bourgeoisie that is less pretentious, more salt-of-
the-earth, but still buoyed by family connections.
Rajender KaurSuleri Goodyear, Sara (1953– )
Born in Karachi, Pakistan, Sara Suleri Goodyear is
best known for her memoir Meatless Days (1989),
which details her family’s migrations between
England and Pakistan, and her own immigra-
tion to the United States. It also relates the tragic
deaths of her sister and her Welsh-born mother,
who were both killed in hit-and-run accidents.
In her second memoir, Boys Will Be Boys (2003),
Suleri again chronicles her family’s history, focus-
ing this time on her father, the prominent politi-
cal journalist Ziauddin Ahmed Suleri, whom his
children nicknamed “Pip,” short for “patriotic and
preposterous.” Suleri graduated from Kinnaird
College in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1974 and received
her M.A. from Punjab University in 1976 and her
Ph.D. from Indiana University in Bloomington
in 1983. She now lives with her husband in New
Haven, Connecticut, teaching English literature
at Yale University. Suleri has been instrumental in
developing cultural criticism in Yale’s curriculum
and was a founding editor of the Yale Journal of
Criticism. She has established herself as a leading
scholar of postcolonial studies and is well known
for her work to reconceptualize English literary
history in a postcolonial context.
Meatless Days, which Suleri calls an “alterna-
tive history,” focuses on the relationships among
the women in her family. The different narratives
are at once deeply personal and political because
they intertwine the stories of her family with the
traumatic history of Pakistan in a way that puts
the private in dialogue with the historical. Suleri
famously declares that “there are no women in the
third world,” a statement by which she introduces
another major theme of her work: the inadequacy
of social categories such as “minority,” “woman,”
or “Asian American.” Suleri regards these cat-
egories as dangerous in that they ignore specific
historical and cultural contexts, so that the cat-
egory of “women” used in the West is inadequate
for describing the experiences of women in the
non-Western world. Meatless Days is not only a
milestone in Pakistani English literature but also
a classic in postcolonial literature; as such, it is
taught widely.
Her second book, The Rhetoric of English India,
traces the literary relationship between India and
its former colonizer, England, and the effect colo-
nialism has had on this relationship. Suleri writes
about E. M. Forster, Rudyard Kipling, Edmund
Burke, British women travel writers, as well as V.
S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie. She argues that
colonial relationships should be understood as
dialogic, not in terms of binaries of colonizer/
colonized or dominant/other. Conceptualizing
colonial and postcolonial processes as highly in-
terrelational and constituted by mutual complic-
ity and guilt, Suleri works to challenge the idea
of rigid power relations of domination and sub-
ordination. In this complicated and controversial
study, Suleri also criticizes postcolonial critics for
romanticizing otherness in ways that threaten
to re-inscribe what they themselves describe as
Orientalism.
In Boys Will be Boys: A Daughter’s Elegy (2003)
Suleri reflects on her father’s political life as a jour-
nalist and patriot, as well as on his private life as
a father who demanded his children’s utmost loy-
alty, as he read their diaries and interfered in their
friendships. From the perspective of a daughter’s
remembrance, Suleri interweaves her father’s story
with that of her family, her childhood in Lahore,
and her life in the United States. The book rings
with the linguistic and cultural traces of her Paki-
stani childhood; the chapter titles are taken from
Urdu verses, songs, and sayings, followed by Sul-
eri’s English translations. The book is not only a
bicultural text but one that speaks to the impor-
tance of language in imagining personal as well as
public life.Bibliography
Bizzini, Silvia Caporale. “Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days
and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman War-
rior: Writing, History and Self after Foucault.”
Women: A Cultural Review 7, no. 1 (Spring 1996):
55–65.274 Suleri Goodyear, Sara