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Full text release has been delayed at the author's request until July 11, 2028

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(Corpo)realities of Nostalgia in Global South Asian Literature and Performance

Ranwalage, Sandamini Yashoda
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3203-2341
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1689243719609434

Abstract Details

2023, Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, English.
A comparative and interdisciplinary study, this dissertation examines corporeal forms of nostalgic recollection in twentieth- and twenty-first-century global South Asian literature and performance. Studying a range of cultural material, I illustrate how writers and performing artists negotiate ideological constructions of the past through nostalgic narratives articulated in corporeal terms and through embodied acts. To this end, I first call for a theoretical reconfiguration of nostalgic recollection as a performative act that can “break and remake” narrations of the past, in keeping with Homi K. Bhabha’s definition of performance as “kinesis.” Such a reconfiguration also accounts for nostalgia’s cross-temporality, since the process of recollecting the past hinges on a disruption of the present and the ideation of the future. Secondly, building on the work of performance theorists like Diana Taylor and Rebecca Schneider, I study how memory is anchored to the body, where the body becomes both the means of recollection and the site for the projection of the past. The dissertation unsettles dominant historiography by calling attention to forms of nostalgia that posit the corporeal as its theoretical, epistemological, ontological nucleus. Thinking through Anuk Arudpragasam’s novel The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016), the first chapter theorizes the performativity of nostalgic recollections in the face of nationalist, imperialist, and heteropatriarchal narratives of history. In Chapter 2, I explore how Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake (2003), Asif Mandvi’s play Sakina’s Restaurant (1988), and Shyam Selvadurai’s novel The Hungry Ghosts (2013) deploy corporeal nostalgic recollection to underscore the unfulfilled neoliberal promises of the first world where the bodies of diasporic women, queer, and working-class individuals are often gendered and sexualized. The third chapter focuses on the performativity of the war-torn body in Sri Lankan performance art by Janani Cooray and Bandu Manamperi (2004-2014) as an indictment of both necropolitics and nostalgia embedded in national narratives of war. As I argue in my fourth chapter, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s multimedia performance piece Alif is for Awakening (2019) and Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2008) re-imagine the imperialist construct of the terrorist body as a locus of nostalgia otherwise displaced by post-9/11 racialization of a Muslim Other. The fifth and final chapter claims that performances of the diasporic South Asian auntie by Nimmi Harasgma and Jehan Ratnatunga on YouTube (2009-2015) embody collective nostalgias that not only create digital diasporas but also work against the digital decorporealization of migrant bodies.
Nalin Jayasena (Committee Co-Chair)
Katie Johnson (Committee Co-Chair)
269 p.
Gender Studies; Literature; Performing Arts; South Asian Studies; Theater Studies
nostalgia; postcolonial literature and performance; South Asia; South Asian Diaspora; performance studies

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Ranwalage, S. Y. (2023). (Corpo)realities of Nostalgia in Global South Asian Literature and Performance [Doctoral dissertation, Miami University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1689243719609434

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Ranwalage, Sandamini. (Corpo)realities of Nostalgia in Global South Asian Literature and Performance. 2023. Miami University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1689243719609434.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Ranwalage, Sandamini. "(Corpo)realities of Nostalgia in Global South Asian Literature and Performance." Doctoral dissertation, Miami University, 2023. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1689243719609434

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

miami1689243719609434
© 2023, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Miami University and OhioLINK.