Asher Ghaffar is a Senior Curriculum Specialist at OCAD University where he promotes decolonizing and anti-racist curricular initiatives across undergraduate and graduate programs. Asher has advocated for decolonization, equity, and inclusion in full-time roles such as Coordinator of the Writing Centre at the University of Calgary, faculty member (LTA) at the University of Saskatchewan, Academic Integrity Specialist in the Centre for Learning and Teaching, and Lecturer/Writing Specialist at Toronto Metropolitan University. Over the past 15 years, Asher’s award-winning creative and scholarly work has focused on anti-racist and anticolonial thought. He is the author of Wasps in a Golden Dream Hum a Strange Music (ECW Press, 2008), the editor of History, Imperialism, Critique: New Essays in World Literature (Routledge, 2018). Asher’s monograph, Muslims in World Literature: Political Philosophy and Continental Thought, examines 20th century Muslim material culture from the anticolonial interwar era to the present (Routledge, 2024). His most recent poetry collection, SS Komagata Maru, was nominated for the K.M. Hunter Award for Literature, and in 2024 he received the Teaching Award for the Faculty of Arts at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Poetry
Wasps in a Golden Dream Hum a Strange Music
Toronto: ECW Press, 2008.
PS8613 .H34 W37 2008
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
“In the age of increasing surveillance of borders, the border is where every thing significant occurs; map the border and you begin to understand the pulse of a nation,” Asher Ghaffar writes in the introduction to Wasps in a Golden Dream Hum a Strange Music, his debut collection of poetry. In 2003, he was stopped at the Wagah border post, where hundreds gather to watch the spectacle of the aggressive flag-lowering ceremony on both the Indian and Pakistani side.
Deploying the Wagah border literally and metaphorically, Ghaffar movingly describes the affective dimensions of “race” from the position of second-generation Canadian-born Muslim immigrant, deftly interrogating media depictions of the War on Terrorism. As Ghaffar writes: “I saw an ocean between two worlds / where flowers burst like paper rage.”
Links
Publisher ECW Press