By Raisa Anan
For the Summer 2026 Issue of MUSE, it was a privilege to interview Dr. Azfar Hussain, summer distinguished faculty member of the Department of English and Humanities at ULAB, whose work moves fluidly across literature, poetry, philosophy, politics, and cultural theory. A poet, essayist, teacher, and scholar, Dr. Hussain approaches these fields not as separate disciplines but as interconnected ways of understanding the world. His pedagogy, as he describes it, is rooted in storytelling and the poetic: theorizing through stories and telling stories through theory. This is Dr. Azfar Hussain in his own words…
Was there a particular book, conversation, political event, or personal experience that first sparked your intellectual curiosity and set you on the path toward an academic life?
I can’t single out anything in particular that “first sparked” my intellectual curiosity or prompted me to choose an academic life. But your question invites me to look back, and I am reminded of what the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (I am not a Kierkegaardian, though) once maintained: “Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forwards,” although I am not sure if life can really be understood simply by looking backward. Understanding life? I think understanding—or knowledge, for that matter—is always-already incomplete, never quite adequate, and can even be confusing. Of course, memory—which, like language, is a very tricky thing—plays a role in making sense of the past.
That said, I vividly recall my childhood days when my paternal and maternal grandfathers used to tell my sister and me all kinds of stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which were simply magical to me. It was a miraculously fortunate coincidence that both of my grandfathers were schoolteachers who knew—to varying degrees—Arabic, Urdu, Persian, and even Sanskrit, in addition to English and, of course, Bangla. Listening to them was a nocturnal routine. I thoroughly enjoyed every story they told, remaining completely under the spell of both the tales and my storytelling grandfathers. My maternal grandfather also recited to me Sanskrit slokas, lines from the ancient playwright Kalidasa, and Persian verses. I can recite them today, too, as I have done more than once for my daughter, Salma Hussain (now a sophomore at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas), and for many of my students in both Bangladesh and the US. The sounds, the rhythms, and the modulation of my grandfather’s voice simply fascinated me. I thought to myself: When I grow up, I want to be a storytelling teacher like my grandfather who can recite slokas and beautiful, musical lines from memory.
Then there was my high school teacher, our headmaster, Mr. M. A. Hakim, who sparked my intellectual curiosity and, more specifically, my interest in philosophy itself. When I was in Grade 10, he gave me a copy of Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy and some other philosophical texts whose titles I don’t recall now. Meanwhile, our “Moulabhi” Sir—a Hafiz of the Quran who also loved Shakespeare—gave me a couple of Bangla books that retold Shakespeare’s plays as stories, which I simply devoured in high school.
Looking back, I might say that both of these teachers probably influenced my decision to become a teacher of literature. But perhaps the impulse had begun even earlier, with those nocturnal stories, those Sanskrit slokas and Persian verses, and the sounds and rhythms of my grandfathers’ voices.
Today, my pedagogy—as I teach interdisciplinary courses on literature, history, philosophy, political economy, social innovation, theory, and other areas—is predicated on storytelling and the poetic: I theorize by way of telling stories and tell stories by way of theorizing, while also using poetry to make theoretical, philosophical, political, and even political-economic points.
Can you tell us about one or more pieces of writing that have fundamentally changed the way you view the world and you think is a must-read for everyone?
I feel tempted to mention quite a few works, really. I am not sure I can single out one piece of writing—or even one book—that I would recommend as a “must-read” for everyone. But I can selectively talk about a few works I’ve found life-changing.
Among the books that have fundamentally changed the way I view the world—although the history of life itself does not stand still, and although how one views the world cannot be reduced to a singular inspiration—I would begin by mentioning The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, a work that has a long history of being dismissed, denounced, or simply badmouthed without even being read. In fact, I wrote about its influence early on in my life in a piece titled “Moon, Memory, Manifesto: A Personal, Lyrical Essay on Atrai,” which appeared in The Daily Star not so long ago. There, I wrote that when I was barely 13, one gray afternoon, a Maoist from Atrai—my uncle’s friend—placed a soiled copy of The Communist Manifesto in Bangla translation in my hands and urged me to read it. I puzzled over and struggled with many ideas in the Manifesto but ended up clinging to at least two words: “bourgeoisie” and “proletariat.” I made only a feeble sense of them, forming a vague idea of what a class struggle might mean. Even as a teenager, however unclear my ideas were, I immediately identified with the proletariat, imagining that we must combat the bourgeoisie to build a better world. I keep returning to this book—or pamphlet, if you will—and every time I do, I am reminded of what my favorite political economist, Samir Amin, once said: reading The Communist Manifesto makes one feel as if it were written only yesterday!
