Degree
BS (Social Sciences & Liberal Arts)
Faculty / School
School of Economics and Social Sciences (SESS)
Department
Department of Social Sciences & Liberal Arts
Date of Award
Summer 2023
Date of Submission
2023-07-09
Advisor
Nudrat Kamal, Lecturer, Department of Social Sciences
Committee
Irum Iqbal Hussain, Lecturer, Department of Social Sciences
Project Type
SSLA Culminating Experience
Access Type
Restricted Access
Keywords
Hopepunk, Affect studies, Television studies, South Asian diaspora, Kinship
Abstract
“Hopepunk”, originally coined by Alexandra Rowland in 2017, emerged as a speculative fiction genre framing hope as a political tool for resistance against dominant hierarchical systems. Such resistance only gains power and traction at the “margins” – an unstable, ideological, and material space of “Otherness”. Taking from scholarship on postcolonial theory, feminism, television, and affect studies, I speculate a “hopepunk affect”, emerging as a fierce, subversive “potentiality” at the margins, resisting oppressive dominant hierarchies by sparking a determinedly optimistic imagination in the present for alternative worlds beyond such structures. Outside of its origins in genre, I explore the presence of “hopepunk affect” within contemporary South Asian diasporic television. Nida Manzoor’s sitcom, We Are Lady Parts (2021), and Bisha K. Ali’s Marvel miniseries, Ms Marvel (2022), both offer compelling, nuanced and powerful representations of South Asian diasporic Muslim women. In my analysis, I engage with moments in the TV shows that, in their cinematography, narratives, and techniques of representation, hold hopepunk affective intensities. In doing so, I identify certain largely necessary forces in the circulation of hopepunk affect: 1) the South Asian diasporic woman “Other” as an agent at the margins; 2) South Asian “rememory” – primarily through poetry, music, art, and intimate, personal histories; and 3) the “collective” as a mobilizing force – bonds of community, friendship, and “kinship” that shake time and space. Lastly, I speculate that an immersive, overwhelming presence of these forces showcases a potential in radical fictional media to embody “hopepunk worlds”.
Pages
94
Recommended Citation
Moosa, P. (2023). Tracing a “Hopepunk Affect” in contemporary diasporic South Asian television (Unpublished undergraduate project). Institute of Business Administration, Pakistan. Retrieved from https://ir.iba.edu.pk/sslace/198
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