About the Book
This volume represents a significant contribution to the fields of migration studies, postcolonial theory, and critical geography. It critically engages with the intersections of power, space, and identity to deepen our understanding of the challenges and possibilities of negotiating citizenship and belonging in an increasingly interconnected and precarious world. The book interrogates the construction of nationalist narratives and their role in perpetuating exclusionary paradigms, which marginalize certain demographic segments and reinforce hierarchical notions of belonging. Further, it examines the bio-political mechanisms that engender conditions of precarity, reshaping conceptions of citizenship and nationhood in response to environmental degradation, population control policies, and state surveillance. The essays in the volume delve into the diverse factors driving displacement, encompassing both state-driven policies of engineered displacement and environmental factors such as climate change, resource depletion, and natural disasters. They also focus on the marginalized spaces of displacement and explore how these sites become loci of resistance and incubators of alternative forms of belonging.
Interdisciplinary in its approach and rigorous in its empirical analysis, the volume will stimulate further research, provoke new questions, and inspire transformative interventions in the fields of migration and diaspora studies, literary and cultural studies, politics and political processes, and sustainability studies.
Table of Contents:
Introduction PART I: Migratory experiences and Mnemonic recollections: Displacement, Memory and Other Sites of Belonging 1. Memories of Migration: Retelling the Alternative History of Oraons/ Kurukhs Migration in North Bengal. 2. Let this be Our Tribute Paid to Memory: J.M.Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus and the Possibility of Other Futures 3. Contextualizing Jibanananda’s “I Shall Return to This Bengal” PART II: Of Heterotopia and Other Imaginary Communities: Alternative Nationalities and Identity Spaces 4. Reconfiguring Char as “Heterotopia”: Poetics, Politics and Polemics of Miya Poetry in Assam. 5. Between Dreams and Despair: Experiencing Heterotopias in Rattan Lal Shant’s “Moss Swimming on the Water”. 6. A Man of No Nation, But a Bengalee: Reading Premendra Mitra’s “Ghana-da” stories alongside Tagore’s “Nationalism”. PART III: Political Precarity and Lived Experiences of Displacement and Migratory Otherness 7. “Our lives have become weapons in a rugged political contest”—A Reading of Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains and Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee. 8. A Hunt for Liberty and License: Examining Abhishek Shah’s Directorial Debut Hellaro. 9. Contested Heterotopias: Bombay and Manto’s stories of the Migrant Undercity. 10. National Identity, Citizenship and the Refugee Crisis:A Study of Asif Currimbhoy’s The Refugee. PART IV: Unmapped Terrains and Transitional Contours: Locating Displacement as Coming into Being 11. Politics of Permissibility: Exploring Ecocracy Within the Postcolonial Nation-State. 12. Lost In The Convolution Of Transnational Space: A Study With Special Reference To Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife 13. The trauma and the triumph: The Case of the Nowhere People in Srijit Mukherjee’s Rajkahini and Goutam Ghosh’s Shankhachil. 14. Stateless in South Asia: Post-Partition institutional violence and the struggle for identity in Debesh Roy’s Udbastu (Refugee).
About the Author :
Sk Sagir Ali is assistant professor at the Department of English, Midnapore College, India. His published works include the edited books Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature: Traversing Resistance Margins and Extremism, Literature and Theory:Contemporary Signposts and Critical Surveys, War on Terror: Nation, Democracy, and Liberalisation, Writing Disaster in South Asian Literature and Culture, and Marginal Narratives and the Question of Human Rights in Asian Pacific Literature. His articles appear in journals of repute like South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies from the University of Florida Press, etc.
Saikat Sarkar is assistant professor in the PG Dept of English, Midnapore College (Autonomous). Before this he was a tenured faculty at the PG Dept of English, Bankura Christian College. Dr Sarkar’s doctoral dissertation is on the ambivalent cultural influence of the Bible on the novels of Toni Morrison. A recipient of US Department of State fellowship, Dr Sarkar has participated in NEH Summer workshop in Rochester, NY in 2011. Dr Sarkar has co-edited critical volumes The Posthuman Imagination: Literature at the Edge of Human (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK, 2021), and Humanism and After: Literature’s Journey from Humanism to Cyber Culture and Other Forms of Posthumanism” (Avenel Press, India, 2020). He has published twenty research articles and twelve book chapters on Black American Literature, Black British Literature, Popular Culture, Shakespeare Adaptations, Indian Partition writing and Indian English Drama, Indian Science Fiction in national journals and edited volumes. Apart from these Dr Sarkar is actively engaged in translation projects and has published his translations of tribal folk literature, partition narratives and Indian English poetry in anthologies. Dr Sarkar has edited noted academic research journals named Wesleyan Journal of Research (a multi-disciplinary peer-reviewed journal) and Appropriations (a peer-reviewed national-level journal of English literary studies) and has been acting as reviewer for peer-reviewed national-level journals like Post-Scriptum and Post-colonial Interventions. His recent area of interest is concerned with posthumanism in cultural texts, science fiction and folk horror.
Tanmoy Kundu is currently Assistant Professor of English, Midnapore College (Autonomous), Midnapore, West Bengal. Formerly, he held a substantive post at Khatra Adibasi Mahavidyalaya and served as a Guest faculty at Saldiha College, Bankura. He has co-edited Off the Line: Transgression and Its Representation in Literature and Culture (Atlantic Publishers and Distributors Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, 2019) and Posthumanism Imagination: Literature at the Edge of Human (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020) and Humanism and After: Literature’s Journey from Humanism to Cyber Culture & Other Forms of Post Humanism (Avenel Press, 2020). He is an Editor of New Literaria- An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities and a member of the Editorial Board of a Journal named Advanced Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences. Postcolonial & Diaspora Studies Popular Culture, Cultural Studies Classical Literature, History of Nations and Violence, Subaltern Studies, Literary Theory, Dalit Studies, are his allied interest areas.
Sanjoy Saren is Assistant Professor of English at Midnapore College (Autonomous), West Bengal, India. He has edited a book of poems named Firth- A Consortium of Indian Poets by Asian Press Books in 2023 and authored a book of own creative poems named The Celestial Pen.
