Partitions: What are they good for?
An AHRC Research Network on Comparative Partitions
Organised by
School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University
School of English, University of St Andrews
Partitions & Cultural Memory
Cardiff University
3-4 June 2013
Monday 3 June
09.00 – 09.45: Registration
09.45 – 10.00: Opening remarks
10.00 – 11.30: Plenary Session 1 (Chair: TBC)
Title TBC (Radhika Mohanram, Cardiff University, UK)
Respondent: Patrick Williams, Nottingham Trent University, UK
11.30 – 11.45: Tea/Coffee break
11.45 – 13.15: Parallel sessions 1
Partitions and Families (Chair: TBC)
Cultural memory formation in children of war survivors from Bosnia and Herzegovina
(Kalina Yordanova, University College London, UK)
Partition Migrants and their Children in a New City: A comparative analysis of Kamila
Shamsie’s Kartography and Inga Iwasiów’s Bambino (Agnieszka Sadecka, Jawaharlal
Nehru University, India)
‘My other mother’: Separated Families, Mourning and Agency in Narratives of the
1947 South Asian Partition (Anindya Raychaudhuri, University of St Andrews, UK)
Post-partition and its discourses (Chair: TBC)
Reading for Time: Notes on a Post-Partition Literature (Charlotta Salmi, University of
Oxford, UK)
Partition: From the Archives of Memory to Literature (Sukrita Paul Kumar, University
of Iowa, USA)
Forgetting 1948: New Palestinian and Israeli Writing (Anna Bernard, King’s College
London, UK)
13.15 – 14.15: Lunch
14.15 – 15.45: Parallel sessions 2
Orality and the Bengal Partition (Chair: TBC)
Impact of Partition in Assam and Tripura: Beginning of a New Culture or a Process of
Making ‘Bengali Identity’? (Anindita Ghoshal, Rishi Bankim Chandra College, India)
Refugee Recollections: The East-West Story (Pallavi Chakravarty, Maitreyi College,
University of Delhi, India)
Retracing the cultural memory in post-partition West Bengal: Commercializing
laughter through Bāngāl (Arnab Dutta, Jadavpur University, India)
Theorising Borders, Theorising Violence (Chair: TBC)
The 1947 India/Pakistan Partition: Lines of Irony, Lines of Memory (Christine Habbard,
University of Lille, France and Lahore University of Management Science, Pakistan)
Partition Within in Susan Abulhawa's Mornings in Jenin (Jacqueline Jondot, Université
de Toulouse le Mirail, France)
Partition Violence and the Limits of Empathy (Karni Bhati, Furman University, USA)
Histories of Partitions (Chair: TBC)
Partition of India and the Disfigurement of History (Waqas Khwaja, Agnes Scott
College, USA)
Moldova’s “loss” of Bucovina: The effects on the political, cultural and diplomatic
relations between Prussia, on the one hand, and the Principality of Moldavia on the
other hand between 1774-1812 (Amelia- Liana Vaidean, Babeș-Bolyai University,
Romania)
“Because you look Chinese”: The story of the rounded up and deported Assamese
population in the Sino-Indian War 1962 with allusion to Rita Chowdhury’s
novel Makam (Jyotirmoy Talukdar, University of Delhi, India)
15.45 – 16.00: Tea/Coffee break
16.00 – 17.30: Plenary Session 2 (Chair: TBC)
From postmemory to post-amnesia: forgetting and remembering East Pakistan
(Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Kings College London, UK)
Respondent: Jennifer Yusin, Drexel University, USA
18.30 – late: Community event at Butetown History & Arts Centre, followed by dinner
Tuesday 4 June
09.00 – 09.30: Registration
09.30 – 11.00: Parallel sessions 3
Narrating the Nation(s)(Chair: TBC)
‘Between ‘going away’ and ‘homing home’: A reading of The Shadow Lines by Amitav
Ghosh’ (Eva Rask Knudsen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Partition Epic: Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun (Nicola Robinson, University of York,
UK)
‘Effacement and Reclamation of the Bod(il)y: Negotiations with the Sundarbans in
Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.’ (Shayeari
Dutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India)
Partitions and the Performances of Memory (Chair: TBC)
‘Partitioned Territory, Connected Histories: Shrines, Social Memory and the Everyday
in Contemporary Punjab’ (Yogesh Snehi, Ambedkar University, India)
Enforced memory / Erased ethnicity: Commemorating the Rwandan genocide (Laura
De Becker, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa)
Violent Memories, Virtual Realities (Robert Schaeffer and Torry Dickinson, Kansas
State University, USA)
11.00 – 11.15: Tea/Coffee break
11.15 – 12.45: Parallel sessions 4
Manto and his Legacy (Chair: Anindita Ghoshal)
Beyond Political Partitions, Uncovering the Human Story of the Partition of the Indian
Subcontinent through the Short Stories of Saadat Hasan Manto (Anurima Chanda,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, India)
Manto the Prophet: interrogating the timeliness of Manto in his time and ours
(Hannah Fitzpatrick, University of St Andrews, UK)
Partition and Gender (Chair: TBC)
Construction of Indian Masculinity and Partition (Abu Saleh, University of Hyderabad,
India)
The Question of Partition and Gender in the Writings of Qurratulain Hyder: Reference
to River of Fire (Safia Begum, University of Hyderabad, India)
12.45 – 13.45: Lunch
13.45 – 15.15: Parallel sessions 5
Afterlives of Partitions (Chair: Kalina Yordanova)
Partition as On-going Process (Smita Tewari Jassal, Middle East Technical University,
Turkey)
Diversity in Macedonia: Between historical tensions, ignorance, conflict and
cooperation (Stefan Molocea, Yuan Ze University, Taiwan)
Post-memory, authenticity and citizenship in Ireland (Louise Harrington, University of
Alberta, Canada)
Partitions in Word and Image (Chair: TBC)
Religion in Rang de Basanti: India, Partition and Nehruvian secularism (Sraddha
Shivani Rajkomar, University of Mauritius, Mauritius)
(Im)Posing Memories: disrupting origin myths in Bani Abidi's photography (Humaira
Saeed, University of Manchester, UK)
South Asian Partition and Cultural Memory (Sayma Khan, Goethe University,
Germany)
15.15 – 15.30: Tea/Coffee break
15.30 – 17.00: Plenary session 3 (Chair: TBC)
Shifting Geopolitical/Sexual Borders: Rethinking (Queer) Identities and (National)
Belonging in a Transnational World (William Spurlin, Brunel University London, UK)
Respondent: Anindya Raychaudhuri, University of St Andrews, UK
17.00 – 17.15: Closing statement
17.30 – late: Film Screening: Crosswinds over Icchamati (Dir: Subha Das Mollick, 2011) and dinner