One may identify class struggle as the thematic core of the Manifesto, but it also inspires me to pay attention to all forms and forces of exploitation and oppression that variously intersect with class struggle. The Manifesto’s tone, timbre, and texture—as well as its conceptual resources, its “bursts of meaning” (to use a phrase from my favorite poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins), and its rhetorical élan—continue to speak to my three abiding passions in life: poetry, politics, and philosophy. It’s not for nothing that all kinds of things have been written about the literary qualities of the Manifesto (among other works by Marx)—from the Venezuelan poet, essayist, and philosopher Ludovico Silva’s 1971 book El estilo literario de Marx (its English translation, titled Marx’s Literary Style, was brought out by Verso in 2023), to the German academic and literary critic S. S. Prawer’s 1976 classic Karl Marx and World Literature, to the Italian medievalist, semiotician, and cultural theorist Umberto Eco’s 1998 essay “Sullo stile del Manifesto” (later translated into English as “The Style of the Communist Manifesto” and included in his collection On Literature), to mention but a few.
Marx has many other works—particularly his magnum opus, Capital—that have taught me a great deal about how to view the world, but I should mention other authors and writings now. I must mention Shakespeare, adding that Marx—himself an ardent Shakespeare aficionado—deepened my interest in Shakespeare’s works later in life, works that continue to make me see the contemporary world in more ways than I can possibly recount here.
While in graduate school in the United States, rereading the work of the Bengali revolutionary poet Kazi Nazrul Islam alongside the Caribbean socialist revolutionary Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth was a remarkable, indeed life-changing, experience. I continue to see Nazrul in Fanon and Fanon in Nazrul, and both have provided me with interpretive and activist arsenals for engaging a world characterized by capitalism, colonialism and imperialism, racism, patriarchy, and other systems of oppression, interconnected as they are.
And this brings me to Audre Lorde—“Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” as she famously described herself—who viewed such a world intersectionally and with profound emancipatory aspirations. Lorde made serious, even trailblazing, contributions to both theory and practice through her understandings of Black lesbian feminism, Third World feminism, LGBTQ+ struggles, and alliance-based political movements against multiple forms and forces of oppression. In important ways, she anticipated what the African American legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw would later famously theorize as “intersectionality.” Lorde thus broadened the horizon of our engagement with the world and remains profoundly relevant today. Of course, I would recommend to anyone interested in the question of the emancipation of humanity in its entirety Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider—a collection of her essays and speeches, and a work that the feminist writer Cheryl Clarke characterizes as Lorde’s most influential book of prose, while also maintaining that its reputation surpasses even that of her poetry, which is no minor feat.
And I must bring up my all-time favorite theorist-activist, Antonio Gramsci—the Italian Marxist revolutionary whose Selections from the Prison Notebooks I discovered in Bangladesh in the early 1990s. Gramsci surely changed how I think about Marxist and left politics and culture. I wrote my MA thesis on Gramsci, while my Ph.D. dissertation, titled “The Point is to (Ex)Change It: Towards a Political Economy of Land, Labor, Language, and the Body,” kept Gramsci at the center of my theorizing about the politics of culture and the culture of politics.
I, for one, think that we should read and reread Gramsci in post-July-uprising Bangladesh to understand that no new Bangladesh is possible without a large-scale cultural struggle aimed at radically transforming the political culture that has evolved in our country since 1972. Indeed, I could go on and on about Gramsci and others who have had formative influences on me.
I haven’t even mentioned the poets who have enabled me to see our world in all kinds of shadows and lights, and the list would be long. Among them, Jibanananda Das has remained particularly close to me since my college days—a poet whose wide-ranging engagement with life itself continues to tell me that one can never exhaust the field of the possible when it comes to living a life whose meaning often slips and slides, yet still longs for intervention and change.
Do you think universities themselves can ever be truly decolonized, or are they still fundamentally shaped by the structures and values they inherited from colonial modernity?
Decolonized? Have you noticed that decolonization has become something of a buzzword in the humanities and social sciences, particularly in academia, both in Bangladesh and elsewhere? Decolonize this, decolonize that, decolonize even the chairs and cars and haircutting—it has become a pronounced imperative, while decolonization itself has lost much of its original, radical, even revolutionary meaning.
But no local site can be fully or truly decolonized unless the entire system is decolonized. Focusing on what Michel Foucault calls “the microphysics of power” is important, yet profoundly insufficient. That doesn’t mean we don’t have to understand the microphysics of (colonial) power, or that we should simply give up on struggles at the local level. Here, we can return to Fanon, whom I regard as the foremost major theorist of decolonization, to understand that decolonization is not merely an unsettling metaphor, a subversive textual analysis, or even insurrectionary interdisciplinarity, although I am fond of all of them and see their usefulness in certain instances.
