Atelier 30 : Postcolonial Literatures and Arts (SEPC)
Responsables de l’atelier
Corinne Bigot
Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès
corinne.bigot@univ-tlse2.fr
Suhasini Vincent
Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas
suhasini.vincent@u-paris2.fr
Martina Balassone
Sorbonne Université
martina.balassone@gmail.com
Dwelling on the Border: Narrative Representations of Borderscapes in Rawi Hage’s Carnival and Rabih Alameddine’s The Wrong End of the Telescope
In my contribution, I will argue that Rawi Hage’s Carnival and Rabih Alameddine’s The Wrong End of the Telescope, while both concerned with the topics of immigration and border crossings, aim to subvert the usual tropes of migration literature. In keeping with their diasporic, rather than exilic, positioning, Hage and Alameddine choose to set their novels within the physical or metaphorical margins of the Western nation: the urban underground and the refugee camp, respectively. A comparative analysis of these two works will therefore allow me to simultaneously address both the physical frontiers crossed by migrants, and the invisible social boundaries that migrants inevitably face after the border crossing. My approach will not only echo current discussions on borderscapes, by reflecting upon the relationship between bordering processes and the ‘where’ of the border, but also highlight the authors’ disorienting portrayal of the West. Though both fictions are written in English and published in North America, the way in which Hage and Alameddine construct space allows their readers to experience firsthand what Homi Bhabha calls “the unhomely moment” of postcoloniality – that is to say, the disruption of progress-oriented conceptions of the nation and the West at the hands of their projected outsiders. This feat is largely accomplished precisely thanks to their choice of setting: the narrative representation of the borderscape inevitably raises questions regarding the presumed stability of current world borders, by highlighting their changing and moving nature, while at the same time allowing for a greater focus on the lived experience of those who dwell in these liminal spaces. Rather than recounting the encounter between the West and its Others, the two authors deliberately choose to represent the connections between different marginalized groups that are enabled by the borderscape, thus effectively “provincializing” the West.
Biographie
Martina Balassone is a doctoral student in Anglophone Studies at Sorbonne Université (Paris IV), where she is working on her thesis The Literature of the Lebanese Diaspora. From the Anglophone World to Multilingualism under the supervision of professor Alexis Tadié. Her research focuses on postcolonial Anglophone literature, with a particular interest in the Middle East and a penchant for comparativism. In 2022, she obtained a joint Master’s degree in « Filologia Romanza – Études Italiennes » from Sapienza University of Rome and Sorbonne University: her Master’s thesis, in comparative literature, analyzes the process of identity negotiation in the works of Amin Maalouf and Rabih Alameddine
Gina Cesto
Université Paris Nanterre
ginacesto@gmail.com
A Dual Metropolis: London as “contact zone” in Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004)
Andrea Levy’s novel Small Island opens on words which suggest a form of cultural frontier: “I thought I’d been to Africa. (…) ‘You’re not usually a silly girl, Queenie Buxton (…) but you did not go to Africa, you merely went to the British Empire exhibition, as thousands of others did’” (2004, 1). Based on her own family history, Levy’s novel reassembles the trajectory of her Jamaican parents who settled in England in 1948. The novel mainly reflects on the viewpoint of three characters –Queenie, the white landlady housing Caribbean migrants; Gilbert, a former RAF soldier and Queenie’s lodger; and Hortense, Gilbert’s wife who married him to escape life in Jamaica, only to find herself living in a delusional “England which had been planted in [her] childhood consciousness” (Lamming, 1983). This paper intends to show how Levy rewrites London as a fictional yet historical space which allows the author to reconnect with a necessary transtemporal timeline. Levy divides her novel into two different time periods entitled “1948” and “Before” which entera dialogue with our 21stcentury reality and understanding of colonial dynamics. Although Hortense and Gilbert both experiment the metropolis in and as “colonial landscapes and subjects” (Hall, 2017), the juxtaposition of narratives told either by Hortense, Queenie or Gilbert questions and complicates the frontier established between the black migrant and the white host. London is thus presented as a “contact zone” (Mary-Louise Pratt, 1991), a place of renegotiation of the Windrush storytelling through Levy’s own rewriting of the metropolis (John McLeod, 2004).Small Islandredefines cultural borders and delineatesa new territory which reframesLevy’s childhoodmemoriesas a black child growingup in London in the 1960s, putting them in perspective within a larger family history set in the 1940s at a time when migrants were supposedly welcome.
