India celebrated the 70th year of its Independence on 15th August 2017. Celebratory national histories, in their enthusiasm to commemorate the giant strides made by the Indian nation in the last seven decades, have tended to marginalize its alternative memory as Partition, which is under the threat of being elided with the rapidly diminishing generation of Partition survivors.
This Seminar aims to complement and supplement the history of Independence through an exploration of the long-term repercussions of one of the most tragic events in Indian history. By reconstructing the personal stories of Partition survivors through literary, filmic, autobiographical and cultural representations as well as historical and testimonial narratives - the seminar hopes to create a better understanding of the afterlife of Partition in the personal, political and cultural spheres.
Papers are invited on but not limited to any of the sub-themes listed below:
- Partition-in-the-east and Partition-in-the-West
- Corporeal and Non-corporeal Violence
- Memory and History
- Post-memories and the 1.5 Generation
- Narrative, Fiction, Testimony
- Displacement, Resettlement, Home
- Lives in the Camps and Refugee Colonies
- Partitioned Subjectivities
- Legacies of Violence
- Memory, Forgetting, Forgiveness
Submit applications before 9th December 2017.
For more detailed information, read the CFP pdf.