This book investigates the ambivalent responses to the opposing compulsions of memory and forgetting in cultural production in South Asia. Mallot reveals how writers such as Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, and Amitav Ghosh indict nationalism's sins by accessing and encoding the past.

This book is the first attempt to bridge the current divide between studies addressing "economic nationalism" as a deliberate ideology and movement of economic 'nation-building', and the literature concerned with more diffuse expressions of economic "nationness"—from national economic symbols and memories, to the "banal" world of product communication. The editors seeks to highlight the importance of economic issues for the study of nations and nationalism, and its findings point to the need to give economic phenomena a more prominent place in the field of nationalism studies. The authors of the essays come from disciplines as diverse as economic and cultural history, political science, business studies, as well as sociology and anthropology. Their chapters address the nationalism-economy nexus in a variety of realms, including trade, foreign investment, and national control over resources, as well as consumption, migration, and welfare state policies. Some of the case studies have a historical focus on nation-building in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while others are concerned with contemporary developments. Several contributions provide in-depth analyses of single cases while others employ a comparative method. The geographical focus of the contributions vary widely, although, on balance, the majority of our authors deal with European countries.

This edited collection attends to the locations of memory along and about the Indo-Pakistan and Indo-Bangladesh borders and the complex ways in which such memories are both allowed for and erased in the present. The collection is situated at the intersection of narratives connected to memory and commemoration in order to ask how memories have been formed and perpetuated across the imposition of these borders. It explores how national boundaries both silence memories and can be subverted in important ways, through consideration of physical sites and cultural practices on both sides of the India-Pakistan-Bangladesh borders that gesture towards that which has been lost – that is, the cultural whole that was the cultural regions of Punjab and Bengal before Partition, as well as broader cultural "wholes" across South Asia, across religious and linguistic lines – alongside forces that deny such connections. The chapters address issues of heritage and memory through specific case-studies on present-day memorial, museological and commemoration practices, through which sometimes competing memorial landscapes have been constructed, and show how memories of past traumas and histories become inscribed into diverse forms of cultural heritage (the built landscape, literature, film).

The Partition of British India in 1947 set in motion events that have had far-reaching consequences in South Asia – wars, military tensions, secessionist movements and militancy/terrorism. This book looks at key events in 1947 and explores the aftermath of the Partition and its continued impact in the present-day understanding of nationhood and identity. It also examines the diverse and fractured narratives that framed popular memory and understanding of history in the region. The volume includes discussions on the manner in which regions such as the Punjab, Sindh, Kashmir, Bengal, Uttar Pradesh (Lucknow) and North-East India were influenced. It deals with issues such as communal politics, class conflict, religion, peasant nationalism, decolonization, migration, displacement, riots, the state of refugees, women and minorities, as well as the political relationship between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Drawing on major flashpoints in contemporary South Asian history along with representations from literature, art and popular culture, this book will interest scholars of modern Indian history, Partition studies, colonial history, postcolonial studies, international relations, politics, sociology, literature and South Asian studies.

Choreographies of 21st Century Wars is the first book to analyze the interface between choreography and contemporary warfare, a pertinent inquiry since choreography has long been linked to war and military training. Authors from a range of disciplines reconceptualize choreography in the face of this century's never ending wars.

When Dorothy Hewett joked about needing a face-lift and sex-change to improve her standing, she drew attention to forces that shaped the production and reception of her drama. Drawing on production of her plays over four decades, and interviews with Hewett’s collaborators, this book reveals how cultural memories in theatre solidify and dissolve. Viewing theatre production as a mode of remembrance, Beaglehole grapples with Hewett as a divisive figure who was ahead of a conservative Australia. Revisiting frequently produced plays, including chapters on The Man from Mukinupin and The Chapel Perilous, as well as rarely-produced works, including Nowhere and The Tatty Hollow Story, this book articulates the ongoing relevance of Hewett’s drama to the history of theatre in Australia.

This volume provides a key analysis of Asian children’s literature and film and creates a dialogue between East and West and between the cultures from which they emerge, within the complex symbiosis of their local, national and transnational frameworks. In terms of location and content the book embraces a broad scope, including contributions related to the Asian-American diaspora, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan. Individually and collectively, these essays broach crucial questions: What elements of Asian literature and film make them distinctive, both within their own specific culture and within the broader Asian area? What aspects link them to these genres in other parts of the world? How have they represented and shaped the societies and cultures they inhabit? What moral codes do they address, underpin, or contest? The volume provides further voice to the increasingly diverse and fascinating output of the region and emphasises the importance of Asian art forms as depictions of specific cultures but also of their connection to broader themes in children’s texts, and scholarship within this field.

This book examines the cultural trauma of the Indian Emergency through a reading of five seminal novels. It discusses the Emergency as an event that prompted the writing of several notable novels attempting to preserve the silenced and fading memory of its human rights violations and suspension of democracy. The author reads works by Salman Rushdie, Shashi Tharoor, Nayantara Sahgal and Rohinton Mistry in conjunction with government white papers, political speeches, memoirs, biographies and history. The book explores the betrayal of the Nehruvian idea of India and democracy by Indira Gandhi and analyses the political and cultural amnesia among the general populace in the decades following the Emergency. At a time when debates around freedom of speech and expression have become critical to literary and political discourses, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of English literature, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, media studies, political studies, sociology, history and for general readers as well.

This book explores the unique contributions of various forms of post-2000 life-writings such as the autobiography, epistles, and biographies, to discourses about the nature and socio-politics of what has become known as the Zimbabwean crisis (c. 2000–2009). Much of what has been written about the Zimbabwean crisis – a decade-long period of unprecedented economic collapse and political upheavals in the southern African country – is strictly discipline-specific and therefore limited to unidimensional modes of theorising the crisis’s many and complex dimensions and dynamics. In this context, this book charts a paradigm shift in hermeneutic and epistemological approaches to comprehending the Zimbabwean crisis. Life-Writing from the Margins in Zimbabwe centres the experiences and memories of ordinary Zimbabweans in pluralizing modes of seeing and knowing the crisis. The book argues that these life-writings present a rich site for encountering versions of the crisis that relate in counter-discursive ways, to the dominant, state-authored narrative of the nation in crisis. Oliver Nyambi’s analysis contributes new ideas to ongoing debates about how cultural texts reflect on the postcoloniality of both power, and experiences and negotiations of power in the context of crisis. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of African literature, Zimbabwean/African studies, postcolonial literature, life-writing and cultural studies.