Research
The Centre serves as a hub of research and archival excellence enabling faculty and students to participate in regular workshops, lectures, seminars, and conferences. It builds on current faculty research strengths and interests as well as reaches out to colleagues across South Asia and internationally. Members of the English Department teach, research, and have publications in areas ranging from memories of Partition to Dalit literature to gender studies to representations of war. CSVMT has a contemporary edge while working with histories and representations of violence and trauma from earlier periods, drawing in the best minds from different disciplines and countries.
The Centre is developing a major research project related to the 1947 Partition focusing on the memorialization of the event through oral narratives and archiving. This is in collaboration with the 1947 Partition Archive. Another research project on the role of soldiers from the Indian Sub-continent in the First World War has also been initiated by the Centre. CSVMT interfaces seamlessly and effectively with the existing Centre for Academic Translation and Archiving and the Centre for Dalit Studies. In the long term the Centre will enable and participate in conversations that will enhance our understanding of violence and its diverse implications.
Research Orientations and Objectives
The Centre looks at issues and questions related to:
The full spectrum, categories, and theorizations of violence, memory, and trauma.
Specific histories, locations, and locutions.
The idea of the violent ‘event’ and its constitutions and representations
‘Truth’; ‘facts’; misremembering; collective amnesia; the relationship of memory and forgetfulness; silence and forgetting at the level of the individual versus the collective
Trauma and post-trauma theories; post-memory; inter-generational transmissions of trauma
Why it might be important to return to and avow ‘founding traumas’ (Dominic La Capra) like slavery, apartheid, the Holocaust, and Partition
The possible risks and pitfalls entailed in projects of cultural memorialization, including the remembering of grief as an incitement to war or revenge and the reification of victimhood on the part of particular groups.
Ethics – of war (just war theory), of representations; the ‘pornography of violence’
The varied textualizations of violence – in literature, photography, film, TV documentary, oral histories, blogs, internet archives, monuments, museums
Literature as testimony as well as a way of ‘working through’ violence and its enduring legacies.
The enchantment with forms of violence in literary and non-literary representations; aestheticization and sensationalization of violence in literature, film, and mediatic representations
Re-envisioning survival — thinking of survival and ‘healing’ in more complex ways that are not confined to the ‘talking cure’
Resistance to violence; protest; anger; revolution
Putting your face to your story allows your readers to connect to you. And here’s a little tip from the pros - write in the first person so your readers can relate to you on a more personal level.
