Background
Suleri was born in Pakistan to a Welsh mother and a Pakistani father, Z. A. Suleri.
Suleri was born in Pakistan to a Welsh mother and a Pakistani father, Z. A. Suleri.
She received her Bachelor of Arts at Kinnaird College, in Lahore, in 1974. Two years later, she was awarded an Master of Arts from Punjab University, and went on to graduate with a Doctor of Philosophy from in 1983.
Her special concerns include postcolonial literatures and theory, contemporary cultural criticism, literature and law. She was a founding editor of the Yale Journal of Criticism, and serves on the editorial boards of YJC, The Yale Review, and Transition. She is one of six children.
Two years later, she was awarded an Master of Arts Suleri is a founding editor of the Yale Journal of Criticism.
Her memoir, Meatless Days, is an exploration of the complex interweaving of national history and personal biography which was widely and respectfully reviewed. Her 1992 The Rhetoric of English India was well received in literary circles.
One critic, for instance, said recent scholarship by Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gauri Viswanathan, and Jacques Derrida has "reformulated the paradigmatic assumptions of colonial cultural studies," and the book was as "important addition to such scholarship." The "unconventionality of some of her selections brings a breath of fresh air to a field prone to turn, time and again, to the same weary list of standard texts." However, an historian took Suleri to task for the "casual manner in which she forms important generalizations without benefit of hard data." As with other deconstructionists, he continued, there are "Pronunciamentos based on unstructured, undisciplined and unresearched observations about the past." He concludes, that "This is not to say that Suleri"s work is totally without substance or that all of her insights are without value. Number doubt, she is a sensitive literary critic who would be bored with the kind of detailed monographs historians and ethnographic anthropologists do as a matter of course." Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter"s Elegy was published in October-15,2003.
In Boys Will Be Boys, she returns—with the same treasury of language, humor, and passion—to her childhood and early adulthood to pay tribute to her father, the political journalist Z. A. Suleri (known as Pip), for his "patriotic and preposterous disposition".