Transcultural Memory and Globalised Modernity in Contemporary Indo-English Novels (Media and Cultural Memory/Medien Und Kulturelle Erinnerung, 20)

This book places transcultural memory in the South Asian cultural and literary context. Divided into two parts, the book first defines transcultural memory in the age of globalised modernity both as a theory and social practice. Then it examines contemporary Indo-English novels from India and Pakistan with the theoretical and methodological tool of transcultural memory to shed new light on the connection between memory and modernity, and memory and South Asian cultures in the wake of new social and political transformations on the Indian subcontinent. A special focus on commemorative tropes in the novels not only show the possibility of a dialogue with different versions of the past, but also how such a dialogue shapes processes of remembrance between and beyond borders. Hence, the books comes up with alternative ways of reading the Indo-English novels, divesting the concept of (trans)cultural memory from its Euro- centrism and claiming it as equally significant in comprehending the new configurations of memory and modernity in non-Western locations. Contents 1 Introduction: Rewriting the Past – Memory, History and the Indo-English Novel of the 1980s and 1990s Part One 2 Memory and Transculturality 2.1 From cultural memory to transcultural memory 2.2 Transcultural memory as a social practice in the age of globalised modernity/modernities 2.3 Rethinking memory and modernity/modernities 2.4 Towards a theory of transcultural memory 3 Literature and Transcultural Memory 3.1 Rethinking memory and literature 3.2 The ‘novel of memory’ and East-West encounters 3.3 The transcultural novel of memory Part Two 4 Novels of Political Memories: Partition and Reconciliation 4.1 ‘Chutneyfying’ Memory and History: Mapping transcultural India in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) 4.1.1 Introduction: Re-membering private and public histories 4.1.2 ‘Pickling Time’: The transcultural saga of India 4.1.3 Between history and memory: Re-collecting cultural plurality in the subcontinent 4.1.4 Pakistan and purity: partition and beyond 4.1.5 The art of chutney, history, memory and autobiography 4.1.6 Conclusion: ‘Chutney’ as a commemorative trope 4.2 ‘Imaginary nations’: Storytelling and transcultural recollection in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1988) 4.2.1 Introduction: Partition as a historical predicament 4.2.2 Ethnic divisions in the name of nationalism: The role of storytelling and transcultural memory 4.2.3 Storytelling as a mode of intertwined memories and histories of India’s dispersed ethnicities 4.2.4 Religious and ethnic fissures: ‘Cracking’ as leitmotif in Lenny’s transcultural recollections 4.2.5 Stories from rural areas in the wake of the national movement in the cities 4.2.6 Caught in the myths of ‘national borders’: Genocide, eviction and loot as the order of the day 4.2.7 Beyond the borders of ‘imaginary nations’: The triumph of the Ice- Candy Man over political barriers 4.2.8 Conclusion: Re-membering as reconciliation 4.3 Inventing or recalling the contact Zones? Transcultural spaces in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988) 4.3.1 Introduction: Shadows of imaginary and remembered spaces 4.3.2 A trip down memory lane: Representation of space in the vicissitudes of time 4.3.3 Cross-cultural practices of imagining space and place 4.3.4 Tracking the past in the present: The events of 1964 as a struggle with silence 4.3.5 ‘Going Away’ and ‘Coming Home’ – Seeking transcultural spaces on a disintegrating subcontinent 4.3.6 Conclusion: Beyond the spatial metaphors of ethnic hatred 5 Novels of Private Memories: Through the Looking Glass 5.1 Fictions of transcultural memory: Zulfikar Ghose’s The Triple Mirror of the Self (1992) as an imaginative reconstruction of the self in multiple worlds 5.1.1 Introduction: An autobiographical novel of individual and collective memory 5.1.2 Exile and return and the literary imagination of Ghose 5.1.3 The fictions of transcultural memory: Reconstructing the self in a world-within-a-world 5.1.4 Phase one: Recollecting entangled histories of the self 5.1.5 Phase two: Translating the self amid cultural diversity and interdependence 5.1.6 Phase three: Re-discovering India as a landmark of time and memory 5.1.7 Conclusion: Modernity, memory and self-identity 5.2 Phantoms of generational memory: A transcultural portrait of family histories in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Shards of Memory (1995) 5.2.1 Introduction: India and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala 5.2.2 Travelling into the past of four generations 5.2.3 Spectres of generational memory: The construction of generation in the age of travelling cultures 5.2.4 The Master as myth and memory over generations 5.2.5 The location of transcultural memory in Henry’s family chronicle 5.2.6 Conclusion: The riddle of generational memory 5.3 Between Calcutta and London: The ambivalence of transcultural remembering in Sunetra Gupta’s Memories of Rain (1992) 5.3.1 Introduction: A tale of two cities 5.3.2 ‘Ambivalence of things past’ 5.3.3 ‘Countries of the mind’: Imaginary homelands and beyond 5.3.4 From the prism of transcultural memories: The enigma of the arrival and departure 5.3.5 Conclusion: Travel and cultural translation Part Three 6 Rerouting and Remapping: The Indo-English Novel of Transcultural Memory after 2000 6.1 Dialectics of ‘roots and routes’ in Siddhartha Deb’s The Point of Return (2002) 6.2 Mnemonic maps and scraps in Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography (2002) 7 Conclusion: ‘Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories’ Bibliography Primary Sources Secondary Sources Online Sources Film Sources Index

