Transnational Imaginaries of M. G. Vassanji

Karim Murji is a professor in the Graduate School at the University of West London and was previously based at the Open University, UK. His recent books include Racism, Policy and Politics (2017) and, edited with John Solomos, Theories of Race and Ethnicity: Contemporary Debates and Perspectives (2015). With Sarah Neal, he is the Editor of Current Sociology.Asma Sayed is a professor in the Department of English at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on Indian Ocean studies, postcolonial literature, and South Asian diaspora in Canada. Her work has appeared in leading academic journals, including the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Canadian Literature, South Asian Review, Transnational Literature, and the Journal of South Asian Diaspora. Her recent books include M. G. Vassanji: Essays on His Work (2014), Writing Diaspora: Transnational Memories, Identities and Cultures (2014), and Screening Motherhood in Contemporary World Cinema (2016).

• Preface – Asma Sayed and Karim Murji: Introduction: Locating M.G. Vassanji in a Transnational Context – John Clement Ball: "An Open Wound": The Memory and Legacy of Partition in Vassanji’s Writings on India – Delphine Munos: Thinking through India, Transnationally: Still Writing from a Hard Place? – Vera Alexander: Agents of Impermanence: The Visitor Figure in A Place Within – Jonathan Locke Hart: Travel as a Way Inward: Vassanji’s A Place Within – Gaurav Desai: ‘Ye Zindagi Usiki Hai’: Illicit Desire and (Post)colonial Romance in The Book of Secrets – Neelima Kanwar: The Sacred as a Theme in The Assassin’s Song and The Magic of Saida – Jonathan Rollins: Roots/Routes and Rhizomes: Diasporic Tourism and the Return of the Native Stranger in The Magic of Saida – Remmy Shiundu Barasa: Narrating Violence as a Metaphor of Colonial Enterprise in The Book of Secrets – Aaron Louis Rosenberg: Riding the Third Rail: Perpetual Movement and Imagined Return in The In-Between World of Vikram Lall – Shizen Ozawa: "This Was My Country—How Could It Not Be?": On the Significance of Travel in The In-Between World of Vikram Lall – Godwin Siundu: Journeys and Re-membered Communities in Amriika – Mala Pandurang: Reading Vassanji’s Women: Reconstructing an Alternate Historiography – Contributors – Index.

“«The Transnational Imaginaries of M. G. Vassanji» is a long overdue academic study of M. G. Vassanji’s work. Vassanji is one of the most category-defying, unsettling, yet rewarding writers of the contemporary age. In writing that cannot but resonate for our divided Brexit/Trump world, Karim Murji and Asma Sayed and their contributors show that this multivalent, border-crossing author nonetheless produces imaginative work replete with a singularity of vision.”Claire Chambers, University of York, UK