Biographie
Gina Cesto is a PhD Student and Teaching Fellow in Anglophone Literature at the University of Paris Nanterre. She works under the supervision of Professor Françoise Král and specializes in Postcolonial and Diasporic Studies, more specifically in Caribbean Studies. Her dissertation explores the role of migrant novels, photography and museology in the restitution of the history of the Windrush since 1948 up to the Windrush Scandal (2018). She focuses on the novels of Andrea Levy and George Lamming, both discussing Britain’s relation to its Caribbean counterparts and Caribbean adaptation to British metropolitan life.
Myrto Charvalia
Université Paris Nanterre
mkcharval@parisnanterre.fr
“fou/nd africa un/der water:” From Loss to Re-membering (the mother-tongue) in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!
In NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! the abducted African cries out generating a “bodily-speech” (Moïse 139); situated in a state of irreversible dislocation in the “womb abyss” (Glissant 6), the “water parts/ [and] the oba sobs” enunciating the “song of an untold story” (Philip 59, 191). Like Other Persephones, NourbeSe’s poetic voices are delineated in the process of losing soil and soul: their mother country and mother tongue. With Zong! NourbeSe proposes a text that surpasses the standardized borders of English, motions to “rotten English” (Ken Saro-Wiwa), and gravitates toward multilingual poetry entering a new space of language related to the highly hybridized, even to the untranslatable (Emily Apter). By surpassing the very limits of Gregson v. Gilbert court case—the “mother document” of Zong! (Philip 200)—NourbeSe manages to poetically reconstruct the skeleton key for “the door of no return” (Dionne Brand), and to reclaim “the bones” of the lost ancestor; as she claims: “Haunted by ‘generations of skulls and spirits,’ I want the bones” (201). In this paper I propose to demonstrate how linguistic and bodily dislocation contributes to the quest for belonging and, eventually, to reclamation. By tracing the spectro-geographic, liminal instances of Zong!’s hybrid text, I hope to explore this finding of “Africa underwater,” as a metonymy for the loss and reclamation of a language-related identity and of the traces of a lost genealogy cut short by slavery.
Biographie
Myrto Charvalia is a PhD candidate at Université Paris Nanterre under the supervision of Prof. Françoise Král. Her work focuses on the representations of the “specter” in the works of Toni Morrison, M. NourbeSe Philip, Brit Bennett, Jesmyn Ward and Toni Cade Bambara. Her research interests include trauma studies, memory, as well as the use of myth in contemporary literature. She regularly publishes her short stories on online Greek literary magazines and has translated Esi Edugyan’s novel Washington Black (2018) in Greek (ed. Gutenberg, 2024).
Narjis El Qarchaoui
Université de Toulon/IUT Bordeaux
narjis.elqarchaoui7@gmail.com
“Porous Borders and Liminal Spaces in Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide (1994)”
Richard Flanagan’s debut novel Death of a River Guide1 (1994) is narrated by Aljaz Cosini, a river guide drowning in the Tasmanian Franklin River and having visions/flashbacks of both his life and his ancestor’s lives, exploring the wonders of collective consciousness and multiple memories. While in agonizing pain, the character discovers his convict and Aboriginal blood and ponders on Tasmanian history through the exposure of his family’s lineage. In my paper, I will attempt to show how the exploration of the intermediate space between life and death reflects the porosity of borders within the narrative and constructs discourses of hybridity. The metaphoric nature of the river, which designs both physical and symbolic borders, extends to issues of space, considering that the river represents the transition and fluidity between different states and experiences. I shall demonstrate that the tenuous boundaries between reality and imagination, the past and the present, and between the characters’ lives are blurred to explore and represent the porous nature of borders, both physical and imaginary. Furthermore, through the characterization of the Franklin river, the novel explores the boundaries between different literary genres with the use of unconventional narrative forms, such as flashbacks and digressions, which challenges the traditional boundaries of linear storytelling. In my paper, I aim to interrogate issues of borders and spaces by examining their porosity in Death of a River Guide through the exploration of themes such as the fluidity of identity, the complexity of the human experience, and the different realities the main character is thrust into.
Biographie
Narjis El Qarchaoui is a fourth-year PhD student at the University of Toulon, supervised by Professor Salhia Ben-Messahel. She is affiliated with the Babel Laboratory and holds a teaching position at the University of Bordeaux (IUT Bordeaux). Her research focuses on the interdisciplinary field of literary anthropology within the context of Richard Flanagan’s novels. The objective of her thesis, titled “The Novelist as Anthropologist: Richard Flanagan’s Fiction,” is to explore the interwoven links between literature, anthropology, and history.
