ã 2018 Jessica K. Young MIGRATING MEMORIES: POWER AND TRANSCULTURAL MEMORY IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIAN FICTION BY JESSICA K. YOUNG DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Michael Rothberg, Chair Associate Professor Manisha Basu Associate Professor Jodi Byrd Associate Professor Stef Craps ABSTRACT This dissertation interrogates two interrelated questions: First, what effect does power have on memory? Second, how does literature help us “locate” or make visible the processes of memory transmission within and between subaltern groups whose actions are patrolled and, at times, curtailed? These questions are central to the future trajectories of memory studies, where the transcultural turn tracing memories across national and cultural borders necessitates an understanding of how people navigate overlapping local, national, and global networks of power that mandate forms of remembrance and forgetting. As Michael Rothberg observes, questions regarding power are paramount as memory studies expands from its Eurocentric roots to examine legacies of colonial trauma and migration (“Locating Transnational Memory” np). However, scholars have yet to address power’s effect on memory. Simultaneously, delineating institutional regulation of transcultural memory requires pinpointing memory’s intangible dynamics in order to identify sites that exemplify what Susannah Radstone defines as the “locatedness” of memories on the move while simultaneously acknowledging their inaccessibility (111). Given these concerns, my dissertation charts the repercussions of institutional power on memory in contemporary South Asian fiction by mapping the representative strategies authors deploy to depict transcultural memories suppressed by hegemonic framings of the past. This project is interdisciplinary, employing methodologies from memory and trauma studies, world literature, and postcolonial theory, paying particular attention to how these fields illuminate transnational connections between subaltern groups. I draw on South Asian fiction produced in the US, Canada, England, and the subcontinent from the 1980s to the present in order to examine how the rise of neoliberalism, multiculturalism, and the impact of 9/11 together ii produce what Jasbir Puar terms a “racial amnesia” that “homogenize[s] and particularize[s] populations for control,” disbanding potential allegiances between minority groups to assimilate them into “civil” society, a phenomenon this literature interrogates (26). To counter this fracturing, I excavate the mnemonic possibilities of fiction by Amitav Ghosh, Mohsin Hamid, Hari Kunzru, and Bharati Mukherjee to demonstrate how such texts act as traveling sites of memory by providing glimpses of alternative pasts and futures not available to subaltern subjects in the present. iii To Daniel, for his unwavering support iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project would not have been possible without the generous support of friends, family, and colleagues. First, I would like to thank my advisor, Michael Rothberg, for introducing me not just to a theory and discipline, but to a supportive academic community. I am extremely grateful for his mentorship and advice. I am also greatly indebted to the rest of my committee for their thoughtful feedback on this project and their ongoing support of my research, including Jodi Byrd, Manisha Basu, Stef Craps, and Junaid Rana. Other faculty members at the University of Illinois have gone above and beyond to help me advance my research at various stages. While there are too many to name here, I want to especially acknowledge Ted Underwood and Catherine Gray. I am also greatly indebted to many excellent scholars in memory and trauma studies who have championed my research, including Brett Kaplan, Lucy Bond, Jessica Rapson, Pieter Vermeulen, Chandrima Chakraborty, Anne Rigney, Rosanne Kennedy, and Yasemin Yildiz. I am also fortunate to be surrounded by many wonderful graduate colleagues and I am especially grateful to Priscilla Charrat-Nelson, Helen Makhdoumian, and Naomi Taub for keeping the Future of Trauma and Memory Studies reading group alive and well since I founded it in 2014. I also want to acknowledge the students, faculty, and staff who have kept this group a vital institution on the Illinois campus throughout the years. Additionally, I want to thank an international cohort of emerging memory studies scholars including Maria Zirra, Holly Brown, Thomas Chadwick, Ifor Duncan, Antje Postema, Catherine Gilbert, and Sean Bex for creating opportunities for us as students to collaborate and share our work. Many of the authors included in this project were also very generous with their time and spoke to me, sometimes at length, about their work. I am especially grateful to Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Hari Kunzru, Mohsin Hamid, and Padma Viswanathan for their insights. v Most importantly, I would not have been able to pursue this degree without the support of my family and friends. Foremost, I want to thank my husband, Daniel, for his patience and unwavering encouragement over the past decade. My mother, Vivian, and the rest of my family also demonstrated enormous patience with my writing schedule and itinerate academic lifestyle and I am grateful for their flexibility and understanding. While my grandparents did not live to see me start my first graduate degree, they planted the seeds of this journey and set an example for what is possible if I put my mind to it. I am also incredibly indebted to the Rice clan, including Anne, Christopher, Karen O’Brien, and Eric Shaw Quinn for their hospitality and encouragement as I was a Visiting Graduate Researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. Writing is usually a solitary activity, but I am fortunate to have had amazing friends to keep me company along the way, including Michelle Martinez, Sara Weisweaver, Sarah Sahn, Jeff Putney, Noah Friedman-Biglin, Jenn Baldwin, Catherine Nguyen, Coral Lumbley, Joseph Guzmán, Jenny Flaherty, and Liz and Derek Hoiem, to name a few. Your friendship means the world to me. Finally, I have to give a special thanks to the Blue Bottle Morsels at the W.C. Morse Building in Oakland, California for keeping me caffeinated during the final push to finish my dissertation. You guys were the best cheerleaders anyone could ask for. Thank you all so much. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: MIGRATING MEMORIES: POWER AND TRANSCULTURAL MEMORY IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIAN FICTION ... 1 CHAPTER 2: “THIS IS A DIRGE FOR THE WORLD…THIS IS SAGA, FOR A NATION”: THE AIR INDIA TRAGEDY AND THE (IM)MOBILIZATION OF TRANSNATIONAL MEMORY .................................................................................. 41 CHAPTER 3: MIGRATIONS FROM TEXT TO ART: HARI KUNZRU’S MEMORY PALACE AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AN IMPERIAL SITE OF MEMORY 98 CHAPTER 4: CONTAGIONS, COMPUTER VIRUSES, AND INFECTOUS AGENTS: TRANSCULTURAL MEOMRY TRANSMISSION IN AMITAV GHOSH’S CALCUTTA CHROMOSOME AND HARI KUNZRU’S TRANSMISSION ................. 153 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION: “A WORLD THAT’S COMING INTO BEING”: MIGRATING MEMORIES AND WORLD BUILDING IN THE NOVELS OF MOHSIN HAMID ...................................................................................................... 229 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................... 244 vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION MIGRATING MEMORIES: POWER AND TRANSCULTURAL MEMORY IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIAN FICTION Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992) attempts to trace the intertwining of Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu trading populations across the Indian Ocean from the 12th Century into the present in order to recover subaltern and migrant figures lost in the transit of time and space. To do so, In an Antique Land weaves together Ghosh’s ethnographic fieldwork in Egypt in the late 1980s and early 1990s with his archival recovery of Bomma, a Medieval Indian slave of a Jewish trader whose story is emblematic of the ancient cross-cultural trading practices Ghosh is trying to uncover in the present. Ghosh concludes his ethnographic narrative by visiting an interreligious memory site, the tomb of Sidi Abu-Hasira, which Ghosh views as a remnant of the transcultural exchanges prevalent during Bomma’s era. “The Sidi,” Ghosh is told, is a religious figure revered by both Muslims and Jews as he “had been born to a Jewish family in the Maghreb, […and] had transported himself to Egypt […by miraculously] cross[ing] the Mediterranean on a rush mat” where he converted to Islam (329). The saint, then, is not simply an interreligious figure, but a migrant as well, emblematic of the historical flow of people and goods across the Indian Ocean throughout the Medieval period. Every year a “mowlid,” or festival, is held at the tomb, where both local Muslims and Jewish tourists converge to commemorate the Sidi. However, arriving with his Muslim taxi driver, Mohsin, a few days later, Ghosh does not encounter Muslims and Jews “gathered around a grave” in celebration, but soldiers guarding it, “watching us, and some of them were fingering their guns” (333). Rather than affirming the possibility of a transcultural or interreligious connection cultivated through this seemingly inclusive memory site, Ghosh’s 1 account paradoxically demonstrates the failure of achieving such a connection in the present due