Javaria Farooqui, "Romance Fandom in 21st-Century Pakistan: Reading the Regency" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Jan 16, 2025

Javaria Farooqui, Assistant Professor of English at COMSATS University, delves into the vibrant world of romance fandom in 21st-century Pakistan. She discusses how Regency themes resonate with readers and the unique perspective of this English-speaking community. The impact of language and socioeconomic factors on literary consumption is highlighted, alongside generational differences in romance preferences. Additionally, Farooqui shares insights from her focus group research, revealing the complex dynamics of reading habits among women and their connection to both local and global narratives.

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Intro

00:00 • 2min

Exploring Romance Fandom in 21st Century Pakistan

01:45 • 6min

The Influence of Language on Literary Consumption in Pakistan

07:34 • 5min

Challenges and Insights in Conducting Focus Group Research

12:37 • 5min

Reading Romance: Generational Perspectives in Pakistan

18:04 • 22min

Romance, Reading, and Media in Pakistan

39:49 • 10min

Romance Fandom in 21st-Century Pakistan: Reading the Regency (Bloomsbury, 2024) offers the first major study of English-speaking romance fandom in South Asia, providing a new reader-centric model that engages with romance readers as genre experts.

Here, she investigates the popular Anglophone romance reading community in Pakistan and develops a model for analysing genre romance novels through the lens of the readers' perspective and preferences. Using focus-group interviews and close textual analysis, her book explores where and how readers access books of their choice, and explains why the detailed descriptions of dresses, food and spaces in historical romance novels of the Regency era exemplify good taste for this distinctive readership. Sitting at the intersection of literary studies, genre studies, and fan studies, this book considers the reception of Anglophone romance fiction by reading communities of colour.

About the author: Javaria Farooqui is Assistant Professor of English and Literary Studies at COMSATS University Islamabad, Lahore Campus, Pakistan. Dr. Farooqui’s research interests fall across multiple disciplines and topic areas in the humanities and social sciences, including fan studies, book history, women’s writing and histories, digital humanities, language acquisition, popular romance studies, and reader response studies. She has published research that explores the reception and materiality of texts, the ramifications of colonization and its aftermath on a nation’s literary culture, gender-based violence, and the problematic reception of Anglophone movies in Pakistan.

Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the National University of Singapore and has been awarded the Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship, starting 2025. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, critical new media industry studies, disability studies, affect studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha

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