Poetics and Politics of Memory/Trauma-Scapes in South Asian Literatures

This seminar extends an invitation to scholars, translators and creative writers to reflect upon the nascent theoretical, fictional and historical interventions in the 'interstitial' space of Memory Studies and South Asian Literatures. This seminar seeks provocative works that negotiate the poetics and politics of memoryscapes - the culturally and historically alienated memories - in the literatures of Global South. Through critical/creative explorations of religious, cultural, ethnic and linguistic borders across Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Nepal, we will collectively recall the ways Toni Morrison identifies memory as "the deliberate act of remembering, a form of willed creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was-- that is research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way” ("Memory, Creation and Writing" 385). This panel also extends its invitation for theoretical deliberations into recent and canonical scholarship in memory studies including, but not limited to, Michael Rothberg's 'Multidirectional Memory', Stef Craps's 'Postcolonial/Transcultural Memory and Trauma', Marianne Hirsch's 'Post-memory', Neil J. Smelser's 'Post-traumatic memory', Cathy Caruth's 'Trauma Theory' and Dominick LaCapra's 'Reliving Trauma'.