The Transnational Imaginaries of M. G. Vassanji

Diaspora, Literature, and Culture

Karim Murji, Asma Sayed

• Publisher: Peter Lang Group
• Year: 2018
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781433147531
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Transnational Imaginaries of M. G. Vassanji is a collection of scholarly articles that engages with, analyzes, and appreciatively critiques the fiction and nonfiction writing of M. G. Vassanji, a multiple award-winning author. Vassanji's works have a sense of multiple connections across four continents: Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. He challenges the imperial centers of Western powers through the content of his work and his deeply-felt humanist engagements with the politics of displacement, settlement, partition and postcolonialism. Ranging across almost his entire oeuvre, the contributors to this book argue that Vassanji's work should be read as one emerging from a transnational space that connects people, places and issues across the world. Collectively, the chapters in this book, using a range of theoretical frameworks, claim that Vassanji's work both fits into and goes beyond the usual categorizations, structures and styles of analysis applied to writers from the colonies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Locating M.G. Vassanji in a Transnational Context (Asma Sayed / Karim Murji)
• 1. “An Open Wound”: The Memory and Legacy of Partition in Vassanji’s Writings on India (John Clement Ball)
• 2. Thinking through India, Transnationally: Still Writing from a Hard Place? (Delphine Munos)
• 3. Agents of Impermanence: The Visitor Figure in A Place Within (Vera Alexander)
• 4. Travel as a Way Inward: Vassanji’s A Place Within (Jonathan Locke Hart)
• 5. ‘Ye Zindagi Usiki Hai’: Illicit Desire and (Post)colonial Romance in The Book of Secrets (Gaurav Desai)
• 6. The Sacred as a Theme in The Assassin’s Song and The Magic of Saida (Neelima Kanwar)
• 7. Roots/Routes and Rhizomes: Diasporic Tourism and the Return of the Native Stranger in The Magic of Saida (Jonathan Rollins)
• 8. Narrating Violence as a Metaphor of Colonial Enterprise in The Book of Secrets (Remmy Shiundu Barasa)
• 9. Riding the Third Rail: Perpetual Movement and Imagined Return in The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (Aaron Louis Rosenberg)
• 10. “This Was My Country—How Could It Not Be?”: On the Significance of Travel in The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (Shizen Ozawa)
• 11. Journeys and Re-membered Communities in Amriika (Godwin Siundu)
• 12. Reading Vassanji’s Women: Reconstructing an Alternate Historiography (Mala Pandurang)
• Contributors
• Index