Room Number: TRS 2-164
Join the Meeting: https://ryerson.zoom.us/j/97577872962?pwd=M2JzQXEzNHhmMGNsQTN2M1ptWlliUT09
Chair: Shadman Chowdhury-Mohammad (Toronto Metropolitan U)
Speakers:
Durba Mukherjee (IIT Kanpur), “Ruptured Identities: Interrogating the Ideas of India and Twenty-first-Century Travelogues of Dom Moraes and Amitava Kumar”
Esther Pujolras-Noguer (U Lleida), “Ectopic Insiders, Mourning Memoirs: The Configuration of the Trauma of Return in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and M.G. Vassanji’s And Home Was Kariakoo”
Jason Sandhar (U Western Ontario), “‘Who’s Here to Tell Her Story?’: Remembering, Recovery, and Rupture in Sunjeev Sahota’s China Room”
Paper Summaries:
Durba Mukherjee (IIT Kanpur), “Ruptured Identities: Interrogating the Ideas of India and Twenty-first-Century Travelogues of Dom Moraes and Amitava Kumar”
This paper explores the twenty-first-century return-travelogues by Dom Moraes and Amitava Kumar. These writers offer an alternative to the predominant reception of diasporic narratives or those by twentieth-century writers about India, that metaphorically represent India, and explore their affiliation to India through the lens of a “felt-community” of the marginalized.
Esther Pujolras-Noguer (U Lleida), “Ectopic Insiders, Mourning Memoirs: The Configuration of the Trauma of Return in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and M.G. Vassanji’s And Home Was Kariakoo”
This paper explores two different ways of articulating the trauma of return through acts of mourning as evinced in the memoirs of Ondaatje and Vassanji. Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and Vassanji’s And Home Was Kariakoo are the products of “ectopic insiders” who struggle to register their emotional home displacement.
Jason Sandhar (U Western Ontario), “‘Who’s Here to Tell Her Story?’: Remembering, Recovery, and Rupture in Sunjeev Sahota’s China Room”
Sunjeev Sahota’s 2021 novel, China Room, features two stories, set 70 years apart, about a family farm in Punjab. This paper argues that Sahota’s juxtaposition of these two stories urges us to rethink the connections and ruptures between memory and trauma, (present) self and (ancestral) other, and origin and return.