Memory, Nationalism, and Narrative in Contemporary South Asia
"Memory, Nationalism, and Narrative in Contemporary South Asia" investigates how English-language fiction, Hindi cinema, and postcolonial urban planning have provided surprisingly ambivalent and deeply controversial responses to the twinned compulsions of memory and forgetting on the Indian subcontinent. J. Edward Mallot examines how Eurocentric assumptions about trauma and testimony need to be challenged in South Asian contexts. In literature, writers such as Salman Rushdie, Romesh Gunesekera, Michael Ondaatje, and Amitav Ghosh turn to unexpected strategies of encoding and understanding the past. Mallot argues that these controversies and strategies expand memory studies in new, provocative directions.
Bio
J. Edward Mallot is an associate professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University.
Praise for this book
Mallot's study is not only a thorough study of the pervasive nature of memory as it shapes contemporary South Asia, but also an invaluable exploration of the ways in which memory's empire is continually challenged and re-imagined: an erudite, sensitive, and very readable book.
Dave Gunning University of Birmingham
