Fatima Rahman

Published by admin on February 27, 2026

Fatima Rahman (she/her) is a second-year doctoral student in the English program at the Graduate Center. Her research interests include interrogating representations of the state, nationalisms, and revolutionary possibilities in postcolonial literature, including the diasporic community whose cohesion (or lack thereof) can complicate or contribute to the longue durée of ongoing decolonization. In Spring 2025, Fatima will be teaching World Humanities I (1500 BCE until the 1700s CE) at the City College of New York. A major text covered in this course is Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West, whose historical and political content echoes into the present. The CACI program will assist in exploring contextual and foundational details through which the novel’s greater significance may be articulated and clarified for undergraduate students. A question debated during class, for example, involves the revolutionary character of Sun Wukong invoked by Mao Zedong. Some students felt otherwise, emphasizing Wukong’s absurdity and condescension. To help promote student understanding during such discussions, it would be useful to learn more about the perhaps hypothetical but nonetheless differing cultural implications or perceptions of Journey to the West in the Ming era compared to the more modern Maoist era.