We are honored to present Episode 20 of the Bangladesh Feminist Oral History Project, an initiative of the Bangladesh Feminist Archives dedicated to documenting the voices, struggles, and legacies of Bangladeshi feminists across generations.
In this episode, we speak with Professor Firdous Azim, a literary critic, feminist scholar, and activist whose work has shaped feminist thought, pedagogy, and public discourse in Bangladesh for decades.
Dr. Azim is Professor of English at BRAC University, where she served as Chair of the Department of English and Humanities for many years. Trained in postcolonial literary studies, her scholarship spans feminist theory, literature, secularism, and women’s movements in South Asia. Alongside her academic work, she has been a long-standing member of Naripokkho, one of Bangladesh’s oldest feminist activist collectives.
Her feminist engagements extend beyond classrooms and texts. Through campaigns such as The Forgotten Women of 1971, editorial work with journals including Feminist Review, and sustained interventions in policy, pedagogy, and movement spaces, Dr. Azim has consistently foregrounded feminist memory, accountability, and resistance. Her work challenges both state-sanctioned forgetting and depoliticized empowerment narratives, insisting on feminism as an ethical and historical practice.
Topics Discussed:
-Early political and feminist formation
-Feminist pedagogy and teaching literature in Bangladesh
-Postcolonial and feminist literary critique
-Feminist memory and archival responsibility
-NGO-ization, empowerment narratives, and critique
-Islam, secularism, and feminist resistance
-Intergenerational feminist movements and futures
About the Project:
The Bangladesh Feminist Oral History Project is a living archive of interviews with Bangladeshi feminists, activists, artists, organizers, and scholars, whose stories offer insight, courage, and memory across generations.
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