. Irrespective of the glowing reviews the author earned for her truthful representations, the novel presents the pro-Communist uprising in a particular discursive regime that establishes a particular way of remembering and forgetting. Dr...

This special issue, Gender, Sexuality, and Islam in Muslim Women's English Literature, emerges at a crucial juncture in contemporary socio-political discourse. In recent years, Muslim women's voices have gained increasing prominence in literary works that interrogate and disrupt established norms surrounding gender, sexuality, and identity. These n...

In the past century, South Asia underwent fundamental cultural, social, and political changes as many countries progressed from colonial dominations through nationalist movements to independence. These transformations have been intricately bound up with the spatiality of social life in the region, drawing further attention to the significance of so...

Sisterhood in the context of Islamic society under Taliban rule emerges as a crucial bond of solidarity and resistance against patriarchal dominance. This study explores the concept of sisterhood in Nadia Hashimi's novel, The Pearl that Broke Its Shell. Drawing upon bell hooks's feminist theoretical framework, it investigates how Muslim female char...

The rising prevalence of harassment in Middle Eastern countries is mirrored in literary works from the region. However, extracting data from these texts to understand the typology and frequency of the cases poses a significant challenge due to human cognitive limitations and potential biases. Thus, this study aims to use natural language processing...

The representation of Islamic societies in life narratives by Western voyagers has long been a subject of criticism for their allegedly prejudiced and demeaning portrayal. These narratives are often accused of perpetuating Orientalist discourses and reinforcing Islamophobia. This article problematizes such myopic perspectives by demonstrating how a...

Despite the growth of digital humanities, the specific application of computational methods to analyse literary themes and elements remains underexplored. This study aims to use machine learning algorithms for text classification on seven novels about the partition of India. The article has a dual objective: firstly, to develop and implement an inn...

Movie streaming services are businesses driven by data and strategies to predict future viewing patterns based on historical data. Without unsupervised learning techniques, industries like movie streaming services might face laborious tasks and issues in anticipating customer preferences and forecasting changes in customer behavior. In this chapter...

This study explores the intersecting factors contributing to violence against women in Pakistan as depicted in contemporary literary works by women writers. Drawing upon Johan Galtung's typology of violence, we aim to examine the dynamics of direct, structural, and cultural violence within Fatima Bhutto's The Shadow of the Crescent Moon (2013). The...

The Arabian Nights is a literary masterpiece that has captivated readers for centuries with its magical elements, mythical creatures and traditional patterns of archetypes. This study delves into the underlying similarities and differences among the types of archetypal characters depicted in two tales, “Three Apples” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thi...

The examination of power, space, and identity formation within diasporic literature has garnered significant attention due to the escalating global mobility of migrants across the world. This article studies the complex integration of spatial hierarchy, civil violence, and gendered responses to power representations in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The Lo...

Bangladesh experienced a massive surge in humanitarian crises after the 1971 Liberation War due to the systematic use of violence at both public and private spheres. Fictional accounts of the post-conflict period depict women as subjected to institutionalised sexism and aggravated physical and mental violence. Critical studies on such narratives of...

The Chinese immigrant and Chinese American communities have faced a long history of stigmatisation and misrepresentation due to racial bias and discrimination. This article explores the transformative growth narrative of the child protagonist in Laurence Yep’s novel Dragonwings, set against the backdrop of historical anti-Asian sentiment in the ear...

The Singapore-born American novelist Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians (2013) and its cinematic adaptation have evoked conflicting responses from the public in social media. Analyzing the huge amount of data posted online is an arduous task for literary scholars who use traditional methods to understand readers and viewers’ responses to creative works...

The growth of social media platforms has enabled people to publicly respond to matters such as racial and gender inequalities. On a recent case in China, individuals used online platforms to express their outrage at racial insults against the Chinese in Paul W. S. Anderson’s Monster Hunter (2020). This article uses sentiment analysis and natural la...

Even though literary works serve as excellent media for bearing witness to trauma, postcolonial and diasporic literary texts are often dismissed for their falsified accounts of traumatic life experiences. Recent studies on African American literature have stressed the need for a decolonized conceptualization of trauma that would not only disrupt th...

The rapid innovations in computer sciences and the emergence of technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), metaverse, and similar cyberspaces have greatly impacted the field of education. The radical changes that IR4.0 has made in the teaching approaches and learning behaviours have posed new challenges for students of liter...

The traditional classification of city spaces in Afghan literature in English as either utopian or dystopian overlooks the possibility of other spaces existing within the same spatial structure. This chapter argues that although Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns is widely known to be teeming with exclusively dystopian elements, the novel d...

The primary objective of this research is to develop and implement an artificial intelligence (AI) approach for the detection and classification of mental breakdowns in literary texts. The study employs text analytics techniques, utilizing natural language processing (NLP) to extract and analyze data from six novels written by Afghan and Pakistani...

Advancement of artificial intelligence has opened new horizons for the analytics of literary texts and social media. However, the current studies are very limited, and there is still need for further scholarships that use AI applications to analyze literary works and social media texts. After presenting a working definition of certain key terms in...

Recently, the revolutionary transformations in social and political landscapes as well as the remarkable developments in artificial intelligence reinforced the importance of geography and spatial analyses in literary and cultural studies. This chapter proposes an analytical framework of topic modelling and sentiment analysis for exploring the conne...

Over the past two decades, literary works from Afghanistan have sought to depict the extensive and increasing level of violence directed against individuals and communities. This study aims to identify the different types of violence represented in selected literary works from the country. To this end, an artificial intelligence approach—comprised...

Behrouz Boochani, the Kurdish-Iranian author of No Friends But the Mountains, has been using social media platforms such as Twitter to speak up against social injustice and human rights abuse against immigrants across the globe. This study proposes an artificial intelligence lifecycle for opinion mining of the dominant sentiments, topics, and emoti...

In recent years, South-Asian literature in English has experienced a surge of newfound love and popularity both in the local and the global market. In this regard, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997) has garnered an astounding mix of positive and negative reactions from readers across the globe. This chapter adopts an artificial intellig...

The British Pakistani writer, Mohsin Hamid's debut novel, Moth Smoke (2000), has garnered conflicting responses from readers across the globe. Over the past few years and with the rapid advancements in social media platforms, readers around the world have publicly shared their opinions and feelings towards the text using online platforms such as Tw...

The phenomena of migration, displacement, and social integration have greatly impacted discourses on the interpretation of cultural translation, which is widely perceived as an ongoing reciprocal process of exchange, integration, and transformation. Drawing upon Homi K. Bhabha’s theoretical notions, such as liminality, hybridity, and third space, t...

The phenomena of migration, displacement, and social integration have greatly impacted discourses on the interpretation of cultural translation, which is widely perceived as an ongoing reciprocal process of exchange, integration, and transformation. Drawing upon Homi K. Bhabha’s theoretical notions, such as liminality, hybridity, and third space, t...

The growing body of studies on heterotopic cartographies and literary works have drawn attention to the profound importance of cultural and political resistance as well as to women’s own agency in reconfigurations of spatial arrangements. Drawing upon Foucault’s theorization of heterotopia, this comparative study aims to examine the Japanese writer...

Despite the growing emergence of new computer analytic software programs, the adoption and application of computer-based data mining and processing methods remain sparse in literary studies and analyses. This study proposes a text analytics lifecycle to detect and visualize the prevailing themes in a corpus of literary texts. Two objectives are to...

Travel writings by Western visitors of the Orient have often been rebuffed for disseminating a stereotypical discourse on the people and the culture of the East. The rationale for the collective dismissal of such narratives, however, is built upon a limited canon whose myopic perspective creates a monolithic Orient. It is argued that since this dom...

The image of Indian women has often been associated with the act of obedience and submission. Previous studies on gender and sexuality in India’s literary tradition and culture point to the dominance of heteropatriarchal normativity and the scarcity of the image of a powerful woman capable of contesting and dismantling such impositions. In this stu...