Annalena Geisler
École Normale Supérieure de Lyon & Leopold Franzens Universität, Innsbruck, Austria
annalena.geisler@ens-lyon.fr
“Rethinking borders as markers of relationships in Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand”
“Asses! A border stops nothing. It is a bridge between two connected parts. Between night and day. Life and death… A border is a horizon. Where two worlds meet. And embrace.”1 These lines hint at the prominent role which borders play in Geetanjali Shree’s prizewinning novel Tomb of Sand (20182). The narrative is loosely structured around the personal journey of 80-year-old Ma who overcomes her depression, moves in with her daughter, strikes up a friendship with a Hijra, and liberates herself from various societal conventions. Ma also embarks on a physical journey to Pakistan with her daughter to confront her traumatic memories of Partition. Despite this apparent teleology, the novel also develops horizontally, blurring narrative borders by integrating the perspectives of multiple characters, animals, and sometimes nature itself. Accordingly, the novel has been described as encompassing “youth and age, male and female, family and nation into a kaleidoscopic whole”3 that challenges the rigidity of borders on various scales. At the same time, Shree is eager to emphasize the physical and societal division lines which contemporary Indian society grapples with, and draws parallels between the fissures in Ma’s family and in India as a nation. Drawing from border theory (Henk van Houtum; Chiara Brambilla; Thomas Nail), I would like to examine the tension between the ubiquitousness of borders that reinforce binaries (we/they, good/bad, Indian/foreign) and Shree’s relational representation of modern India in which everyone and everything is connected to one another. This will lead me to show how Shree invites her readers to rethink the notion of borders in representing them as markers of relationships rather than divisions.
Biographie
Annalesa Geisler is a joint PhD candidate at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (France) and the Leopold Franzens Universität, Innsbruck (Austria). As a member of the joint research unit Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités (IHRIM), she works under the guidance of Professor Vanessa Guignery and Professor Helga Ramsey-Kurz. Her research focuses on the representation of Hindu nationalism in contemporary novels from the Indian subcontinent.
Natacha Lasorak
ENS Lyon
natacha.lasorak@ens-lyon.fr
Crossing Thresholds, Drawing Borders in Madhuri Vijay’s The Far Field (2019)
Kashmir has been a contested territory between India and Pakistan for more than fifty years, and the area’s traumatic history and current tensions have been and are still represented in Indian literature. In Agha Shahid Ali’s words in 1997, Kashmir became a “Country Without a Post Office”[1]; two decades later, in Madhuri Vijay’s first and only novel to date, it turns into The Far Field (2019), a remote place where military occupation and Hindu-Muslim tensions turn everyday life into a dangerous game of hide-and-seek. Set in Bangalore and Kashmir, Vijay’s novel tells the story of a young woman who sets on a quest to find a long-lost friend of her deceased mother’s in the northern mountains of India. As Shalini enters a territory that is at once foreign and national, she is both a friend and an invador. Unaware as she seems that her religious and cultural belonging labels her as Other, she penetrates homes sensing both hospitality and hostility (or hostipitality, as Jacques Derrida would phrase it[2]), bringing political matters into the intimacy of the households in the process. As a boarder, Shalini dwells on the border[3]. Yet rather than blurring the lines between people, Shalini’s crossings unveil them in a clumsy, if not ouright imprudent way. The story, therefore, does not celebrate a metaphorical Third Space (Homi K. Bhabha) or the possibilities of transculturalism between North and South India, Muslim and Hindu, rural and urban, as much as it draws symbolical lines between people. This paper will attempt to explore the ways in which these “strange encounters” (Sara Ahmed) might lead to the crossing of frontiers but often reinforce the impermeability of lines.
Biographie
Dr. Natacha Lasorak completed her PhD in 2023 in École Normale Supérieure, Lyon. Her thesis was entitled: “Between the lines: the concept of home in contemporary anglophone literature from the Indian subcontinent”. She is a member of the joint research unit Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités (IHRIM) and the Laboratoire Héritage & Création dans le Texte et l’Image (HCTI). She works on contemporary anglophone novels from the Indian subcontinent.
