History, Memory, Fiction New Dimensions in Contemporary Pakistani and Kashmiri Writings

by Waterman, David

• ISBN13: 9780190708825
• ISBN10: 0190708824
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2023-12-11
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

History, Memory, Fiction proposes an examination of several contemporary novels and memoirs of leading Pakistani and Kashmiri writers, considering them as historical fiction, in other words as works that are based on real-world facts, but as fiction are able to go further in creating what have been called 'possible worlds', ultimately creating a plausible story that might well be a true story. By blurring the frontier between history and fiction, unconstrained by concerns of referential 'truth', these novels and memoirs are able to provide us with fresh insights and moral orientation while suggesting that the past—which is not the same as history—must be given meaning in our present if we wish to create better possible futures. Thus, these writers are engaged in active social critique, providing readers with a broader perspective of historical consciousness.

Author Biography

David Waterman, Professor, University of La Rochelle, France

David Waterman is currently Professor at the University of La Rochelle, France, where he is a member of the research team at the Center for Research in International and Atlantic History (CRHIA), Co-director of the doctoral program, Euclide and Director of the Asia Pacific Institute.

His publications include, Where Worlds Collide : Pakistani Fiction in the New Millennium (OUP, 2014), Pat Barker and the Mediation of Social Reality (2009), Identity in Doris Lessings Space Fiction (2006), Disordered Bodies and Disrupted Borders : Representations of Resistance in Modern British Literature (1999).

Table of Contents

Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction

1. Part 1
The Exchange of Interconnected Histories in Soniah Kamals An Isolated Incident
2. Now and Then
Mirza Waheeds The Collaborator and the Contested History of a Place
3. Part 2
Personal and Political Displacement in Rafia Zakarias The Upstairs Wife
4. Life-writing and Cultural Memory
Basharat Peers Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love, and War in Kashmir
5. Neoliberal self-help and Water Resources
Mohsin Hamids How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
6. Part 3
History, Legacy, and Contemporary Literary Representations
7. Cultural Understanding as Military Strategy
Mapping the Human Terrain in Nadeem Aslams The Wasted Vigil
8. Historiography and the Question of What Happened?
Uzma Aslam Khans The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali
9. Part 4
The Making of a World
10. Snuffing Out the Moon
Kino/Bio Politics, Movement, and the State of Exception
Conclusion
11. Eventful History, Movement, and Social Mutation
Possible Futures

Works Cited
Copyright Acknowledgements
Index