Rahul K. Gairola

Lauren O'Mahony

Melissa Merchant

Simon Order

This innovative volume compels readers to re-think the notions of performance, performing, and (non)performativity in the context of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Given these multi-faceted ways of thinking about “performance” and its complicated manifestations throughout the pandemic, this volume is organised into umbrella topics that focus on three of the most important aspects of identity for cultural and intercultural studies in this historical moment: language; race/gender/sexuality; and the digital world. In critically re-thinking the meaning of “performance” in the era of COVID-19, contributors first explore how language is differently staged in the context of the global pandemic, compelling us to normalise an entirely new verbal lexicon. Second, they survey the pandemic’s disturbing impact on socio-political identities rooted in race, class, gender, and sexuality. Third, contributors examine how the digital milieu compels us to reorient the inside/outside binary with respect to multilingual subjects, those living with disability, those delivering staged performances, and even corresponding audiences. Together, these diverse voices constitute a powerful chorus that rigorously excavates the hidden impacts of the global pandemic on how we have changed the ways in which we perform identity throughout a viral crisis. This volume is thus a timely asset for all readers interested in identity studies, performance studies, digital and technology studies, language studies, global studies, and COVID-19 studies. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Intercultural Studies.

Performing Identity in the Era of COVID-19

Sharanya Jayawickrama

Is trauma a concept that can be translated across cultures? Can it have global applicability and utility for literary and cultural analysis? Do the approaches and perspectives generated by literary and cultural work hold purchase for social and political interventions? Modern Asia is a region in which the traumatic legacies of colonialism persist and military regimes and dictatorships have led to untold human suffering. Countless loss of life has been caused by revolution, civil war, and genocide; and natural catastrophe has rendered existing social and political tensions even more volatile. The insights of trauma theory for the analysis of literary and cultural representation in Asia and the enrichment of trauma studies by the study of Asian literatures are two crucial areas of scholarly research. This book broadens the scope of trauma and memory studies by considering whether existing concepts of trauma and memory are viable in relation to the histories, present states, and futures of the non-Western world. Explore the complex and surprising intersections of literature, history, and ethics across the region through its wide-ranging but closely comparative focus on geo-political sites across East, South, and Southeast Asia which brings together perspectives on both dominant and marginalized sites in the broad Asian continent, including Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Turkey.

Trauma, Memory, and Healing in Asian Literature and Culture

Roopika Risam

The digital cultural record has a powerful role to play in both new and future strategies of creating new homes within the digital milieu. For example, the development and establishment of new digital archives around South Asian studies not only allows us to create new archives of the past but also to remember and commemorate the past differently. New maps transform how we understand space and place. And new digital comfort zones facilitate connections for those whose family and loved ones are only accessible online. Such interventions are essential to the recuperation of the integrity and soul of a people who have lived through and continue to shoulder the fraught and painful legacies of the British Empire and the communal bloodshed wrought by its demise. Building on the important history of digital humanities scholarship in South Asia and its diasporas that precedes this work, this book contends that South Asian studies is further positioned to offer a new genealogy of digital humanities, demonstrated through this assemblage of essays that reveal how the digital continues to shape notions of home, belonging, nation, identity, memory, and diaspora through a variety of humanistic methodologies and digital techniques. South Asian Digital Humanities thus demonstrates that postcolonial digital humanities has great possibility for creating some of the most important social justice scholarship in South Asian studies of the past century. It offers these essays as innovative interventions that complicate the digital cultural record while lodging a 'homelanding' for South Asians within it, positioning digital humanities as a method through which South Asian studies can strategically participate in the ongoing struggle for representation within digital knowledge production. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Review.

Postcolonial Mediations across Technology’s Cultural Canon

South Asian Digital Humanities

Amritjit Singh

Nalini Iyer

Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays on Memory, Culture, and Politics brings together scholars from across the globe to provide diverse perspectives on the continuing impact of the 1947 division of India on the eve of independence from the British Empire. The Partition caused a million deaths and displaced well over 10 million people. The trauma of brutal violence and displacement still haunts the survivors as well as their children and grandchildren. Nearly 70 years after this cataclysmic event, Revisiting India’s Partition explores the impact of the “Long Partition,” a concept developed by Vazira Zamindar to underscore the ongoing effects of the 1947 Partition upon all South Asian nations. In our collection, we extend and expand Zamindar’s notion of the Long Partition to examine the cultural, political, economic, and psychological impact the Partition continues to have on communities throughout the South Asian diaspora. The nineteen interdisciplinary essays in this book provide a multi-vocal, multi-focal, transnational commentary on the Partition in relation to motifs, communities, and regions in South Asia that have received scant attention in previous scholarship. In their individual essays, contributors offer new engagements on South Asia in relation to several topics, including decolonization and post-colony, economic development and nation-building, cross-border skirmishes and terrorism, and nationalism. This book is dedicated to covering areas beyond Punjab and Bengal and includes analyses of how Sindh and Kashmir, Hyderabad, and more broadly South India, the Northeast, and Burma call for special attention in coming to terms with memory, culture and politics surrounding the Partition.

New Essays on Memory, Culture, and Politics

Revisiting India's Partition

Contemporary Asia is a diverse and sweeping region throughout which traumatic legacies of colonialism persist as military regimes and dictatorships have produced untold human suffering. Countless losses of life have been caused by disease, revolution, civil war, and genocide from the distant past into the 21st century. A global pandemic, natural catastrophes, closed borders, and acute xenophobia render existing social and political tensions even more volatile today. As such, two critical imperatives of Memory, Trauma, Asia are to re-think established insights of memory and trauma theory and to enrich trauma studies with diverse Asian texts for critically analyzing literary and cultural representations of Asia and its global diasporas. This volume broadens the scope of memory and trauma studies by prompting and dialogically meditating on the following questions: Is memory always a reliable register of the past? Is trauma a concept that translates across cultures? Can pain and affect have global applicability and utility for literary and cultural analysis? Do the approaches and perspectives generated by literary and cultural texts hold purchase for social, political, and historical interventions in the 21st century? How are Asians subject to orientalist lenses that warrant foreclosure of empathy and humanity? How do inter-ethnic racism, inter-Asian classism, queerphobia, sexism, misogynoir, and systemic xenophobia continue to impact Asian people and culture? By critically meditating on whether existing concepts of memory and trauma accurately address the histories, present states, and futures of the non-Occidental world, this volume unites perspectives on both dominant and marginalized sites of the broader Asian continent. Contributors explore the complex and surprising intersections of literature, history, ethics, affect, and social justice across the region through its wide-ranging but comparative focus on geo-political sites across East, South, and Southeast Asia, and on Asian diasporas in Australia and the USA. This volume is thus the first of its kind to argue for a comparative methodology in memory and trauma studies that centers Asia rather than pushing it to the periphery of the Occident. It will appeal to scholars, students, teachers, and readers interested in memory and trauma studies, comparative Asian studies, diaspora and postcolonial studies, global studies, and women, gender, and sexuality studies in the 21st century.

Rahul K. Gairola

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