Sabine Lauret-Taft
Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté
lauret.sabine@gmail.com
“Exploring Porous Borders in Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Gun Island”
In Ghosh’s fiction the reader often comes across the recurring motifs of displacement and migration. In The Hungry Tide and Gun Island in particular – a diptych which juxtaposes India, Italy and the U.S. – diasporic characters, refugees and migrating animals come together bringing to the fore water borders. With the natural backdrop of the mangrove forest of the Sundarbans, described in The Hungry Tide as the “trailing threads of India’s fabric,” both narratives navigate porous borders marked by transformation and violence. This paper means to explore how the novels rely on an aesthetics of uncertainty. In the Sundarbans, water constantly reshapes the landscape and dictates the life of people and animals alike. The uncertainty of this terrain is echoed by the fragile ecosystem of the Venetian estuary in Italy. It is also mirrored by the dreamlike experience of characters like Kanai and Deen. The realism that imbues the life of the refugees intersects with the uncanny of climate disruptions. Building on ecocritical readings of the novels, this paper will highlight how porous borders bring into focus the life of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances and the necessity to question certainty in our understanding of the world.
Biographie
Sabine Lauret-Taft is an Associate Professor at the University of Bourgogne Franche-Comté. She completed a joint PhD at University Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle and the University of Madras in 2010. Her dissertation focused on the notions of voices, language and discourse in Amitav Ghosh’s novels. Her main research interests are Southeast-Asian fiction, conflicted spaces and territories, diasporic cultures, and the use of archival material in fiction. She has published articles on authors like Amitav Ghosh and Romesh Gunesekera. Her most recent paper explored “the History of the Bangladesh War of Independence Told by Women in Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age.” (Commonwealth Essays and Studies, Vol. 43, No. 1, Nov 2020)
Anne-Sophie Letessier
Université Jean Monnet-Saint Etienne
Against / outside Colonial Conceptualizations: ‘terristory’ in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies (2020)
The title of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s novel, Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, is inspired by the account of pioneering in British immigrant Susanna Moodie’s 1852 Roughing it in the Bush, a memoire which non-Indigenous authors, like Margaret Atwood, have contributed to establish as part of the CanLit canon. The subtitle is programmatic in so far as it introduces the text as a remedy to settler literature and the colonial conceptions of the land it has informed. Noopiming (the Anishinaabemowin word for “in the bush”) refers less to a delineated territory and to the opposition between cleared and uncleared land, than to a “terristory,” a word coined by Warren Cariou to “conceptualize the unity of land and narrative” and which he defines as “a plural and ongoing set of relations.” Understood thus, the narrative does not welcome all readers in the same way for it never attempts to bridge the gap between Nishnaabewin and “whiteness.” Simpson, in her essays, insists that her texts be read not as merely against colonial conceptualizations, which would reduce them to a narrative of resistance, but outside them, that is, as instances of epistemological emancipation. This paper proposes the ponder the reception of the novel by a non-Indigenous reader positioned as an outsider and a stranger through the fraught notion of recognition.
Biographie
Anne-Sophie Letessier is a senior lecturer at the University Jean Monnet-Saint Etienne, where she is affiliated to the research group ECLLA (Etudes du Contemporain en Littératures, Langues, Arts). Her PhD dissertation, which focused on the politics and poetics of intermediality in Canadian novelist Jane Urquhart’s landscape writing, won the 2018 SEPC Award for best PhD thesis in the field of postcolonial studies. She has presented and published papers on issues relating to the perception and representation of space in contemporary English Canadian literature.
Jessica Maufort
Université libre de Bruxelles
jessica.maufort@ulb.be
Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s Gothic Ecotone in The Spawning Grounds
Canadian author Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s novel entitled The Spawning Grounds (2016) takes as its premise the pivotal role of the Pacific sockeye salmon’s inland migration in the sustainability of this fish and the ecosystems around spawning pools. The salmon not only represents a key element in the local food chain: it also features prominently in creation stories of the Secwepemc (Shuswap) and Nlaka’pamux (Thompson/Couteau) First Nations of British Columbia. Since the mid-19th-century gold rush along the Fraser River, agribusiness and real estate projects have jeopardised the viability of these waters and the possibility for the salmon to swim upstream and reproduce. Set in a rural village along the fictional Lightning River, the novel focuses on the descendants of a European gold seeker, Hannah and Brandon Robertson, who, together with the Shuswap community, help the salmon reach the spawning grounds. This “borderland” (Moe 27) between the human (land) and salmon (water) suddenly morphs into an “ecotone”, or “contact zone” where two biological communities overlap and create “assemblages” (Haraway When 217), when, in a magic-realist-like moment, a salmon spirit takes possession of Brandon’s body, leaving the boy’s spirit trapped in the river. This ecotonal zone thus carries Gothic overtones: through such exchange of alleged opposites and the doppelgänger figure, the author makes the human/salmon assemblage a tangible and life-threatening reality. This transgression of species boundaries draws on First Nations stories of salmon/human metamorphoses and life/death circularity associated with this semelparous fish. Re-enacting an Indigenous story, the “salmon-as-Brandon” aims to provoke an apocalyptic storm to put an end to humans’ pollution of the river. In brief, the author’s ecoGothic epitomizes Anna Tsing’s observation that “human nature is an interspecies relationship,” thereby debunking human exceptionalism (144). By favouring transformative fluidity over rigid boundaries, Anderson-Dargatz’s gothic ecotone casts the salmon and human as “companion species” bound in co-constitutive, co-emerging kinship relations, in an echo to Indigenous non-dualistic worldviews, while retaining their respective “significant otherness” (Haraway).
