Room Number: TRS 1-077
Join the Meeting: https://ryerson.zoom.us/j/93227463334?pwd=ZTRnTE9Ldk1sc0xuNnlIbEdIUllHQT09
Chair: Jonathan Nash (U Victoria)
Speakers:
John C. Ball (U New Brunswick), “Risk and Responsibility in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows”
Antara Chatterjee (IIESR Bhopal), “The Refugee ‘Boat’: Rupture, Crisis and Precarity in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Islandand Sharon Bala’s The Boat People”
Walter Perera (U Peradeniya), “From The Story of A Brief Marriage to A Passage North: A Paradigm Shift in Anuk Arudpragasam’s Fiction?”
Paper Summaries:
John C. Ball (U New Brunswick), “Risk and Responsibility in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows”
At a time of heightened awareness of conflicts and trade-offs between individual freedom and collective sacrifice to mitigate collective risk, this paper reads Kamila Shamsie’s transnational, intergenerational novel Burnt Shadows as articulating, through its characters’ risk calculations and risk-taking actions, a vision of a post-9/11 commons that is breaking apart.
Antara Chatterjee (IIESR Bhopal), “The Refugee ‘Boat’: Rupture, Crisis and Precarity in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Islandand Sharon Bala’s The Boat People”
This essay will examine the fictional refugee narratives in two recent novels Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island and Sharon Bala’s The Boat People. Both novels address the conference’s central theme of rupture and ruptured commons. I will use critical frameworks of postcolonial crisis, rupture, precarity, nation and borders in my analysis.
Walter Perera (U Peradeniya), “From The Story of A Brief Marriage to A Passage North: A Paradigm Shift in Anuk Arudpragasam’s Fiction?”
If Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage was commended for being apolitical, A Passage North is palpably ideologically driven in approach. The current study tracks this trajectory, posits a possible rationale for the transformation, and assesses the gains and losses in effecting such a paradigm shift.