"The question then of being-at-home or leaving home is always a question of memory." (Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 91)

This panel aims to reflect upon the implications of disruptions caused in narrations of the everyday due to tensions between memory, place, and events. These disruptions may arise due to the failures of national and transnational discursive positions to include marginalised accounts that resist subscribing to their neat, totalizing impulses. However, the five papers in this panel attempt to resist this overwhelming impact of events by underlining the persistence of various iterations of memory like nostalgia, loss, regret, consequences and reckoning as negotiations with displacement and defamiliarization. The panel attempts to see how the notion of home as place, feeling, and memory is seen as a point of return that is, paradoxically, both desirable and impossible. This reconstitution of past memory, according to Pierre Nora, either occurs through a gradual transformation of the present or through the onset of sudden transformative events, both generating "sites of memory" that further create contested notions of identity. Accordingly, contemporary identity politics play a significant role in constructing what Brigit Neumann calls "fictions of memory".

These "fictions'' take a cultural-revivalist turn in Indian postcolonial discourses through the continuous tensions between regional poetics and the ideological expectations of western capitalism and nationalist politics. For instance, while the modern-day inhabitants of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu exhibit a pan-Indian consciousness, the predominance of Tamil revivalist tendencies indicates a cultural imaginary of home that constantly negotiates with pronationalist narratives that attempt to subsume Tamil cultural space within a homogenous whole. A similar kind of cultural hybridization, this time along linguistic trajectories, is found in the negotiations of bordered identities between Tamil Nadu and its neighbouring state Kerala. This notion of 'split identities' emerging out of temporal breaks is similarly found in the affective subjectivities of post-apartheid South Africa, where the abolition of segregation had presaged the unfolding of a 'new' nation-state that would be built on the reorientation of affective realities. However, the complete alignment of the individual and the collective remained impossible in the state, as individual experiences of trauma could not be assuaged by visions of collective closure and catharsis, and the privileging of restorative forms of justice over retributive ones. The essays in Andrew Lam's Perfume Dreams (2005) discuss the memory of the Vietnam war for the Vietnamese themselves- especially the diaspora and those in exile- and the struggle for identity in pining for a home that is permanently lost. In Ali Smith's Seasonal quartet (2017-2021), for instance, characters grapple with sentiments of loss of identity as Britain becomes defamiliarised, as opposed to the nationalist rhetoric of Brexit affirming Britain as the original (and originary) home.

In what ways should we then remember home? The panel proposes to raise some interesting questions in this regard.

Catherine Shilpa. X (HS19D007)

'Fictions of Memory' and Identity Politics in mid-twentieth century Tamil Nadu

The transition from an Indian nationalist discourse to a regionalist identity politics in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu in the first half of the twentieth century corresponded to an ideological shift that was also reflected in the literature and film produced during that time period in the state. In the representative novels and films of these decades, reformist values coexist with cultural orthodoxies and Dravidian regionalism is offset by a nationalist agenda. The ancient past of the country and the past of the Tamil people were reimagined in order to better suit the ethos of post-independence era Tamil Nadu. This paper will analyze the creative works of Dravidian ideologues C.N.Annadurai (Anna) and M. Karunanidhi within the context of Tamil Revivalism, and the delineation of modern Tamil identity. The political nexus of film and literature within the state played a significant role in the construction of certain "fictions of memory" that circulated within the cultural landscape of that time period. In Tamil Nadu there can be observed a very clear connection between print culture, film, theatre, literature and politics and this nexus can be best understood through a reading of the literary and cultural endeavours of the prominent DMK (Dravidar Munnetra Kazhagam or Dravidian Progressive Federation) leaders Anna and Karunanidhi. The creative output of these two leaders was not merely incidental to their politics and their writerly personalities clearly defined their political selfhood in important ways. For instance, their creative writings and their public speeches which frequently referenced the ancient Tamil Sangam corpus of poems, were a celebration and memorialisation of Tamil civilisational worth. The rallying of popular sentiment through revivalism in the late 1940s through the 1950s, was part of the modern project of creating a geopolitical space and ensuring that this newly formed linguistic state conformed to what was imagined as Tamilakam-"the home of Tamil" in the Sangam age. The mobilization of Tamil literary heritage within political discourse, the translation of it to a useable cultural template and the later institutionalizing of it through state power by these modern literary and political figures, will be examined as important markers of the history of the Tamil public sphere and the influential evocation of antiquity within it, in the twentieth century.

Keywords: Fictions of Memory, Dravidianism, Revivalism, Memorialisation, Modernity

Subhashini R

Enchanting the Borders: Modernity, Memory and Re-enchantment in the works of writers from the Borders of Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

This paper analyzes the novels written by select bilingual writers from the borders of Kerala and Tamil Nadu in order to understand what constitutes the memory and modernity of the people from these borders. The State of Kerala and the State of Tamil Nadu were officially formed in 1959 as the result of the States Reorganization Act of 1959, by which the boundaries of Indian states were reorganized on a linguistic basis. This created a bilingual-bicultural population in the borders of these states, who were neither migrants nor refugees but natives of those places. Therefore, the new territorialisation defamiliarized the familiar space for these populations. Jan Assman states that a society's Cultural Memory serves to "stabilize and convey that society's self-image" and each group "bases its awareness of unity and particularity" upon such collective knowledge of the past. The newly formed states were using various state and language-specific memories to weave a cohesive history and legitimize their group identity, while the culturally hybrid population in the borders were stuck in a liminal space where they identify with both cultures but don't fully belong in either of these cultures. Examining the kind of memory that emerges out of such hybrid cultures and engaging with what constitutes the modernity of people from these borders form the major aims of this paper.

