Azfar Hussain has served as Honorary Vice-President of GCAS since the institution’s inception in 2013. Across the thirteen years of his tenure he has given a number of guest lectures for GCAS, and in 2017 he led the GCAS seminar in Havana, Cuba.

A theorist, critic, poet and translator working in both English and Bengali, Hussain has published several hundred academic, popular and creative pieces. His range is unusually wide even by the standards of interdisciplinary work: Native American poetics and politics, critiques of postmodern and poststructuralist theory, Marxist political economy, literatures of the global South, globalisation and empire, and the theory and practice of interdisciplinarity itself.

Research and writing

Hussain’s work examines how capitalism, colonialism, racism and patriarchy operate not as separate systems but in their interconnections — and how those interconnections shape everyday life, economically and culturally, locally and globally. From that analysis he has developed a theory of struggle organised around four sites where oppression and resistance both take hold: land, labour, language, and the body. These four categories function in his writing as more than a political framework; they serve as the conceptual and interpretive tools he brings to literary and cultural criticism.

In comparative literature he has argued that the field remains substantially Eurocentric, and has pressed for its decolonisation — reading beyond the canonical Anglo-American and European traditions in order to trace the connections and affinities between anti-colonial literary works from Asia, Africa and Latin America that comparative study has tended to overlook.

As a translator he has brought the fiction of Gabriel García Márquez and the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, Vicente Aleixandre and Roque Dalton into Bengali, and has translated the lyrics of Kabir and the poetry of Faiz Ahmad Faiz into English.

Education and career

Hussain took his BA (Honours) and MA in English at the University of Dhaka, and a second MA in English at Washington State University under a Fulbright fellowship, followed by a doctorate in English and World Literature at the same institution — both awarded with distinction. He held a postdoctoral Blackburn Fellowship at Washington State before joining its faculty in 2004.

He has taught English, world literature, ethnic studies and cultural studies at Washington State University, Bowling Green State University and Oklahoma State University, and, in Bangladesh, at Jahangirnagar University and North South University. He is Summer Distinguished Professor of English and Humanities at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh, where he has also served as Scholar-in-Residence.

In the early 1990s in Bangladesh he served as Acting General Secretary of Bangladesh Lekhak Shibir, a national organisation of writers, artists and activists, and co-edited the Bengali viewsweekly Somoy. He is an advisory editor of Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, and sits on the editorial boards of the Bengali journals Natun Diganta and Sarbajonakotha. He is a frequent public speaker and a regular voice in the media on Bangladeshi society, culture and politics.

Selected publications

• Dorshonakkhyan (Philosophical Narratives), 2019
• The Wor(l)d in Question: Essays in Political Economy and Cultural Politics, 2008
• The Phalgun Phenomenon (translations of Bengali poems), 2008
• Reading About the World, Volumes 1 and 2 (co-editor), 1999
• Chromatones (poems in English), 1980