In recent years, advancements in computer mediated technologies, such as internet, have greatly impacted disciplines like literary studies. Previous studies have shown that on-line discussion spaces have helped readers across the globe to co-construct their interpretations of a text. The increasing popularity of digital writing has prompted the boo...

The award of literary prizes such as the Booker Prize has a great impact on production and reception of literary works. In recent years, the Booker Prize awarding committee has faced challenges in selecting books that are more readable and popular. This study suggests that one feasible way to address this issue is to analyze readers’ response and p...

The rapid growth of the Internet and the social networking services (SNS) has allowed readers from across the globe to share their thoughts and feelings about literary works through social media platforms like Twitter, Goodreads, and Facebook, to name only a few. This study aims to perform text mining techniques—opinion mining using topic modeling—...

This chapter seeks to explore the Bangladeshi diasporic writer Tanwi Nandini Islam's debut novel Bright Lines (2015) to study the subtle nuances of (female) identity and sexuality as portrayed through its main characters. The chapter draws upon the poststructuralist feminist Helene Cixous's notions of the feminine, the other, queer intimacy, and l'...

Hijra is a distinctive South Asia known for their gender and sexual difference and associated with their transgender and intersex identities. Otherwise known as transwomen, they are traditionally subjected to prejudices and embedded within narratives of exclusion, discrimination, and the subculture. As a result, Hijras are typically perceived as is...

Thus far, studies on the politics of gendered identities and spatial (in)justice in the Islamic Republic of Iran have mainly focused on the negative role of spatialization in the formation and perpetuation of a heteropatriarchal normativity. Little attention has been paid to the dia- lectical relationship between space and power as well as to...

In examining Malaysian literature in light of the global canon, one cannot miss the numerous parallelisms between literary works by Tunku Halim bin Tunku Abdullah and Edgar Allan Poe. Both writers are preoccupied with grotesque realities of mentally deranged individuals, and similarly visualize the darkness and animality of human consciousness. Thi...

Opinion mining is the use of analytic methods to extract subjective information. A study was conducted to apply spatial opinion mining in literary works to examine the writers’ opinions about how matters of space and place are experienced. For this reason, this paper conducts a review study to identify and compare different analytical techniques fo...

With the recent prevalence of white supremacist discourses in the United States, Asian Americans have unavoidably been subjected to xenophobic gazes and tendencies. The white gaze has traditionally enjoyed the privilege to objectify and fix the diasporic subject both racially and ethnically, foregrounding a relationality that naturalizes the immigr...

With the recent prevalence of white supremacist discourses in the United States, Asian Americans have unavoidably been subjected to xenophobic gazes and tendencies. The white gaze has traditionally enjoyed the privilege to objectify and fix the diasporic subject both racially and ethnically, foregrounding a relationality that naturalizes the immigr...

Stereotypically depicted as unresisting and passive victims of oppressive power, Saudi women are generally considered as unable to effect changes to the patriarchal socio-political status quo. This article studies the Saudi woman life writer Manal al-Sharif’s Daring to Drive (2017) to demonstrate the various ways in which the subjugated women insti...

With universals of translation budding into an interesting field in translation studies, discussing the nature of translation universals and explicitation as one of the universals of translation emerges as one important strand worthy exploring. In this paper, first of all, the notion of explicitation in translation is introduced, followed by the pr...

Contemporary life narratives by or about Middle Eastern women often portray the female body as the object of oppressive ethical and political governmentalities. This article focuses on the writings of a generation of secular and Muslim women, whose works describe the condition of women as subjugated by sovereign states and disciplinary governments,...

This article carries out a (con-) textual analysis of cultural crossings, with a particular focus on the notions of assimilation and syncretism, in certain of Jhumpa Lahiri’s diasporic writings. By situating two of her short stories “This Blessed House” and “The Third and Final Continent” within the social-political context of the post-1960s Americ...

Even though diverse theoretical approaches have been employed to tease out the psychological nuances of the male character Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov’s (1955) erotic novel Lolita, the decisive role of psycho logical issues such as fear and anxiety in forming his character have hitherto remained unexplored. Drawing upon Freud’s theories on...

