Migrating Memories: Power and Transcultural Memory in Contemporary South Asian Fiction

As a scholar of German-Jewish descent, my academic research has focused on the dynamics of traumatic memory as it circulates across the globe, solidifying itself in moments of remembrance in one instance, and dissipating through individual and collective forgetting in the next. As the field of memory and trauma studies moves towards a more global outlook, my dissertation, “Migrating Memories: Power and Transcultural Memory in Contemporary South Asian Fiction,” takes a postcolonial approach to the field, exploring the often fraught transmission of difficult and violent histories across national and cultural borders. My dissertation revolves around two interrelated questions: First, what effect does power have on memory? Second, how can we “locate” or make visible the processes of memory transmission within and between subaltern groups whose actions are patrolled and, at times, curtailed?

(Excerpt from Jessica's proposal)