Memory, Nationalism, and Narrative in Contemporary South Asia

Memory, Nationalism, and Narrative in Contemporary South Asia investigates how English-language fiction, Hindi cinema, and postcolonial urban planning have provided surprisingly ambivalent and deeply controversial responses to the twinned compulsions of memory and forgetting on the Indian subcontinent. J. Edward Mallot examines how Eurocentric assumptions about trauma and testimony need to be challenged in South Asian contexts. In literature, writers such as Salman Rushdie, Romesh Gunesekera, Michael Ondaatje, and Amitav Ghosh turn to unexpected strategies of encoding and understanding the past. Mallot argues that these controversies and strategies expand memory studies in new, provocative directions.