Ananya Jahanara Kabir’s Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971 and Modern South Asia

Abstract

Academically approached and discussed has been the reterritorialization and secession of the South Asian subcontinent. Orientalists have, from multidisciplinary arenas, debated the motivation and resulting consequences of Partition. In the same vein, Ananya Jahanara Kabir provides the reader an analysis that is not only postcolonial and transreligious but also bio-cartographic and psychosomatic. Memory and trauma studies have been recently considered at the vanguard of  cultural studies thanks to the remarkable work of scholars such as Kali Tal’s Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma, Nayanika Mookherje’s “Aesthetics, Affect, and the Bangladesh War Crimes Tribunal” or Monica J. Casper’s Critical Trauma Studies among others. Needless to say, this innovative territory offers postcolonial studies new readings that claim consideration. Thus, and owing mainly to Kabir’s interocular narration, Partition’s Post-Amnesias takes the reader to an
ekphrastic journey through the [hi]story of the Indo-Pak territory and its resulting nostalgic narratives.