Partitions and Their Afterlives

Reviews / Votes

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 comprehensive and astute and throw a great deal of light upon the bordering practices operating in the world today. -- Bill Ashcroft, University of New South Wales This ambitious and timely volume is the first to bring together humanities and social science scholars to collectively address the historical, theoretical, cultural and social legacies of partition, from the era of decolonisation to the present. Ranging from policy to popular fiction, and from advertising to the archive, the collection insists on the need for a truly comparative partition studies, undeterred by geographical or disciplinary limits. -- Anna Bernard, Head of Department of Comparative Literature, King's College London By inducting numerous parallel case studies of partition in the last century, this volume goes beyond the causation, processes and consequences of decolonisation and border demarcations-often done hastily and self-righteously with complete irreverence for people at large. Areas like gender, selective usage by nationalist narratives and commercial concerns, and an ongoing evolution of sundered and imagined communities feature in this collection offering comparative searchlight on varied examples such as Ireland, Germany, Bosnia, Palestine and certainly the Sub-continent. -- Iftikhar Malik, Professor of History, Bath Spa University Thanks to a 'multidirectional' approach, this multi-region edited collection of essays stretches our understanding of how partitions are constructed and how we are intimately shaped by them. It revisits perspectives that have so far been limited to individual nations and entrenched disciplines. Paradoxically, the framework of memory and trauma studies emphasizes even more how partitions are endlessly replayed in our present. A must-read for anyone interested in the contemporary world. -- Judith Misrahi-Barak, Associate Professor, English Department, Paul Valery University of Montpellier