Sara Suleri Goodyear

Sara Goodyear (Template:Nee Suleri; June 12, 1953 – March 20, 2022)<ref name="Sanga">Template:Cite book</ref> was a Pakistan-born American author and professor of English at Yale University,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> where her fields of study and teaching included Romantic and Victorian poetry and an interest in Edmund Burke. Her special concerns included postcolonial literature and theory, contemporary cultural criticism, literature, and law. She was a founding editor of the Yale Journal of Criticism, and served on the editorial boards of YJC, The Yale Review, and Transition.

Early life and education

Suleri was born in Karachi, Dominion of Pakistan (now Pakistan), one of six children, to a Welsh mother, Mair Jones,<ref name="Sanga"/> an English professor,<ref name="Parameswaran">Template:Cite news</ref> and a Pakistani father, Z. A. Suleri (1913–1999),<ref>Template:Citation</ref> a notable political journalist, conservative writer, author, and the Pakistan Movement activist regarded as one of the pioneers of print journalism in Pakistan, and authored various history and political books on Pakistan as well as Islam in the Indian subcontinent.<ref name="State University of New York Press">Template:Cite bookTemplate:Dead link</ref>

She had her early education in London and attended secondary school in Lahore. She received her B.A. at Kinnaird College, also in Lahore, in 1974. Two years later, she was awarded an M.A. from Punjab University, and went on to graduate with a PhD from Indiana University in 1983.<ref name="Sanga"/>

Career and major works

Suleri taught for two years at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, before she moved to Yale and began teaching there in 1983.<ref name="Sanga"/> Suleri was a founding editor of the Yale Journal of Criticism.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Suleri's 1989 memoir, Meatless Days, is an exploration of the complex interweaving of national history and personal biography which was widely and respectfully reviewed.<ref>Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Remembrance of Things Pakistani: Sara Suleri Makes History", Village Voice Literary Supplement, December 1989, pp. 37–38; Candia McWilliam, "Jazzy, Jyoti, Jase and Jane", Rev. of Meatless Days and Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee, London Review of Books, May 10, 1990, pp. 23–4; and Daniel Wolfe, "Talking Two Mother Tongues", Rev. of Meatless Days, New York Times Book Review, June 4, 1989, p. 30.</ref> An edition of the book, with an introduction by Kamila Shamsie, was published in the Penguin Women Writers series in 2018.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Her 1992 The Rhetoric of English India was well received in scholarly 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 an "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."<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> However, an historian took Suleri to task for the "casual manner in which she forms important generalizations without benefit of hard data". 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. No 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."<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter's Elegy was published in 2003. The book is a tribute to her father, the political journalist Z. A. Suleri, who was known as Pip for his "patriotic and preposterous disposition". It also incorporates the story of Suleri's marriage to her husband.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Henry Louis Gates Jr. has described Suleri as "a postcolonial Proust to Rushdie's phantasmagorical Pynchon."<ref name="Sanga"/>

Published works

• Meatless Days. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989, Template:ISBN
• The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992, Template:ISBN
• Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter's Elegy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003, Template:ISBN

Personal life

In 1993, Suleri married Austin Goodyear (c. 1920–2005) of the Goodyear family.<ref name="Niaz">Template:Cite news</ref> Goodyear had three children from his first marriage to Louisa Robins (1920–1992),<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> the granddaughter of Thomas Robins Jr;<ref name="MrsThomasRobinsJr">Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref> the eldest, Grace Rumsey Goodyear (b. 1941), is married to Franklin D. Roosevelt III (b. 1938), the grandson of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Suleri and Goodyear remained married until his death on August 14, 2005.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Goodyear died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease on March 20, 2022, at her home in Bellingham, Washington, at the age of 68.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

External links

• Sara Suleri: An Overview, scholars.nus.edu.sg. Accessed 30 March 2022.