Graphic Migrations

Precarity and Gender in India and the Diaspora

"Kavita Daiya’s book makes significant contributions to the field of Partition Studies. It links Partition Studies to contemporary crisis of secularism in India and resurrects the secular as a useful category to resist the current erasure of minority rights in India. Daiya is mapping new archives of Partition memory and exploring new materials from print and digital culture. Finally, her project makes productive connections between the mid-twentieth population displacements and the contemporary production of refugees in civil wars in countries like Syria and Yemen. She also establishes solidarities between South Asian refugees with refugees produced by other conflicts in Asia like the Korean and Vietnam wars."
—South Asian Review

"Graphic Migrations incorporates a unique interdisciplinary approach...which enables Daiya to map various representations of post-partition South Asian and South Asian American refugee and immigrant experiences. This representational mapping, which draws widely from film, literature, oral histories, visual culture, and new media from present-day India and the South Asian American diaspora, reveals a contentious discursive field.... Daiya’s representational mapping also offers the promise of comparative interpretation of other refugee and immigrant experiences emerging from forced displacement by militarized neocolonial border adjustments in 20th-century Southeast Asia.... Recommended."
—Choice

“Kavita Daiya has written a panoramic study of post-Partition studies. The remnants of the mid-twentieth-century Partition may be the debris of long colonial histories, but these very remnants return to haunt the suffering memories of migrants and minorities who are frequently disfigured as enemies ‘within’ or displaced as enemies ‘without.’ Daiya argues that post-Partition remnants are dangerously weaponized by ethno-nationalists, who weaponize traditions of the sacred in order to demean the democratic ambitions of secular pluralism. Daiya’s wide scholarly purview ranges across literature, cinema, graphic novels, and the creative arts, as she assembles a rich archive of contemporary reflection and critical relevance.” — Homi K. Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University

“Kavita Daiya’s reading of decolonization is centered on the vast and heterogeneous cultural production generated by Partition’s aftermath in South Asia and its diaspora. Graphic Migrations opens up new and exciting vistas for Partition studies. It also enhances our contemporary understanding of statelessness, ‘sub-altern’ secularism, gender, and precarity by viewing this historical catastrophe within a brilliantly conceptualized global framework of connections and resonances.”—Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Global Distinguished Professor of English, New York University

“Graphic Migrations represents an important and unique contribution to the field of Partition studies specifically, and to the fields of postcolonial studies, memory studies, and diaspora studies more generally. Daiya advances impor- tant debates concerning religion, secularity, and subalternity, with insights into the crisis of secularism and how the Partition prompts a rethinking of the refu- gee. The book’s archive is at once expansive and eclectic, encompassing visual culture, film, novels, media, and digital memory projects. This is a beautifully written, finely argued, and original study.”—Asha Nadkarni, Associate Professor of English, University of Massachusetts Amherst

“This is a sophisticated and provocative set of reflections on migration stories as sites for alternative understandings of the secular at a time when the term itself is under scrutiny. Bringing together a fascinating variety of texts with connections to South Asia and its Partition histories, Daiya offers deft and sophisticated readings which speak to the emergence of what she calls ‘the subaltern secular,’ a resource for hope in our difficult century. Graphic Migrations is an important contribution to both South Asian literature and migration studies.” —Priyamvada Gopal, Professor in Postcolonial Studies, University of Cambridge

“Daiya constructs a dazzling mosaic of Partition images—drawn from the intimate literary, graphic, and visual representations of gendered statelessness, precarity, and survival—to produce a new motto for the decade: the subaltern secular. Weaving critical theory, oral history, digital humanities, and more traditional literary and filmic texts, along with graphic novels and emerging digital forms, Graphic Migrations is a journey into a new historiography of an old, previously underexplored trauma.”—Henry Schwarz, Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University