Prof. Alia Somani in SCL

Congratulations to Prof. Alia Somani, whose article “What is Remembered and What is Forgotten? South Asian Diasporic Histories and the Shifting National Imaginary” was published in Studies in Canadian Literature, (vol. 40, issue 1). This article traces Canada’s collective imaginings by examining a selection of canonical history textbooks from the 1940s to the present day for the way they document (or deliberately erase) histories that symbolize racial exclusion in Canada. What these textbooks reveal is that that there has been a gradual, yet reluctant, remembering of diasporic histories. Her argument is that this remembering might be linked to the efforts of writers and artists who have inscribed forgotten traumas in the public record, and in so doing, fought to redefine the Canadian nation itself. She focuses particular attention on Bharati Mukherjee, whose short story “The Management of Grief” records Canada’s response to the 1985 Air India bombing, and Ajmer Rode and Jarnail Singh, whose museum exhibit “The Komagata Maru Stories” pays tribute to the passengers aboard the Komagata Maru who were turned away from Canada’s border in 1914. Check out the abstract and link to article here.