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Accepted Paper:
Cartography, Memory and Race: Risks and Rationalities of Communities in Moyez Vassanji’s Memoirs
Godwin Siundu
(University of Nairobi)
The paper explores how MG Vassanji's memoirs A Place Within and And Home Was Kariakoor enlist geography, memory and race to interrogate points of (ir)rationality that affirm and/or question our humanity, as drawn from (post)colonial dynamics that (re)ordered society n Eastern Africa and India.
Paper long abstract:
Moyez Vassanji’s memoirs, A Place Within: Rediscovering India (2008) and And Home was Kariakoo (2014) enlist spatial consciousness of rural and urban India and Africa to (re)draw cartographies of South Asian diasporic presences in the regions and the world. While allegorizing the physical state of place with socio-economic and political standing of South Asian and other communities in these texts, Vassanji’s intellection swivels around a hermeneutic of suspicion; how, for instance, prejudice precipitates intolerance of different races and religions, whose logical end is the ruining of physical environment while dehumanising its human presence. If the historical ‘fear of small numbers’ (Appadurai, 2006) has eroded to the minimum our cosmopolitan rationality of ‘ethics in a world of strangers’ (Appiah, 2006), the overall outcome seems to be a resurging rightwing logic that risks plunging humanity into a dystopic end of a ruined world. For the VAD Conference, I propose to engage with these ideas, as they manifest in the two memoirs, and ultimately argue that Vassanji’s formal and substantive logic in the texts is a call to reposition the moral and ethical coordinates that frame what we value as the human and the humane, regardless of time, place, and race.