But, as Fanon suggests in The Wretched of the Earth, decolonization is a serious life-and-death struggle aimed at inaugurating a total, complete, even absolute rupture with the existing order of things; it has to do with an entire social structure being “changed from the bottom up,” to use Fanon’s famous phrase. In this sense, decolonization is more than political independence from colonial rule achieved through a national liberation movement. And in this sense, our country as a whole—let alone our universities—has not been “truly” decolonized. Decolonization remains decisively an unfinished project in Bangladesh, as does democratization.
Indeed, certain curricular changes in certain literature and social science departments notwithstanding, our entire education system has remained not only class-divided but also colonialist, as have our judicial, bureaucratic, military, and police systems, not to mention the entire political culture that has evolved since 1972, a political culture that remains tied, one way or another, to US imperialism, notwithstanding the anti-fascist and emancipatory aspirations of our unprecedented July Uprising of 2024.
Under such circumstances, universities, by and large, cannot transcend their material and structural limitations, although they can serve—as they commendably have from time to time—as sites of anti-colonial resistance, depending on how progressive forces within them think, act, organize, and come together. And, as I have long argued, there is no decolonization without true democratization, and there is no true democratization without decolonization.
If you could sit for a meal with an author, dead or alive, who would it be and why?
My answer will probably be the briefest one here: Akhteruzzaman Elias—one of our major fiction writers in Bangla—who died at only 53 in 1997. I have always felt he left this world far too early. I’m proud to say that, despite our considerable age difference, he was a close comrade and mentor of mine. We worked closely together in the Bangladesh Lekhok Shibir, a national organization of writers, artists, and activists. He was the organization’s Vice-President, and I was its General Secretary. In fact, our lives were deeply intertwined in the early 1990s. But when Elias Bhai died, I was in the US, and I couldn’t say goodbye to him properly; it’s not that I ever wanted to say goodbye to him. So, I would love to have another massive adda with him, wherever he is, and hear his creative jokes and loud, infectious laughter again—the kind of laughter that would energize and animate me, especially in our dark times.
If you had complete freedom to design a course with no institutional constraints, what unconventional or non-canonical texts, films, music, or cultural artifacts would you include?
Complete freedom? I have always dreamed of it. So, yes, I have long wished to design and teach an interdisciplinary course in the English Department itself, titled simply “The Point.” The point is to make the point and also to explore points on a continuum or moving at a zigzag velocity, so to speak. I have always been interested in the point, the drop, the dot, even the droplet. I keep thinking about the massive significance of the Insignificant—the tiny, the overlooked, even the obvious.
Admittedly, my inspiration comes from two canonical figures—my favorite Greek poet, Odysseas Elytis, and, of course, Rabindranath Tagore, although I intend to use predominantly non-canonical materials. As Elytis once put it, “You’ll come to learn a great deal if you study the Insignificant in depth.” Tagore, too, powerfully and evocatively draws our visual attention to the significance of the insignificant in his famous yet often overlooked poem about a dewdrop glistening on a single sheaf of paddy grain. In that poem, he suggests that while we travel at great expense to see mountains and oceans and so on and so forth, we fail to open our eyes and see—just a few steps away from our own home—a dewdrop glistening on a sheaf of paddy grain. Also, our great fiction writer Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay once wrote to this effect: We need a history of insignificant things. And Pablo Neruda wrote dozens of magnificent odes to ordinary things, as I discuss in my essay “Of Things” (available online).
So, the objective of this course would be to explore the poetics, politics, philosophy, and even the political economy of the point and to develop creative and critical ways of thinking about the common, the ordinary, the tiny, and the overlooked things that are nevertheless foundational and integral to life and living. I would use such unconventional and non-canonical materials as slave narratives and plantation songs; the songs of Kabir and Lalon; pointillist paintings; Afro-Cuban jazz; fractal geometry; feminist poems about dewdrops and bubbles; critical pieces on decimal studies; and the mathematical philosophy of Alain Badiou, among many others—all, ultimately, to make points about the Point.
In your recent article on Kazi Nazrul Islam’s 127th birth anniversary, you called him “the first revolutionary poet in the entire history of Bangla literature.” Despite the immense influence of his writings and ideals, do you think Bangladesh has adequately honored his legacy beyond symbolic celebrations? In what ways have we failed to live up to the values he advocated?
