Graphic Migrations

“Kavita Daiya has written a panoramic study of post-Partition studies. The remnants of the mid-twentieth-century Partition may be the debris of long colonial histories, but these very remnants return to haunt the suffering memories of migrants and minorities who are frequently disfigured as enemies ‘within’ or displaced as enemies ‘without.’ Daiya argues that post-Partition remnants are dangerously weaponized by ethno-nationalists, who weaponize traditions of the sacred in order to demean the democratic ambitions of secular pluralism. Daiya’s wide scholarly purview ranges across literature, cinema, graphic novels, and the creative arts, as she assembles a rich archive of contemporary reflection and critical relevance.”
— Homi K. Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University

"Kavita Daiya’s book makes significant contributions to the field of Partition Studies. It links Partition Studies to contemporary crisis of secularism in India and resurrects the secular as a useful category to resist the current erasure of minority rights in India. Daiya is mapping new archives of Partition memory and exploring new materials from print and digital culture. Finally, her project makes productive connections between the mid-twentieth population displacements and the contemporary production of refugees in civil wars in countries like Syria and Yemen. She also establishes solidarities between South Asian refugees with refugees produced by other conflicts in Asia like the Korean and Vietnam wars."
—South Asian Review

"Graphic Migrations incorporates a unique interdisciplinary approach...which enables Daiya to map various representations of post-partition South Asian and South Asian American refugee and immigrant experiences. This representational mapping, which draws widely from film, literature, oral histories, visual culture, and new media from present-day India and the South Asian American diaspora, reveals a contentious discursive field.... Daiya’s representational mapping also offers the promise of comparative interpretation of other refugee and immigrant experiences emerging from forced displacement by militarized neocolonial border adjustments in 20th-century Southeast Asia.... Recommended."
—Choice

" The book brings alive an alternative perspective on the 1947 Partition through literary and media archives foregrounding the minorities and thus affirming a subaltern secular. It is also successful in not restricting the 1947 Partition to just an event that is static and fixed in time but traces its afterlife, which continues to make and remake people’s lives across transnational borders.... The book is going to be a useful read for students and academics interested in 1947 Partition – in the field of literary studies, media studies, sociology and political science."
—Doing Sociology

"(A) groundbreaking work of scholarship that ruptures the silo of refugee studies as area studies.... (E)ach chapter engages with multiple literary and cinematic creations, (and) it is precisely this critical dialogic framework that makes the book so compelling in its argument for a just and capacious planetary community, based upon the refugee stories in terms of the global public sphere.."
—Journal of Postcolonial Writing

"Daiya’s book outsmarts several challenges of presenting migration, and especially partition-driven migration stories because read from whichever political standpoint, this book draws significant inspirations from feminist discourses including dealing with the epistemic question – who is telling the story, and how. in fact, the power of story-telling as a method of theory building, that Daiya champions so emphatically, lies in the witnessing that ‘past’ can be communicated the best when shared through personal anecdotes; and ‘past’ – as she effectively establishes, is an absolute essential for understanding the precarity, the fragility, the vulnerability of migrants anywhere in the world."
—Gender, Place, and Culture