Biographie
Dr Jessica Maufort specialises in postcolonial ecocriticism, ecopoetics, and magic realism, a triangulation her PhD thesis at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB; 2018) examined in Indigenous and non-Indigenous fiction from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Canada. After completing a F.R.S-FNRS postdoctoral fellowship at ULB, she was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Edinburgh (2023). As a research associate at ULB, she is pursuing her research on the ecopoetics of trauma in the Anthropocene. Related research interests include zoocriticism, material ecocriticism, affect studies, and ecospirituality. Jessica recently co-edited a volume on post-apartheid South African drama (Brill, 2020), a special issue on “New Scholarship” in The Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies (2021), and special issue on “Voicing Absences/Presences in a Damaged World” in English Text Construction (2022).
Aurore Montheil
Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès
aurore.montheil@orange.fr
Crossing the Frontiers of Marginality in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017)
In their seminal work The Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft and his colleagues challenge the conventional understanding of marginality as a spatial or social phenomenon that excludes certain individuals from a defined centre (Ashcroft et al., 2002). They argue that the marginality experienced by those belonging to postcolonial cultures, in comparison to the Western centre, should be embraced rather than shunned. This redefinition of marginality is not about creating a new centre of subjectivity, but rather about recognizing marginality as an integral part of social experience. Hence, they cross the frontiers which delineate marginality. This concept is vividly illustrated in Arundhati Roy’s novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Roy, 2017). The narrative centres around places and characters that are typically marginalized – the Khwabgah where the hijras live, the cemetery where the hijra Anjum decides to reside and create the Jannat guesthouse, and characters who are socially marginalized due to their gender identities, religions, or castes. Rather than being sidelined, their statuses are highlighted and celebrated. Their grotesque and sometimes obscene depictions are combined with elements that magnify and distort our typical understanding of marginality. This fusion not only challenges the readers’ preconceived notions but also introduces a fresh perspective on how they perceive these individuals. The novel blurs the boundaries of marginality. This paper aims to delve into how Roy’s novel crosses the frontiers of marginality to redefine marginality. It will examine the novel’s counter-representation of the margins, acknowledging the processes that stigmatize (Goffman, 1963) and render some individuals invisible(Le Blanc, 2009), confining them within the boundaries of marginality. The paper will also explore how Roy’s stylistic and linguistic transgressions challenge these boundaries and celebrate these individuals.
Biographie
Aurore Montheil is a PhD student at the University of Toulouse Jean-Jaurès (CAS) whose work focuses on contemporary Indian literature. She is writing a PhD dissertation, entitled “Politics and Aesthetics of the Obscene in Five Contemporary Indian Women Writers’ Novels” supervised by Héliane Ventura and Vanessa Guignery. She has been teaching at the INSPE of Pyrénées Atlantiques since 2019. Her research interests include Indian literature and culture, postcolonial literatures, decoloniality, gender studies, feminism, and the ethics and aesthetics of the obscene in contemporary Indian literature written by English-speaking women writers.
Caroline Sarré
Université d’Orléans
cmasarre@yahoo.fr
Shell Shock: Hybrid identities and Fluid Borders in Margaret Atwood’s short story “Metempsychosis”
This paper concerns itself with the hybrid identities which arise from the appropriation of transnational spaces and places. It aims to examine differences between landscapes and settlers and the trauma and double vision or even multiple visions settlers experience when they try to attune themselves to their new surroundings.
