1. ‘History, Memory, Fiction
New Dimensions in Contemporary Pakistani and Kashmiri Writings’
2. ‘Educational Leadership: Policies and Practices
Voices from the Developing Countries’
Oxford University Press is the largest international university publishing house in the world, second oldest after Cambridge University Press. It is engaged in the publication of pedagogical and other texts for the last 500 years or so. The present two books have been lately published by OUP in furtherance of the same objective viz. publish, promote and preserve the culture of books that teach, train and transform their reading clientele.
‘History, Memory, Fiction’:
The writer of this book David Waterman is Professor at La Rochelle University, France, where he is a member of the research team at the Centre for Research in International and Atlantic History (CRHIA). He is the author, among others, of ‘Where Worlds Collide:
Pakistani Fiction in the New Millenium (2015). He is currently working on Pakistani history, culture and literature in English, and has also served on the editorial team of ‘Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies’.
The instant book envisages an examination of several contemporary novels and memoirs of leading Pakistani and Kashmiri writers, taking them as historical fiction, or as works that are based on ‘real-world facts’ or ‘possible worlds’, ultimately leading to a plausible story similar to a true story. These novels and memoirs provide the readers with fresh insights and moral orientation while suggesting that the past, different from history, must be given meaning in the present if they wish to create better possible futures. Thus they provide readers with ‘a broader perspective of historical consciousness’.
Noted Pakistani writer in English Muneeza Shamsie in her prefatory remarks, gives a resume of the theme and content of the book. According to her ‘the history of mankind has been forged by migration and exploration, conflict, change, and adaptation’. Thus she endorses David Waterman’s standpoint that ‘people have always been on the move, and history seems to be driven by movement’.
The book is split into four sections. Section 1 is intended to review two novels that recreate troubled Kashmir viz. ‘An isolated incident’ by Soniah Kamal and ‘The collaborator and the contested history of a place’ by Mirza Waheed.
Section 2 deals with three novels viz. Rafia Zakaria’s ‘The upstairs wife’, Basharat Peer’s ‘Curfewed night: A frontline memoir of life, love, and war in Kashmir’, and Mohsin Hamid’s ‘How to get filthy rich in rising Asia’’.
Section 3 highlights the situation in and around Pakistan during the Afghan war in the first essay; in the second Nadeem Aslam’s novel ‘The wasted vigil’ is discussed; and in the third one, Uzma Aslam’s ‘The miraculous true history of Nomi Ali’ is the subject of deliberation.
Section 4 projects the issue of migration as viewed in Mohsin Hamid’s ‘Exit West’; the second essay treats Osama Siddique’s novel ‘Snuffing out the moon’ tracing migration in the Indus Valley over the past 4000 years. In this context the author opines that ‘Migrants and other new comers will continue to arrive, not in static, pre-existing communities but in communities that were also created through the movement of peoples and cultures, and all of the apocalyptic prognostications and resistance in the name of national and cultural purity, proving that civilization outside the cage (Michael Mann’s view of human civilization as a product of ‘fixity’ which is analogous to living in a ‘cage’) is not only possible but desirable, and ultimately absolutely necessary.’
‘Educational Leadership – Policies and Practices’:
‘Educational research plays an important role in addressing the need to create inspiring and visionary leadership for transforming the world. To fully harness the power of educational research it is important to understand the multi-paradigmatic nature of contemporary approaches which offer a rich array of epistemologies (or ways of knowing), enabling us to generate different forms of knowledge — objective, subjective, critical, integral — depending on the purpose of our research.’ (Taylor & Luitel, 2019).
The book in hand is meant to pursue the aforesaid end. It contains some eleven erudite research articles on the following captions:
1) Leadership conceptions in public universities. 2) Role perceptions of DEOs in Pakistan. 3) School supervision, a tool or burden. 4) Pedagogies for developing pedagogical leaders. 5) Challenges, opportunities, and lessons learnt from a leadership development programme. 6) Administrative support of beginning teachers in Kyrgyztan.
7) Support of students affected by war and terrorism. 8) School improvement leadership in Gilgit-Baltistan. 9) Exploration of self and beyond in educational leadership. 10) A case study in Afghanistan regarding culture and organisational knowledge. 11) Key lessons and way forward in the domain of educational leadership policies and practices.
To quote Michael Fullan of University of Toronto (Canada), in these articles, ‘We see the familiar concepts: transformational, moral, pedagogical, capacity building, contingent, mobilizing community, and so on, but the contexts are so different that the findings and lessons generate new ideas about leadership.’ The chapters, largely, are based on original empirical field research, learning drawn from applied research, and study of organizational learning.
Educational leadership is a challenging area. This book has taken a holistic view of the challenge as viewed by Engr. Prof. Dr Attaullah Shah, VC, Karakoram International University. Prof. Dr. Muhammad Memon, Chairman BISE, Hyderabad Sindh appreciates the ‘think globally, act locally’ approach in the resolution of the indigenous education leadership issues. Thus it is hoped that this book will be of great interest to policy makers, researchers, educators, students at graduate, MPhil, and PhD levels besides educational leaders of different categories across developing countries of the world.
