Graphic Migrations

Precarity and Gender in India and the Diaspora

Kavita Daiya
Book Cover

PB: $34.95
EAN: 978-1-4399-2025-1
Publication: Oct 20

HC: $110.50
EAN: 978-1-4399-2024-4
Publication: Oct 20

Ebook: $34.95
EAN: 978-1-4399-2026-8
Publication: Oct 20

246 pages
6 x 9
20 halftones

Examines “what remains” in migration stories surrounding the 1947 Partition of India

Read an excerpt from the Introduction (pdf)

Description

In Graphic Migrations, Kavita Daiya provides a literary and cultural archive of refugee stories and experiences to respond to the question “What is created?” after decolonization and the 1947 Partition of India. She explores how stories of Partition migrations shape the political and cultural imagination of secularism and gendered citizenship for South Asians in India and the United States.

Daiya analyzes literature, Bollywood films, Margaret Bourke-White’s photography, digital media, and print culture to show how they memorialize or erase refugee experiences. She also engages oral testimonies of Partition refugees from Hong Kong, South Asia, and North America that address the nation-state, ethnic discrimination, and religious difference. Employing both Critical Refugee Studies and Feminist Postcolonial Studies frameworks, Daiya traces the cultural, affective, and political legacies of the Partition migrations for South Asia and South Asian America.

The precarity generated by modern migration and illuminated in public culture prompts a rethinking of how dominant media represents gendered migrants and refugees. Graphic Migrations demands that we redraw the boundaries of how we tell the story of modern world history, and of how we confront the intricately interwoven, intimate production of statelessness and citizenship across the world’s communities.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Theorizing Subaltern Secularism in the Crisis of Modern Migration
• The Remains of Partition: Art, Storytelling, and Public Culture
• Secularism in Crisis
• Restorying Migration: The Popular Representation of Refugees’ Stories
• Ecologies of Displacement: Migrants, Refugees, Citizens
• #rememberingpartition: Unpacking the Archive

1. “Partition Is Still Happening”: Transmedia and Graphic Secularism
• Drawing Embodied Secularism: Religion and Pedagogical Nationalism in Print Culture
• Gender, Displacement, and Ecologies of Loss in Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Graphic Anthology This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition
• Photojournalism and Bearing Witness in Margaret Bourke-White’s Photography

2. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Witnessing: Refugees, Literary Modernism, and the American Diaspora
• Disability, Patriarchal Violence, and Witnessing in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India
• Migration, Reproductive Femininity, and Citizenship in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers
• Citizenship and Expulsions in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
• Media, Violence, and Reparations in the Conflict Zone

3. Melodrama, Community, and Diasporas in Popular Hindi and Accented Cinema
• Asian Americans and Secular Crisis in Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Delhi-6
• Surviving Gendered Citizenship and Death in Shyam Benegal’s Mammo
• Indo-Pak Intimacy and Border Crossings in Meghna Gulzar’s Raazi and Kabir Khan’s Bajrangi Bhaijaan
• Pakistan, Political Violence, and Failed Intimacies in Sabiha Sumar’s Khamosh Pani
• Conclusion: Performing the Secular, Inventing Peace

4. Transnational Asia, Testimony, and New Media
• Border-Crossing Advertising: Google and Secular Intimacies in the Commercial “Reunion” (2013)
• Intergenerational Memories: Rebuilding Life and Reckoning with Loss in Mumbai, Pune, Hong Kong, and Washington, D.C.
• New Art and Digital Archive Memory Projects: Testimony and Peace

Conclusion: Rethinking Mid-Twentieth-Century Asia and the Present

Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author(s)

Kavita Daiya is Director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, and Associate Professor of English, at George Washington University. She is the author of Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender, and National Culture in Postcolonial India (Temple), and editor of Graphic Narratives from South Asia and South Asian America: Aesthetics and Politics.


Subjects

Asian Studies Literature and Drama Gender Studies

In the Series

  • Asian American History and Culture edited by Cathy Schlund-Vials, Rick Bonus, and Shelley Sang-Hee Lee

    Founded by Sucheng Chan in 1991, the Asian American History and Culture series has sponsored innovative scholarship that has redefined, expanded, and advanced the field of Asian American studies while strengthening its links to related areas of scholarly inquiry and engaged critique. Like the field from which it emerged, the series remains rooted in the social sciences and humanities, encompassing multiple regions, formations, communities, and identities. Extending the vision of founding editor Sucheng Chan and emeriti editor Michael Omi, David Palumbo-Liu, K. Scott Wong and Linda Trinh Võ, series editors Cathy Schlund-Vials, Rick Bonus, and Shelley Sang-Hee Lee continue to develop a foundational collection that embodies a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to Asian American studies.