1st Edition
Between Homelands in Michael Ondaatje’s Fiction
Between Homelands in Michael Ondaatje’s Fiction is a comprehensive study of the novels of the Sri Lankan-Canadian author and poet, Michael Ondaatje. This survey of the Booker Prize winning novelist’s works locates him as a powerful voice that urges globalization and multiculture in a world that is closing its borders. It reconnoitres Ondaatje’s search for a homeland by cracking open the core of his evocative, inventive, and innovative concepts that undergird his art of storytelling. The contributors in this volume examine themes such as literary cosmopolitanism, Sri Lankan identity, diasporic identity, race and racism, home and belonging, trauma in the Sri Lankan civil war, and war games and uncertainty theory.
An important contribution to Ondaatje studies, the book is an indispensable resource for students and researchers of Sri Lankan literature, diasporic and world literatures, South Asian and Canadian studies, cultural studies, postcolonial fiction, and history.
Introduction: In Search of Home
Julie Banerjee Mehta and Harish C. Mehta
PART ONE
THE ‘LOST’ FATHERLAND
1. “Gothic Detection” in Anil’s Ghost
Marlene Goldman
2. Intimate Words: Intertextuality in Running in the Family
PART TWO
MYTH, RACE, AND SUBVERSION
3. Idiosyncratic Histories: Revisionist Mythopoetics in The English Patient
4. Subversive Art and History in The English Patient and Divisadero
Mohini Maureen Pradhan
5. The Colonized Sikh Warrior in The English Patient
Ayushi Ray
PART THREE
SONGS FROM THE ‘HOOD’
6. Jazzing Up the Facts in Coming Through Slaughter: Ondaatje’s Fictional “Archive”
Raka Mukherjee
7. Predatory Violence and Abuse of State Power in Billy the Kid
Roma Bhattarcharjea
8. An Unprivileged Place: Journeying Selves in The Cat’s Table
Chaitali Maitra
PART FOUR
TRAUMA IN SRI LANKAN CIVIL WAR HISTORY
9. An Invented Past: Representation of History in Anil’s Ghost
10. Connected by Tunnels of Light: Reading Care in Anil’s Ghost
PART FIVE
WAR, GAMES, POKER, AND UNCERTAINTY
11. Teens, Trolls, and Toxic Games in Divisadero
Harsh Kumar Singh
12. Triad of Chance, Risk, and Security: Postwar Uncertainty in Warlight
Vinod Kumar Pillai
Index
Biography
Julie Banerjee Mehta is guest faculty at Loreto College, Kolkata. has an MA and a PhD in English Literature and South Asian Studies from the University of Toronto, where she taught courses on the works of Michael Ondaatje, and where she conceptualized and taught the Chancellor-endowed course on Asian Literatures and Cultures in Asia. Her translation of Tagore’s play Dak Ghar/Post Office was performed by Pleiades Theatre, Toronto, in 2010, to critical acclaim, and earned her the title of “One of Sixteen Most Influential South Asians in Canada”. She is the author of Dance of Life: The Mythology, History, and Politics of Cambodian Culture, and co-author of The Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen.
Harish C. Mehta has an MA and a PhD in History from McMaster University, Canada, in the history of American foreign relations and Southeast Asia. He did graduate studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and taught history at McMaster, the University of Toronto, and Trent University. He is the author, most recently, of People’s Diplomacy of Vietnam: Soft Power in the Resistance War, 1965-1972, and of three books on Cambodian history. His research articles have appeared in International History Review, Diplomatic History, Peace and Change, The Historian, and History Compass. He has twice won the Samuel Flagg Bemis research award from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is currently editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed Rising Asia Journal (www.rajraf.org).
