South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies Commons^™

Laila: A Doll Memoir Of 1947 Partition Of India And Pakistan, Maleeha Malik, Maleeha Fatima Malik

Children's Literature (MFA) Theses

This abstract examines a creative and critical work centered on the 1947 Partition of India, which displaced approximately fourteen million people and caused one million deaths. The narrative introduces Laila, an anthropomorphized doll who functions as both witness and archive, embodying the memories and traumas of multiple child survivors. Through Laila’s journey across India, Pakistan, and the diaspora, the text explores themes of identity, belonging, loss, and intergenerational memory.

Blending personal family history with historical analysis, the author situates Laila within lived experiences of migration, silence, and religious marginalization, particularly as part of the Ahmadi Muslim community. The narrative foregrounds …

The Tales Of Maruni, Sikuma Rai

Theses and Dissertations

Sikuma Rai journeys into the fading indigenous genre of Maruni—an eastern Nepali song and dance form—narrating letters to her late grandfather. Accompanied by her father, and a devoted folk musician from an upper-caste background, she traces echoes of memory, identity, and the fragile inheritance of indigenous culture.

Catastrophe Of War, Sujit Kumar Singh, Ayushi Jaiswal

Critical Humanities

The paper selects the novel Palpasa Café (2005) by Nepali author Narayan Wagle to highlight the factors that contributed to the Maoist insurgency and counter-insurgency that punctured the Nepali consciousness. It will also critique Eurocentric trauma theory for diminishing the South Asian perspectives of trauma (incidents) from the main discourse of trauma theory. In addition, the paper will explore the detrimental impacts of war and conflict as experienced by Nepalese cops and civilians together, and its long-lasting imprint on their psyche as manifested in different forms of trauma in the text. The dissemination of the 'inarticulable trauma' concept into something …

“Nararampag Nga Mga Takna . . . Nangangaliding Nga Mga Higayon”: Memory, Nostalgia, Love, And Loss In Victor Sugbo’S Taburos Han Dagat, Jessa A. Amarille

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

This paper explores how the concepts of memory, nostalgia, love, and loss are depicted in the poems 1) “Ha Akon Paglinakaton,” (In My Travels[1]), 2) “May Ada Panahon” (There Comes a Time), 3) “Parada Han mga Sinya” (The Parade of Zinnias), 4) “An Pagdumdum” (On Recalling), 5) “Kawarayan” (Emptiness), 6) “Agurang Mundo” (Old Mundo), 7) “Taburos Han Dagat” (Sea Spray), 8) “La Madonna Alegro,” and 9) “Cadena de Amor” from Victor N. Sugbo’s Taburos Han Dagat (2014) using an ecocritical lens. Published in a post-Haiyan context, the poems may be classified as belonging to the ecopoetry genre with …

Ruptures In Indentures In Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter Of Maladies And Unaccustomed Earth, Prabal D. Gupta

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Jhumpa Lahiri (1967) is one of the prominent American writers of Bengali descent, contributing mainly to diaspora literature to depict the nuanced aspects of Bengalis in their immigrant lives. Lahiri’s stories in Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Unaccustomed Earth (2008) illustrate the challenges of the Bengali diaspora due to their indentured identity, which I have used to refer to the Bengali people’s culturally-rooted identity. This study investigates how the diaspora’s native cultural identity fluctuates in connection with the host culture. The research renders a reconfigured image of “home” because the concept of home changes for these people after migration in …

Envisioning A New Pakistani Home: Gender, Class, And Identity In Women’S Urdu Journals, 1947-1960, Mehreen Jamal

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The women’s journals published in Urdu during the first decades of Pakistan were vital to understanding the middle-class aspirations for a new national identity, since independence raised concerns among the dutiful citizens for the reformation of the new society, particularly concerning private lives. The writers and readers of these journals belonged to a generation whose lives and ideas had been formed by the Muslim reform literature of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the independence of Pakistan in 1947 to roughly the 1960s, writers in women’s journals engaged in refashioning the ideas of a new Pakistani middle-class respectability, foreseeing …

Articulating Refug-Endity In Vietnamerica And The Diasporas 1975-2015: From Ethnic Autonomy To Global Visibility, Trangdai Glassey-Tranguyen

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

Since the culmination of the Vietnam War on April 30^th, 1975, waves of Vietnamese evacuees, refugees, and immigrants arrived in the United States and created a new home across the country. Orange County, California, is home to the largest concentration of Vietnamese Americans since 1975 in the U.S., and has notoriously been known as the “Vietnamese refugee capitol” in the diasporas. I argue that there has been an organic, thriving – albeit very under-studied – body of Vietnamese-language literature and media in Orange County and VietnAmerica since 1975, which provides a fertile ground for the articulation of what …

Objects Of Desire: Photographs And Retrospective Narratives Of Fieldwork In Indonesia, Jennifer W. Nourse

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

This discussion of my fieldwork, memory, and experience begins with a nod to Handler and Gable’s essay (this volume) in which they ask what anthropology can contribute to the study of social memory. I take Gable and Handler’s insights about the false dichotomy between memory and history (since, they argue, all history and memory are perspectival) and consider ways in which fieldwork photographs demonstrate the same point. I suggest that my photographs became the repositories for individual interpretations of a host of broader issues related to the nation-state and its agenda. This agenda was reflected in ways the photographs were …