The contemporaneous feminist argument that there is “a gaze” at work within patriarchal culture, and within the existing hierarchies of power, is important in the context of the portrayal of women by diasporic writers. The female gaze and the immigrant woman’s in-/visibility is often complicated by phallocentric cultural imperatives and social stan...

This article explores the Iraqi-American life writer Zainab Salbi’s memoir Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny; Growing up in the Shadow of Saddam (2005) in the light of a Foucauldian framework to examine both visible and invisible tactics of power once exercised by Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime. The Foucauldian analysis of juridical fo...

Middle East women’s active participation in resisting against socio-political impositions andconstraints has received scant attention in the existing scholarship within the field. Much ofthe literature is focused on the socially victimized, subjugated and passive state of the femalesubjects in facing patriarchal authoritarianism and repression. In...

Gayatri Spivak’s repeated accusations against the hyphenated Americans of colluding in their own exploitation is noteworthy in the context of diasporic writers’ portrayal of immigrant women within the prevailing discourse of anti-Communism in the United States. The woman in South Asian American writings is often portrayed as still stuck in the trad...

Middle East women life writings have been downplayed for their oversimplified representations of female subjects as purely passive, submissive and unresisting. This article explores the allegation in three contemporary memoirs by Jean P. Sasson (1992) (the ghostwriter of Saudi princess Sultana), Zainab Salbi (2005) and Manal al-Sharif (2017) who re...

Michel Foucault's notion of neoliberal governmentality is important in the context of the portrayal of the private sphere of the family by diasporic writers. Family, which is generally defined in terms of its functionality, when considering the difficulties of integration into the non-natal culture from the perspective of the uprooted migrants, is...

This essay examines South Asian American writer Jhumpa Lahiri’s literary engagement with the re-Orientalization and sexualization of a collective subject described as Indian diaspora within the context of contemporary consumer culture. The essay explores the relationship between Lahiri’s best-selling novel, The Namesake (2003) and its contemporary...

This article attempts to evince the political, cultural and affective consequences of Jhumpa Lahiri’s diasporic writings and their particular enunciations of the literary gaze. To do so, it details the manner in which the stories’ exercise of visual operations rigidly corresponds with those of the Panopticon. The essay argues that Lahiri’s narrativ...

This article examines the modes of objectification of a collective subject described as "Indian American", through the panoptic technologies of literature and cinema as utilised in the United States (US) in the aftermath of 9/11. Following the 2003 publication of the novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake, Fox Searchlight Pictures released Mira Nair'...

The panoptic gaze is vested in with a constitutive impact upon the subjectivity of individuals. Feminist scholars like Luce Irigaray have charged that the metaphor of vision is intimately connected with the construction of gender and sexual difference. By pointing to the masculine logic of Western thought, Irigaray confirms that a woman’s entry int...

The study attempts to indicate how the manifest content of a text is in essence the projection of the obsessional thoughts of the neurotic author. The research approach adopted in this study is what is referred to as psychobiography or the Freudian psychoanalytic criticism. Freud's ideas have been employed due to the increasing shift to him in the...

This study aims to show how Emily Brontë’s opposing attitude to civilization in Wuthering Heights reveals to a certain degree her unconscious opposition to authority and accordingly her obsession with the notion of a world in which the father figure is finally slain. The research approach adopted in this study is what is referred to as psychobiogra...

Attempts to present a rational explanation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights have been a growing concern since its publication in 1847. The abundant, yet incoherent, interpretations of Wuthering Heights, make the need for this research timely. This article focuses on ways to achieve a truer and more rational interpretation of the novel. The study...

Attempts to present a definitive rational explanation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights have been a growing concern since its publication in. The abundant, yet incoherent, interpretations of Wuthering Heights, each taking one element of the novel and extrapolating it towards total explanation, make the need for this research timely. This article...

Attempts to present a definitive rational explanation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights have been a growing concern since its publication in 1847. The abundant, yet incoherent, interpretations of Wuthering Heights, each taking one element of the novel and extrapolating it towards total explanation, make the need for this research timely. This...