Partitions and Their Afterlives: Violence, Memories, Living [Paperback]

How can we theorise partitions differently? How are new identities, moralities, polities and life constructed post-partition? How are gender and sexuality recalibrated after partition? How can violence be theorised? What is the relationship between identity in the diaspora and identity after partition? What is the relationship between the movement of capital and national borders that is the mark of partition?

Partitions and their Afterlives engages with political partitions and how their aftermath affects the contemporary life of nations and their citizens. Using a comparative perspective, the essays seek to stretch our understanding of these conflicts and to show how elements of our day-to-day lives have been shaped by them. In juxtaposing the various partitions in a single volume the book contributes to debates on citizenship, collective memory, nation-building, and borders and boundaries. Such a focus also reveals how local communities as well as nations use their knowledge of the past and history. This ground-breaking multi-disciplinary and multi-region volume will analyse the various convergences and departures between the different partitions and draw out lessons for the present. In so doing, this work will also examine methodological challenges and the imperatives for scholars working on individual countries.

Radhika Mohanram is a Professor at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University, UK.

Anindya Raychaudhuri is a Lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews.

This book could not be more timely, given the hysteria with which national borders are being increasingly protected. The essays demonstrate that partitions are not erected to keep violent communities away from each other, nor are they simply historically erected border walls, but are the result of ongoing political processes whose consequences spread wide and deep in contemporary communities. These analyses of partitions are both comprehensivelã.