Decolonizing Gendered Subjectivities in Mohammed Hanif's Rebel English Academy: A Postcolonial Feminist Analysis of Language, Power, and Identity

This is a peer-reviewed research article co-authored by Muhammad Awais, published in Social Science Review Archives (Vol. 4, No. 1, 2026, pp. 6246–6269). The full text is published and hosted by the journal — this page presents the abstract and citation, with a PDF export of this record available via the download button above.

Abstract

This study investigates the construction and decolonization of gendered subjectivities in Mohammed Hanif’s Rebel English Academy through the combined lenses of postcolonial feminism and computational literary analysis. While existing scholarship on Hanif primarily focuses on satire, authoritarian politics, and postcolonial nationalism, relatively little attention has been devoted to the ways language functions as an instrument for negotiating gender, identity, and colonial epistemologies within the novel.

The present study addresses this gap by integrating qualitative textual interpretation with Monte Carlo simulation to model the probabilistic interaction among key thematic constructs. Drawing upon the theoretical contributions of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Homi K. Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault, the study conceptualizes language as a contested ideological space where colonial authority, patriarchal dominance, educational aspiration, and gendered resistance continuously intersect.

The research develops a thematic coding framework comprising six analytical variables: colonial linguistic dominance, female agency, patriarchal authority, educational empowerment, identity negotiation, and linguistic resistance. Narrative episodes from the novel were systematically coded according to these constructs before probabilistic simulation was performed using 10,000 Monte Carlo iterations. Rather than producing empirical claims about readers or society, the simulation estimates the stability and interaction of thematic relationships under coding uncertainty, providing an innovative methodological extension to computational humanities research.

Simulation results indicate that linguistic resistance consistently exhibits the strongest positive relationship with female agency and identity reconstruction across repeated iterations, whereas colonial language ideology demonstrates persistent associations with institutional power and patriarchal authority. Sensitivity analysis identifies educational access as the most influential variable affecting the emergence of decolonized subjectivities.

These findings support postcolonial feminist arguments that language simultaneously operates as an instrument of domination and a medium of resistance. Hanif’s fictional educational space consequently becomes a symbolic arena in which colonial linguistic hierarchies are challenged through everyday acts of learning, translation, negotiation, and gendered self-definition. Methodologically, the article contributes to digital literary studies by demonstrating how Monte Carlo simulation can complement close textual reading without replacing interpretive criticism. The study proposes a replicable framework for integrating computational uncertainty modelling into qualitative literary scholarship while maintaining theoretical fidelity to postcolonial feminist inquiry.

Keywords: Postcolonial feminism, Mohammed Hanif, Rebel English Academy, Monte Carlo simulation, gendered subjectivity, language ideology, identity, computational humanities, decolonization, literary studies.

Authors

Anees Fatima, Muhammad Awais, Shazeen Khalid Raja, Noor ul Ain Shah, Nooriman, and Muhammad Abdullah Butt.

Citation

Anees Fatima, Muhammad Awais, Shazeen Khalid Raja, Noor ul Ain Shah, Nooriman, & Muhammad Abdullah Butt. (2026). Decolonizing Gendered Subjectivities in Mohammed Hanif’s Rebel English Academy: A Postcolonial Feminist Analysis of Language, Power, and Identity. Social Science Review Archives, 4(1), 6246–6269. https://doi.org/10.70670/sra.v4i1.2496

Published version and full text: policyjournalofms.com