MAPS OF MEMORIES. RE-CONSTRUCTING IDENTITY THROUGH REMEMBERING AND THE DEFINING POST DIASPORA
MAPS OF MEMORIES. RE-CONSTRUCTING IDENTITY THROUGH REMEMBERING AND THE DEFINING POST DIASPORA

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores the concept of (post)diaspora as an act of remembering, as illustrated in the British Asian writer Nadeem Aslam’s novel, Maps for Lost Lovers (2004). The narrative follows several inter-related ‘maps’, symbolizing ‘networks’ that link protagonists within and across generations and spaces. Memory being at the centre of this analysis and the core of Aslam’s novel, personal experience is interlaced with historical data (the Partition of India and the decades following the 1950s of South Asian immigrants in Britain) thus complicating further the ‘maps’, both physical and those of the mind, that two of the main male protagonists go through/‘wander’. The research study interrogates the meaning of post diaspora in terms of post memory and ‘past’ diaspora rather than in strict temporal terms, placing identity at the intersection of history, experience, trauma and violence, culture and psychoanalysis.

• Details
• Contents