The Transnational Imaginaries of M. G. Vassanji

The Transnational
Imaginaries of
M. G. Vassanji

Diaspora, Literature,
and Culture

Edited by Karim Murji & Asma Sayed

PETER LANG

New York • Bern • Berlin

Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Murji, Karim, editor. | Sayed, Asma, editor.

Title: The transnational imaginaries of M. G. Vassanji:
diaspora, literature, and culture / edited by Karim Murji and Asma Sayed.

Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2018.

Series: Interdisciplinary studies in diasporas; vol. 6
ISSN 2378-0975 (print) | ISSN 2378-0983 (online)
Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018000645 | ISBN 978-1-4331-4752-4 (hardback: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4331-4753-1 (ebook pdf) | ISBN 978-1-4331-4754-8 (epub)
ISBN 978-1-4331-4755-5 (mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: Vassanji, M. G.—Criticism and interpretation.
Transnationalism in literature.

Classification: LCC PR9199.3.V388 Z88 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018000645
DOI 10.3726/b13366

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

© 2018 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006

www.peterlang.com

All rights reserved.

Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.

About the book

The Transnational Imaginaries of M. G. Vassanji is a collection of scholarly articles that engages with, analyzes, and appreciatively critiques the fiction and nonfiction writing of M. G. Vassanji, a multiple award-winning author. Vassanji’s works have a sense of multiple connections across four continents: Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. He challenges the imperial centers of Western powers through the content of his work and his deeply-felt humanist engagements with the politics of displacement, settlement, partition and postcolonialism. Ranging across almost his entire oeuvre, the contributors to this book argue that Vassanji’s work should be read as one emerging from a transnational space that connects people, places and issues across the world. Collectively, the chapters in this book, using a range of theoretical frameworks, claim that Vassanji’s work both fits into and goes beyond the usual categorizations, structures and styles of analysis applied to writers from the colonies.

Advance Praise for The Transnational Imaginaries of M. G. Vassanji

“This is a rich and timely collection of essays. The excellent scholars contributing to this book do much more than celebrate M. G. Vassanji’s critically acclaimed and popular writing. Attending to the singularity and multiplicity of his work, they bring important new insights to Vassanji’s novels, short stories, and life writings. This book will feel particularly vital to anyone with an interest in story telling from and about East Africa, South Asia and North America; and not least because it is energised by a shared and urgent commitment to a ‘transnational’ understanding of geography and history. This is an important book for any reader with an interest in stories about location and dislocation, and about what transnational storytelling might mean for being postcolonial, diasporic, or worldly in any way. Most importantly, perhaps, the book is vibrantly attuned to Vassanji’s ‘deeply humanistic outlook’. Through the rigorous exercise of close literary, historical, geographical and political analyses, the authors of The Transnational Imaginaries of M. G. Vassanji pursue an acute engagement with what literary culture means for being human today.”

Stephanie Jones, University of Southampton

“The Transnational Imaginaries of M. G. Vassanji is a long overdue academic study of M. G. Vassanji’s work. Vassanji is one of the most category-defying, unsettling, yet rewarding writers of the contemporary age. In writing that cannot but resonate for our divided Brexit/Trump world, Karim Murji and Asma Sayed and their contributors show that this multivalent, border-crossing author nonetheless produces imaginative work replete with a singularity of vision.”

Claire Chambers, University of York, UK

“The editors and contributors to this collection succeed in highlighting the multiple dimensions to Vassanji’s work but do so in linking it to ever-present issues of humanity and being in the globalized world as crossing geographical, political, social, and cultural boundaries. This volume provides a much needed addition to scholarship on Vassanji’s work in its consideration of the complexities of systems of identification and belonging that breakdown the notion of the political as personal and the personal as political within a transnational, diasporic and cross-cultural context.”

Cristina Santos, author of Unbecoming Female Monsters: Witches, Vampires and Virgins

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Contents

Preface

Introduction: Locating M.G. Vassanji in a Transnational Context

Asma Sayed and Karim Murji

1. “An Open Wound”: The Memory and Legacy of Partition in Vassanji’s Writings on India

John Clement Ball

2. Thinking through India, Transnationally: Still Writing from a Hard Place?

Delphine Munos

3. Agents of Impermanence: The Visitor Figure in A Place Within

Vera Alexander

4. Travel as a Way Inward: Vassanji’s A Place Within

Jonathan Locke Hart

5. ‘Ye Zindagi Usiki Hai’: Illicit Desire and (Post)colonial Romance in The Book of Secrets

Gaurav Desai

6. The Sacred as a Theme in The Assassin’s Song and The Magic of Saida

Neelima Kanwar

7. Roots/Routes and Rhizomes: Diasporic Tourism and the Return of the Native Stranger in The Magic of Saida

Jonathan Rollins←v | vi→

8. Narrating Violence as a Metaphor of Colonial Enterprise in The Book of Secrets

Remmy Shiundu Barasa

9. Riding the Third Rail: Perpetual Movement and Imagined Return in The In-Between World of Vikram Lall

Aaron Louis Rosenberg

10. “This Was My Country—How Could It Not Be?”: On the Significance of Travel in The In-Between World of Vikram Lall

Shizen Ozawa

11. Journeys and Re-membered Communities in Amriika

Godwin Siundu

12. Reading Vassanji’s Women: Reconstructing an Alternate Historiography

Mala Pandurang

Contributors

Index ←vi | vii→

Preface