In the short story “Metempsychosis”, the protagonist is reincarnated in human-form, becoming a metaphorical settler who takes up residence inside a new body after living life as a snail. There is a redefining of boundaries on all fronts which takes place throughout the acclimatization process as the snail tries to adapt to their new life, sexuality and body. This process is a long and challenging one. The protagonist has to go through the various stages of grief and acceptance about their own loss of former identity before being able to fully embrace their new persona by crossing into the confines of new anatomical borders and becoming accustomed to a new skin. I will be looking at how the settler’s perspective of themselves alters within the confines of their new body whose outer shell encases them like a border. Fluidity of perception is revisionary in that self-definition is destabilized and becomes fuzzy as these borders move and are reshaped. The settler is left straddled between two selves and a third middle ground of in-between-ness which is demarcated by the layering of a multiple and interconnecting lattice work of borders within themselves. As reality changes for the reincarnated being, inner turmoil is created by the fact that a sense of self is being redefined in physical, psychological and sexual ways. Through the lens of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault’s works on sexuality and power I will examine whether a sense of cross-cultural empathy is evoked, how identity can change as a result of emerging and altered realities and how new visions and voices can be characterized through alternative topographies of the self.
Biographie
Caroline Sarré is a second year PhD candidate at the University of Orléans under the supervision of Pr. Kerry-Jane Wallart attached to the research unit REMELICE (EA 4709). Her research project in the field of postcolonial literature focuses on survival and resilience in the works of Margaret Atwood within the context of Biopower. She holds a full time PRCE teaching position at the University for the English Department in the Humanities Faculty where she has been working for the last 20 years. She has been involved in a number of different administrative projects related to course development for both the English and Applied Languages Departments and has held different posts of responsibility including the coordination of the Master MEEF anglais (2013-2016 and 2018 to 2023) and LANSAD (2007-2018).
Sandrine Soukaï
Université Gustave Eiffel, Champs-sur-Marne
soukai.sandrine@gmail.com
“Where would we go?”: Transgenerational Uprooting, Refugeeism and Identity Reconstruction in The Parted Earth by A. Enjeti
Nearly 77 years after the bloody partition that split the Indian subcontinent along religious lines, causing one of the largest population displacements in history, the three states born of the successive divisions of 1947 and 1971 – India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – are still suffering the tragic consequences of this divide. The worst effects of this schism are felt by religious minorities who face discrimination, extreme poverty and exclusion sanctioned by national policies. The highly controversial Citizenship Act of 2019 perfectly illustrates this. Partition’s lasting impacts are the focus of Anjali Enjeti’s debut novel The Parted Earth published in 2021. The novel begins in June 1947, relating the story of the teenager Deepa, born into a Hindu family in Delhi, who falls victim to the violence leading up to Partition and eventually migrates to London. The narrative then shifts present-day Atlanta where Shanthi, Deepa’s granddaughter, tries to make sense of her life’s failures by retracing her family’s history and in so doing plunges back into the history of Partition. The Parted Earth is a good example of how the Indian English-language novel is ‘handcuffed’ to Partition (Kabir 2015) in both form and content given its focus on forced migration and border-crossing, refugeeism, loss of home and the often-futile resistance to displacement, issues that are encapsulated in one of the Eurasian characters’ unanswerable question: « Where would we go?” (16). The novel partially answers this question through the character of Shanthi as she purposefully crosses geographical borders – she travels to London and to India – and timelines to trace her family background so as to give direction to her own life. The novel, I argue, adopts a transgenerational perspective which does not prompt a stultifying travel back in time and space, but rather interrogates uprooting and refugeeism (Ghoshal, Revisiting Partition, 2022) and offers alternative (re-)constructions of identity.
Biographie
Sandrine Soukaï is Senior Lecturer of English and postcolonial literatures. She teaches at the Department of Languages at Gustave Eiffel University in Champs-sur-Marne. Her current research focus is on the memorialisation of trauma in arts and literatures; South Asian literatures; the Indian Partition; literatures, cultures, and memories of indentureship and the Indo-Caribbean diaspora; Caribbean literatures. She has published articles and book chapters in English and in French on Indian literatures, Partition, indentureship in the Caribbean. She is EACLALS Secretary.
Agha Shahid Ali, The Country without a Post Office [1997], London, Penguin Books, 2013. ↑
Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality”, Angelaki, translated by Barry Stocker and Forbes Morlock, vol. 5, no. 3, Dec. 2000, p. 3–18, https://doi.org/10.1080/09697250020034706. ↑
The pun is Richard Brown and Gregory Castle’s in “‘The Instinct of the Celibate’: Boarding and Borderlines in ‘The Boarding House’”, Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in Dialogue, edited by Vicki Mahaffey, Syracuse University Press, 2012, p. 144–63. ↑