Violence, History and Silence in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines

This article analyzes Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines to examine a narrative gap at its heart that conceals the central fact of the death of Tridib, arguably the most important character in the text. The novel concentrates on the Partition of Bengal and its impact on people from different countries and nationalities in Asia and Europe. Accommodating the story of three generations of people in three cities--Dhaka, Calcutta, and London--The Shadow Lines shows the interaction of characters belonging to Hindu, Muslim, and Christian faith. Important events in the text revolve around the family of Mayadebi, her sister Tha’mma and the Prices, their English friends. The narrative begins in 1939 and ends in 1964, connecting the Second World War, the Partition in 1947, and the riots of 1964 in Calcutta and Dhaka. Using Tha’mma, the grandmother of the unnamed narrator, as the connecting link between their pre-modern life before Partition in Dhaka and diasporic life in post-Partition Calcutta, The Shadow Lines depicts the traumatic suffering of characters from different nationalities but mainly from India and Bangladesh. The paper argues that the silence and secrecy maintained by Tha’mma and others about Tridib’s death mirrors the silence of official history concerning violence in their narrative of civilization, freedom, and progress which Ghosh unravels to produce a novelistic revisionist history that not only challenges the mainstream history but also fills the gaps it leaves.

Another Cinema

James Baldwin was a vocal critic of Hollywood, but he was also a cinephile, and his critique of film was not so much of the medium itself, but of the uses to which it was put. Baldwin saw in film the chance to transform both politics and art—if only film could be transformed itself. This essay blends readings of archival materials, literature, film, and print culture to examine three distinct modes in Baldwin’s ongoing quest to revolutionize film. First, I argue, literature served as a key site to practice being a filmmaker, as Baldwin adapted cinematic grammars in his fiction and frequently penned scenes of filmgoing in which he could, in effect, direct his own movies. Secondly, I show that starting in the 1960s, Baldwin took a more direct route to making movies, as he composed screenplays, formed several production companies, and attempted to work in both Hollywood and the independent film scene in Europe. Finally, I explore how Baldwin sought to change cinema as a performer himself, in particular during his collaboration on Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley’s documentary I Heard It Through the Grapevine (1982). This little-known film follows Baldwin as he revisits key sites from the civil rights movement and reconnects with activist friends as he endeavors to construct a revisionist history of race in America and to develop a media practice capable of honoring Black communities.

A Maud of her own: re-visioning L.M. Montgomery’s “Western Eden” in Melanie Fishbane’s historical fiction

This major research paper considers the connection between the genre of historical fiction and the complex dynamics of revisionist history in Melanie Fishbane’s young adult novel Maud: A Novel inspired by the Life of L.M. Montgomery (2017). More specifically, this study critically examines how Fishbane appropriates L.M. Montgomery’s Western Canadian writings for her own purposes to update complex social realities and sensibilities in her historical novel. Because Montgomery’s personal and fictional writings reveal a deeply conflicted and contradictory ideological stance on race issues, particularly where Indigenous peoples are concerned, which may frustrate or alienate 21st century mass readership, Fishbane opted to make her character, Maud, more sympathetic towards the plight of the Indigenous peoples in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan; this revisionist approach, I argue, has potential to gloss over the real Montgomery’s more problematic and more heteroglossic representations on race. This study’s findings indicate that the revisionist nature of historical fiction, moulded by the new context in which it is written, influences the way that texts and historical figures, like L.M. Montgomery are re-imagined and re-written.

A Maud of her own: re-visioning L.M. Montgomery’s “Western Eden” in Melanie Fishbane’s historical fiction

This major research paper considers the connection between the genre of historical fiction and the complex dynamics of revisionist history in Melanie Fishbane’s young adult novel Maud: A Novel inspired by the Life of L.M. Montgomery (2017). More specifically, this study critically examines how Fishbane appropriates L.M. Montgomery’s Western Canadian writings for her own purposes to update complex social realities and sensibilities in her historical novel. Because Montgomery’s personal and fictional writings reveal a deeply conflicted and contradictory ideological stance on race issues, particularly where Indigenous peoples are concerned, which may frustrate or alienate 21st century mass readership, Fishbane opted to make her character, Maud, more sympathetic towards the plight of the Indigenous peoples in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan; this revisionist approach, I argue, has potential to gloss over the real Montgomery’s more problematic and more heteroglossic representations on race. This study’s findings indicate that the revisionist nature of historical fiction, moulded by the new context in which it is written, influences the way that texts and historical figures, like L.M. Montgomery are re-imagined and re-written.

Contingency in International Legal History

Why are international legal scholars abandoning international law’s structuralism and searching for contingent pasts and plural futures? And why now? I use a revisionist history of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s claims at the League of Nations to explain the current preoccupation with the contingency-necessity debate. First, putting international law ‘in context’ yields more contexts and more contingency. This puts pressure on what counts as law, an issue of existential concern for international law. The controversy over contextualising and the contingency it exposes express anxiety about the differentiation of international law. Second, international law comes with its own theory of history. The debate shows scholars are repudiating international law’s own structuralist progress narrative. Third, the contingency-necessity debate is politics dressed as methodology. Necessity stories give international law a future to fight for, whereas contingency stories leave it rudderless. The controversy shows that we, scholars, do not know what to do about international law’s present or future. The heat shows we wish we did.