Shivani Arulalan Pillai

I am a DPhil Candidate in English, and my doctoral thesis offers a comparative study of the writers Rohinton Mistry (India and Canada), Orhan Pamuk (Turkey), and Svetlana Alexievich (Belarus) by deploying the theoretical framework developed by memory studies. First published in the 1980s, the three of them attend to the link between the imperial pasts and the authoritarian present of the regions they hail from in writings across the genres of realist fiction, historical novel, detective fiction, and testimony. I argue that an understanding of how memory works in the writings of Mistry, Pamuk, and Alexievich enables us to recover a ‘mnemohistoric’ narrative of the transition from imperialism to authoritarianism in India, Turkey, and Belarus and that the ambivalence characterizing such a gesture—something that Assmann describes as “both a conscious choice and an unconscious burden” (51) becomes especially powerful through their depiction of imperial ruins of various kinds as sites of ‘living’ memory. These figures of ruins thus help to shed light on the post-imperial nostalgia characteristic of all three regions, suggesting that a clean break from the past is seldom, or almost never, possible.

My research interests include comparative literature, postcolonial and world literature, and cultural memory studies. While not a translator myself, I am an avid reader of literature in translation and am always eager to learn more about anything related to translation!