New Books In South Asian Studies

Shuchi Kapila, Postmemory and the Partition of India: Learning to Remember (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024) Dr. Shuchi Kapila, Professor of English at Grinnell College, has a new book that explores the India/Pakistan Partition in 1947 through the lens of memory, generational conversation and inheritance. Postmemory and the Partition of India: Learning to Remember is most clearly focused on this idea of how we learn to remember the past, particularly the complexities of a past that includes trauma and violence along with independence and hope. This book, part of the Palgrave MacMillan series on Memory Studies, examines these ideas of memory and nostalgia and how they have shaped the cultural and political understanding of Partition in India, but also in the diaspora. Kapila starts with her own lived experiences, recalling bits of stories her mother told of her life before Partition. This is the path that Postmemory and the Partition of India continues along, as Kapila notes that the memories of Partition are fragmen