Author:

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Soham Adhikari.

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Abstract:

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This study examines borrowed memoryscapes within Northeast Indian imagination, and interrogates how postmemory transforms into a liminal space in and of itself, giving rise to hyphenated identities that oscillate within its confines. ‘Official’ memories erected by government authorities produce a ‘shared past’ among indigenous people, which subsequently engenders ethnonationalist sentiments among various disproportionally populated collectives, leading to ‘otherisation’ through the creation of majority-minority binaries. Three forms of remembrance are created: official memorials and spaces of manufactured history, majority-narrative (ethnoidentity) history that amalgamates into the quantized state’s historical imagination, and minority-narrative vernacular history that is alienated since it belongs to the ‘other’. This minority population is often comprised of intra- and inter-national migrants, both of whom actively contribute towards furthering the heterogeneity of the state. However, they are faced with rampant acts of xenophobia, racism and other forms of discrimination in the hands of the ethnonationalist majority. Second- and later-generational migrants born on these lands are trapped within a constant state of flux, confused about which of the remembered histories to choose from and base their (ethno-) social identity around – thereby becoming hyphenated subjects in themselves. For the sake of sociopolitical propaganda, the true memories of events have been either unconsciously forgotten, artificially obliviated, or strategically altered, and replaced with adulterated quasi-synthetic memories. In their daily interactions with propagators of postmemory, these reforged memories are passed onto posterity. These later generations are therefore hyphenated, and are forced to inhabit the liminal space produced by discordant memoryscapes that they unwittingly borrowed.

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This paper will be presented at the Association for Asian Studies' 2022 Annual Conference.