Yes, Nazrul has been canonized, institutionalized, reified, even fetishized, to say the least, to the point of evacuating him of his actual content and depoliticizing him. Yes, he is even our national poet. But one of the great ironies of our history is that our national ruling classes and their allies have long come to stand for almost everything—every system of oppression—that Nazrul himself continued to confront, challenge, and combat: capitalism, colonialism, communalism, racism, and patriarchy.
Indeed, to reread Nazrul today is to reassert the three distinctly pronounced principles of our own unfinished National Liberation Movement of 1971—equality, social justice, and human dignity. These principles, I argue, deeply inform Nazrul’s entire body of work. His own line—“Of equality I sing”—serves as a leitmotif running through many of his poems.
But Nazrul is more than a didactic poet of principles. He is one of the major Bangla poets and, I would argue, one of the greatest revolutionary poets in the world—one who manifestly declares in “Dhumketu” [“The Comet”]: “I’ve come now for the great revolution.” This Nazrul—a revolutionary poet (more than a rebel poet, that is)—has unfortunately been overlooked or downplayed by many Nazrul researchers and critics.
And, yes, one may sing Nazrul’s songs with extraordinary virtuosity and still support fascist politics, remaining clueless about the questions of class and gender, for instance. Our Bangladeshi educated middle class often loves Nazrul only at the expense of his actual content—a content that is otherwise unsettling, insurrectionary, even “communist” in character. I have already encountered plenty of irrebellious lovers of this rebel poet in Bangladesh, critics and translators included. I have said this before, and I will say it again: Had the Bangladeshi educated middle class taken Nazrul seriously—I mean, really seriously—there would have been a social revolution in Bangladesh by now.
How do you think your identity as a teacher differs when you teach in Bangladesh versus when you teach in America?
Of course, I remain the same teacher. But pedagogy, for me, is not a frozen body of teaching methodologies and strategies; it is never a state of being but always a process of becoming. And I think immediate locations and material conditions—specific sites, subjects, and scenes—inform and influence pedagogy.
When I teach literature classes in Bangladesh, I tend to tell my students stories of life or cite contemporary political, social, and cultural examples they know. I also often allude to Bangla literary works to make points about English and American literary texts (I have this crazy comparatist zeal for making connections). These are just a couple of examples. But when I teach politically engaged, interdisciplinary graduate courses in the US, I often focus, for instance, on what the US government has been doing both at home and around the world. Of course, my registers, idioms, and turns of expression change with different rhetorical situations.
But my teaching philosophy remains the same. For me, teaching—like love—transforms life. I also believe a teacher is a lifelong student—even a student of their students—one who facilitates and inspires learning for growth and change, while helping students develop self-confidence, courage, curiosity, and compassion.
You have described Anton Chekhov as one of your favorite writers. Chekhov is often remembered not for grand revolutions but for his subtle portrayals of ordinary lives, moments, and disappointments. What is it about Chekhov that continues to resonate with you, both as a reader and as someone committed to social transformation?
In your question, I think you are right about your quick characterization of Chekhov. In art and literature, I suspect, one does not have to declare a revolution to be revolutionary. But it is widely acknowledged—and rightly so—that Chekhov revolutionized modern short-story and dramatic writing. It’s no coincidence that both Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky (both of them are among my favorites) admired Chekhov, albeit to varying degrees, while two other all-time favorites of mine—James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway—were influenced by him.
As for the question of revolution, I think there is no revolution without abiding concern with the quotidian—the dull prose of daily living—the ordinary, the insignificant, even the trivial, all of which Chekhov zoomed in on without becoming sentimental. In his plays and short stories, he wonderfully yoked together the beautiful illusions one sometimes needs to make life bearable and the naked, even ugly, truths of life. And then there are life’s daily absurdities. And, of course, Chekhov’s humor! And Chekhov’s humor is political in more ways than one. All these things continue to resonate deeply with me.
Even the Russian Marxist revolutionary V. I. Lenin, in one of his warm letters to his mother, enthusiastically inquired about Chekhov’s play Three Sisters. And there is the famous account of Lenin’s powerful response to Chekhov’s short story “Ward No. 6,” which gave him a dark but urgent sense of the oppressive reality of pre-revolutionary Russia—the very reality that Lenin would seek to transform.
By the way, I must admit that I never tire of repeatedly quoting—perhaps to the annoyance of some of my friends and colleagues—a particular statement from Chekhov’s short story “Gooseberries”: “Money—like vodka—can do crazy things!”
Thank you, Raisa, for your questions and for giving me this generous opportunity to share some of my thoughts and ideas, including some autobiographical details.