Defining the Transcultural turn in Memory Studies, Astrid Erll states that it emphasizes the "fluidity and fuzziness of memory in culture as well as the non-isomorphy of culture, nation, ethnicity, social groups, and memory". Keeping this as a point of departure, this paper attempts to theorize bi-cultural memory from an 'in-between' space, which will throw light on how memory works in communities with multiple worldviews.

Keywords: Transcultural Memory, Modernity, Cultural Hybridity, Biculturalism, Re-enchantment.

Soham Chakraborty

Re-membering the Nation: Memory, Space, and Hope in Post-Apartheid South African Literature on the TRC 

This paper conducts a reading of select pieces of post-Apartheid South African literature that deals with the event of The Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) which was set up with a faith in the therapeutic possibilities of the acts of remembering and providing testimony, stressing that the state could start the act of envisioning a future for itself only after it had addressed the wrongdoings of its past. The question of the role of memory in communities undergoing change is explored through the lens of transitional justice which helps us analyze the TRC as belonging to a period of liminality that occupies the temporal space of what lies between the before and the after. Texts such as Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull also stress the importance of the spaces of testimony during the TRC that often subverted the hegemonic presence of the dominant groups while retaining traces of its problematic colonial past. Spatiality and affect also become key criteria in Mark Libin's study of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee and its public hearings that were organized to generate the sense of a 'new' South Africa that was constructed on a foundation of affective expressions of a range of emotions, and their consumption by the South African people across diverse languages, media, and spaces. The acts of remembering in this context testify less to a homogenous and communal model of collective memory, and instead to memories of dispossession and loss that themselves refuse to be structurally ordered, problematizing the state's attempts to construct a collective psyche of the people and forge a path to complete closure. The paper also analyzes how the question of space is integral to conceptualizations of justice in post-Apartheid South Africa, with references to critics such as Elizabeth Anker who have pointed out how architectural and spatial metaphors dominate the imaginations of nation-building in the literature of the time. 

Keywords: Affect, Memory, Space, Testimony, Trauma, Truth

Rashi Shrivastava

Plurality of Home for Vietnamese Refugees in Andrew Lam's Perfume Dreams (2005)

Viet Thanh Nguyen's 'Refugee Memories and Asian American Critique' (2012) throws light on his community's belief that Vietnamese people should and must remember to return to their homeland, irrespective of the distances they have travelled. This problematizes the idea of 'home' for Vietnamese refugees. This presentation reads Andrew Lam's Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora (2005), a collection of essays enumerating the experiences of Vietnamese refugees in America as an exploration of their tenuous relationship with their 'homeland'. The essays narrate the constant struggle with dual belongings, loss of homeland, and subsequent defamiliarization with the community he calls home. Having lived the American Dream, Vietnamese refugees like Andrew Lam possess a multicultural sense of belonging, and the notion of home exists in plurality. The presentation proposes nostalgia as an effective medium to study this dichotomy in the selected text. It argues that Svetlana Boym's Future of Nostalgia (2008) is an accurate lens to study the selected text through the idea of reflective nostalgia because it is "ironic, inconclusive, and fragmentary" and is characterized by a sense of defamiliarization with the ruined home. The sense of community and Kai Erikson's communalism of trauma are also matters of scrutiny in the selected text.

Perfume Dreams emerges as a significant text in the study of home as a contested realm with the aid of reconstructed memory narratives of the Vietnamese refugee experience, narrated through Andrew Lam. The essays in the collection explore themes of memory, trauma, nostalgia for their lost land, the feeling of being an outsider (xenophobia as well), identity crisis, and transgenerational trauma. The presentation discusses how these themes highlight the ever-changing aspect of the sense of the Vietnamese refugee community bound together through loss and post-memory.

Keywords: Community, Memory, Nostalgia, Defamiliarization, Trauma

Nishtha Pandey

Producing Home in the Face of 'Stranger-Danger': Ali Smith's Autumn

The proposed presentation examines contentions that arise in discursive productions of the United Kingdom as 'home' in the light of Brexit. It reads Ali Smith's 2016 novel Autumn as demonstrative of everyday instances in the lives of ordinary citizens grappling with the aftermath of Brexit that fracture national narratives hailing British exceptionalism as the driving force behind this decision. Be it the controversial "Go Home" campaign by the UK Home Office in 2013, or the unanimous vilification of the Duchess of Sussex by the British media, the presentation argues that the idea of home as a safe space is ontologically dependent on the paradox of recognizing certain communities as already strangers.

Autumn explores certain important events in post-war British politics and culture through the unconventional life-long friendship between Elisabeth Demand, a 26-year old art historian and her 101-year old neighbour, Daniel Gluck, who is currently comatose. It draws parallels between the EU referendum campaign of 2016 and the Profumo Affair of 1963. Elisabeth encounters the art of Pauline Boty, a rebellious founder of the British pop-art movement in the 1970s, especially her paintings of Christine Keeler who was held responsible for the Profumo affair. Elisabeth's realization that Keeler has been reduced to a footnote of history as a model responsible for a scandal is symptomatic of the collective erasure of women from national memory-making projects through their continuous reduction into misogynist tropes. The presentation suggests that the seemingly unrelated reduction of immigrants to 'stranger-danger' and the persistent vilification of 'transgressive' women is intentional as they threaten the memory of Britain as a morally exceptional nation. Through a reading of Autumn, it argues that the nostalgia for white masculinity is intimately tied to this idea of home, which is threatened both by the stranger-intruder who makes the nation 'unhomely', as well as 'transgressive' woman, who refuses to fit into this idea of home. It suggests that Autumn (as well as Smith's Spring) provides hope for forging new and unlikely communities that raise new possibilities for the British political novel in its engagements with questions of identity.

Keywords: Home, British politics, "stranger-danger", Brexit, White Masculinity