Kamila Shamsie, Burnt Shadows
(2009)
Pakistani writer’s 5th novel
Interlocking histories and geographies
ruins of Nagasaki
Partition of India
Pakistan 1980s
New York post 9/11
Afghanistan post US-invasion
The past/the present
• “How did it come to this?”: Complex shared histories: against the
clash of civilizations thesis (Islam vs West; us/them)
• Historical correlations between seemingly unconnected places—
writing against historical exceptionalism (of 9/11; of Partition, etc)
p. 250: in the aftermath of 9/11, Hiroko tells Kim “That’s not the
world, it’s just the neighbourhood”.
• Histories of imperialism and neo-imperialism
• Nations and borders often imagined and subjective but policed
through violence and destruction
• Nations and identities: religious, linguistic, ethnic
• States, ideologies, individual fanatics: agents of terror
• Nagasaki/Dilli/Karachi/Kandahar/Ground Zero
Hiroko Tanaka
• Young school-teacher turned munitions factory worker;
daughter of an artist who is designated as a traitor for
speaking out against the emperor and militarism
• Translator of languages
• Figure of gendered transnationalism—unhomely
• “It didn’t bother her in the least to know she would
always be a foreigner in Pakistan—she had no interest
in belonging to anything as contradictorily insubstantial
and damaging as a nation” (204); contrast with Raza,
Sajjad and Harry
Modern girl
•
Modern girls (モダンガール, modan gaaru) (also shortened to "moga") were
Japanese women who followed Westernized fashions and lifestyles in the 1920s.
These moga were Japan's equivalent of America's flappers, India's kallege ladki,
Germany's neue Frauen, France's garçonnes, or China's modeng xiaojie (摩登小姐
).[1] By viewing her through a Japanese vs Western lens, the nationalist press
could use the modern girl archetype to blame such failings as frivolity, sexual
promiscuity, and selfishness on foreign influence.[2] The period was characterized
by the emergence of working class young women with access to money and
consumer goods. Using aristocratic culture as their standard of Japaneseness, the
critics of the modern girl condemned her working class traits as "unnatural" for
Japanese. Modern girls were depicted as living in the cities, being financially and
emotionally independent, choosing their own suitors, and apathetic towards
politics.[3] The woman's magazine was a novelty at this time and the modern girl
was the model consumer, someone more often found in advertisements for
cosmetics and fashion than in real life. The all-female Takarazuka Revue,
established in 1914,[4] and the novel Naomi (1924) are outstanding examples of
modern girl culture.
•
Japanese modern girls—Hiroko’s mother
Japanese modern girls
Gender and modernity
• “I want a modern wife” p. 52
• P. 130—Raza’s gender conservatism and
nationalism
• P. 132—Hiroko’s authenticity
History as loss/Unbelonging
•
•
•
•
Hiroko from Nagasaki
Sajjad from Delhi
Henry from India
Abdullah from Karachi
• Condition of modernity
• Displacement
• Memory and nostalgia: “the light in Kandahar”;
the clear blue skies of Nagasaki—remembered in
New York (311)
Ghalib’s home in Dilli
Poetic/Linguistic transnationalism
• Imagining of different, alternate histories of
solidarity and belonging, unmoored from
place and identity
A Ghalib couplet in Urdu
Japanese writing