M.G. Vassanji

Essays On His Works

Asma Sayed

• Publisher: Guernica Editions
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781550719970
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This collection was born of a conviction that Vassanji's contributions to the global literary scene merit more in-depth scholarly notice. The articles herein, most of which are comparative in focus, provide various interpretations of Vassanji's writings through a diversity of theoretical frameworks. The fulcrum of much of this research comes back to issues of globalization, transnationalism, identity, post-colonialism, cosmopolitanism and diaspora. It should also be noted that, while many critics have tried to fit Vassanji and his writing into national perimeters identifying him as Canadian, others as African or Indian, or all of these, none of the writers in this book argue that Vassanji, or his works, belong to any particular national paradigm. Rather, the articles recognize Vassanji's engagement with transnational issues and his preoccupation with history and politics, and concerns of home, migration, exile, loss, belonging, dislocation, violence, trauma, and identity as central to his writing. Included are a new and detailed interview with Vassanji and a previously unpublished article, authored by Vassanji himself. Among the contributors: Annie Cottier, Jonathan Hart, Jonathan Rollins, Warris Vianni, Amin Malak, and Nancy E. Batty.

Table of contents

• Introduction: Writing History, Writing Diaspora: The In-Between World of M. G. Vassanji
• Loss, Belonging and the Vagaries of Migration: Cosmopolitanism in M. G. Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song
• M. G. Vassanji and the Essay of Life
• Picturing Canada: Narratives of Home and the (Trans-)National Imaginary in the Work of M. G. Vassanji
• In Search of a Place
• Ambivalent Affiliations and the Postcolonial Condition: The Fiction of M. G. Vassanji*
• “Mahabharata is yet to happen”*: Communal Violence and Diasporic Time in M. G. Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song and A Place Within**
• Deliberations on The Magic of Saida*
• History, Magic, and Film: In Conversation with M. G. Vassanji
• The Book of Life: A Brief Biography of M. G. Vassanji
• So As Not to Die*
• Bibliography: Works by and about M. G. Vassanji
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright