Papers are solicited for a book that seeks to connect the different facets of partition violence to histories of migration and relocation within and across the nation-states of India and Pakistan as well as to the West. For many survivors, the partition of 1947 remains the defining moment of trauma that marks their lives and memories. In recent years, historians, activists, and literary scholars have recovered stories of survivors of partition violence in order to understand its human side and the multiple dimensions of the ways in which the “partitioned subject” reconstituted him/herself in relation to the violence. This book seeks to complicate such stories in order to examine the ways in which forms of violence arising from the conflicts between “homeland” and the nation states’ regulatory practices concerning issues of domicile, nationality, citizenship, ethnicity and language impacted the process of migration itself. How do such forms of violence mediate the afterlives of migrants in places that are marked by new pressures of differences, hopes and possibilities? What do they speak about the failures of nation and home? How do the mediations of gender account for the failures and possibilities of their new homes and nations? The aim of this book is to bring together essays that explore the ways in which representational forms such as literature, film, media, theatre, testimonies and oral histories negotiate these and other related questions. The book will also examine the interventions that such representations may make in existing opinion on the subject.

Please submit proposals (250-300 words) for essays, along with a title, by November 15th, 2004 to Nandi Bhatia and Anjali Gera (e-mail addresses given below).