We Who Have Been Killed on Dark Paths: Faiz Ahmad Faiz's Internationalism and World Literature

Abstract This chapter provides a brief overview of the life and work of Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz (Faiẓ Aḥmad Faiẓ), emphasizing his relationship to world literature and connections across the Global South during the mid‐twentieth‐century heyday of anti‐ and postcolonial movements worldwide. Particularly, it focuses on his contributions to transregionalism and transnationalism in literature and his aesthetic and humanistic legacy. Given recent debates about Eurocentrism in the disciplines of comparative literature, world literature, and area studies, I propose that Faiz offers a global literary connectedness that does not necessarily privilege the academic Anglosphere, or its particular epistemic and hermeneutic traditions. His influence on cinema and music and his massive popularity in South Asia and the diaspora destabilizes a text‐bound understanding of literary flows or nationalist categorizations of Urdu poetry. Ultimately, Faiz's legacies offer an understanding of the creative possibilities inherent in and emergent from the circulation and reception of literature.