“Politically Mobilized Memory in Arundhadi Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.” Kyle Woodend, CHA University in South Korea.
This paper sets out to delimit the function of memory as dissent from the Official History of the historical events covered in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. In a number of her essays in My Seditious Heart, Roy has positioned the cultural anarchy of India and its people against both the national and global powers that be. In many early reviews of Ministry, critics responded to the cluttered and chaotic narrative that weaves together the lives of Anjum, Tilo, Musa Yeswi, Saddam Hussain and several other outsiders who have been expelled from the single, unidirectional, and monolithic Official History. Despite these sometimes negative and occasionally defensive takes on Roy’s attempt to transgress readerly expectations, the anarchic narrative of Ministry constitutes the very grounds for both resistance and the communal alternative to the ‘Officialdom’ that attempts to smother dissent and subalternize the outliers. For the nationalist government, its corporate backers, and its followers, history is ‘a revelation of the future,’ a top-down trajectory whose course is set by what it officially remembers, forgets, and disavows; for the residents of Jannat House, memory is mobilized in a like-minded yet inverse way, as dissention from Officialdom and a bottom-up approach to its selection of memories. With this anarchic memory, communal decisions are made for the benefit of ‘each’ instead of ‘all.’ The latter amplifies what Roy has called ‘spectacular anarchy’ of the diverse cultures that constitute India. This paper demonstrates Roy’s effort to reclaim and mobilize memory from history and, consequently, India’s fundamental plurality from the unidirectional state power.
Kyle Woodend is Assistant Professor of English at CHA University in South Korea. His recent publications include “Irony, Narcissism, and Affect in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest” in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (2019) and “On the Familiar and the Unfamiliar in Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s Americanah” in South Central Review (Fall, 2021). Currently, he is doing a PhD with the University of Bristol on representations of epistemological and ideological transformation in postcolonial literature. His work is centered on mapping possibilities for change at both individual and social levels.
“The Ethiopian Red Terror and Its Narrative Afterlife: Postmemory in the Short Stories of Dinaw Mengestu and Maaza Mengiste.” Brandon Breen, University of Cagliari
The Red Terror was a period of extreme violence during Ethiopia’s military dictatorship (1974-1991) that resulted in the creation of a worldwide diaspora, and many diasporic Ethiopian writers revisit this time period in their works. This contribution aims to look at the short stories and essays of two Ethiopian American writers, Dinaw Mengestu and Maaza Mengiste, in order to analyze how the Red Terror is remembered and reconfigured through literature. First, I will offer a brief historical and biographical background of the time period and authors in question in order to contextualize their texts. Then I will demonstrate how both authors encapsulate Marianne Hirsch’s idea of postmemory (2008) through their description of traumatic events that they claim to remember vividly despite being small children at the time. I argue that these accounts force the reader to question the faithfulness and veracity of memories and to consider memory, or rather postmemory, as indicative of a collective group consciousness rather than an accurate recollection of fact. Furthermore, these texts provide evidence that the truthfulness of a memory is not as significant nor relevant as the feelings and convictions that it portrays. This allows memory to work in a manner similar to fiction by conveying emotions and establishing connections in a manner that is at least threefold: between the authors and their own past, between readers and authors, and between readers and the historical event that is being remembered.
Brandon Breen is a second-year doctoral student at the University of Cagliari in Philological-Literary and Historical-Cultural Studies. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at Stony Brook University. His doctoral dissertation focuses on contemporary literature in the United States by Ethiopian American authors and questions of historical trauma, national and diasporic belonging, and literary tradition. He graduated from the University of Padua with a thesis on postcolonial Italian literature and has multiple research interests: contemporary literature of the US and Italy, literature from the Horn of Africa, translation studies, and postcolonial and migrant studies.
“Performativity in Shailja Patel’s Migritude.” Marietta Kosma, University of Oxford
Shailja Patel’s Migritude focuses on the placement and re-placement of black African women and diasporic communities in the discourse of international concern. I demonstrate how Patel brings to the forefront histories of the subaltern otherwise silenced with the employment of decolonization. This paper consists a reconceptualization of what is considered to be home in terms of the queer imaginary by addressing the silenced discourse of the subaltern. In this context there is no ideal sense of the queer self, as the discourse that queerness falls into is challenged by an intricate system of mobility. The female body’s queer identification falls into a transgressive dialogue in which identity norms are challenged, as the strictures of traditional normativity are broken by the constant movement of the East African Asian female subject that operates within and outside the framework of the traditional home. The performance work I analyze focuses on what it means to experience an inbetweeness. The unique experiences of belonging of these female subjects, place them into a new multi-dimensional locus, where a different consciousness of identity arises. Patel’s narrative signals towards an innovative recuperation of female diasporic subjectivity that is evidently progressive. The queer female South-East Asian subject becomes the center of attention and the space it occupies becomes a terrain of possibility. The subaltern’s concerns are brought to the forefront, as the reproduction of systemic violence upon its body is questioned through language. Attentive to the multiplicity of voices, Patel engages with transnational political discourse as she achieves to project a new form of solidarity among the dispossessed, while contesting imperial remains.
Marietta Kosma is a second year DPhil student in English at the University of Oxford at Lady Margaret Hall. Her academic background includes a master in English from JSU and a master in Ancient Greek Theater from the University of the Aegean. Her research interests lie in twentieth-century American literature, post colonialism and gender studies. She has published articles, interviews and reviews in Cambridge Scholars Publishing, H-Net, Cherwell and Transatlantica among others. She is Editor of the Journal of Gender, Ethnic, and Cross-Cultural Studies. She has presented her work in various academic conferences.
“Memory, Counter-Memory, Trauma, and Place in Amy Waldman’s The Submission.” Margrét Ann Thors, University of Iceland.
Literary theorist Michele Balaev writes, “The primacy of place in the representations of trauma anchors the individual experience within a larger cultural context because place attains its meaningful import based on individual perception and symbolic significance accorded by culture.” In other words, place and traumatic memory are inherently linked, perhaps nowhere more so than Ground Zero in lower Manhattan, site of the former Twin Towers.
In Amy Waldman’s 2011 novel The Submission, US society all but implodes when, through a blind selection process, a Muslim architect is chosen to design the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero. Debates rage in the novel about the optics of a man named Mohammed designing the memorial; about the importance of getting the memorial right, as this is where so many unrecovered bodies are buried; and the fear that incorporating Muslim design elements into the memorial will send the unwanted message that this is an Islamic martyrs’ garden, as described in the Quran. In a society that has vowed to “Never Forget” the tragedy of 9/11, those who sympathize with and support the Muslim architect are decried as anti-American, and those who refuse to allow the memorial to be designed by a Muslim are denounced as anti-democratic.
In this paper, I analyze the juncture of traumatic memory, memorialization, and place in The Submission through the lens of Balaev’s insistence upon the primacy of place in literary trauma theory and memory studies. Doing so will illuminate the plural forces at work in maintaining, and sometimes reimagining, cultural memory — and in producing counter-memor(ies) to the dominant narrative.
Margrét Ann Thors is a PhD candidate at the University of Iceland, where she is researching Trauma, Gender, Memory, and Religion in Literature after 9/11. She holds an MFA, MA, and BA from Columbia University, and is also an aspiring novelist.