Im Kontext der kulturwissenschaftlichen Gedächtnisforschung widmet sich diese interdisziplinär ausgerichtete Reihe dem Verhältnis von Medien und kultureller Erinnerung. Die hier vorgestellten Studien behandeln die ganze Bandbreite der durch Medien konstruierten, tradierten und verbreiteten Erinnerung. Schrift und Bild, das Kino und die ‘neuen’ digitalen Medien, Intermedialität, Transmedialität und Remediation sowie die sozialen, zunehmend transnationalen und transkulturellen, Kontexte der mediatisierten Erinnerung gehören zu den Forschungsinteressen der Reihe. Ziel ist es, eine internationale Plattform für die interdisziplinäre Medien- und Gedächtnisforschung zu schaffen. Eingereichte Manuskripte werden im peer review Verfahren durch externe Experten begutachtet.

Den Herausgebern, Astrid Erll (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main) und Ansgar Nünning (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen) ist ein internationaler Beirat aus renommierten Wissenschaftlern assoziiert:

• Aleida Assmann (Universität Konstanz)
• Mieke Bal (University of Amsterdam)
• Vita Fortunati (University of Bologna)
• Richard Grusin (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
• Udo Hebel (Universität Regensburg)
• Andrew Hoskins (University of Glasgow)
• Wulf Kansteiner (Binghamton University)
• Alison Landsberg (George Mason University)
• Claus Leggewie (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen)
• Jeffrey Olick (University of Virginia)
• Susannah Radstone (University of South Australia)
• Ann Rigney (Utrecht University)
• Michael Rothberg (University of Illinois)
• Werner Sollors (Harvard University)
• Frederic Tygstrup (University of Copenhagen)
• Harald Welzer (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen)

This interdisciplinary series addresses the relation between media and cultural memory. Its publications study how media construct, store, and disseminate memory. The series' focus is on different media and technologies, such as text and image, the cinema and the new digital media, on transmediality, intermediality, and remediation, as well as on the social (and increasingly transnational and transcultural) contexts of mediated memory. The aim of the series is to provide a vibrant international platform for research and scholarly exchange in the field of media and memory studies. Manuscripts submitted to the series are peer reviewed by expert referees This study develops a theory of transcultural memory in relation to the recent phenomena of globalised modernity. It aims to address the connection between memory and culture, and memory and modernity in contemporary Indo-English novels to shed new light on memory cultures in the South Asian context. Develops a theory of transcultural memory in relation to the recent phenomena of globalised modernity. This book addresses the connection between memory and culture, and memory and modernity in contemporary Indo-English novels to shed light on memory cultures in the South Asian context. Nadia Butt. Originally Presented As The Author's Thesis (doctoral)--universität Frankfurt Am Main, 2009. Includes Bibliographical References (pages 185-202) And Index.