Published in 2011, Teju Cole’s second novel Open City tells the story of one year of walking in New York and Brussels narrated from the perspective of the novel’s first-person narrator, Julius. In this manner the reader is offered ample insights into Julius’s thoughts and memories. This is a narrative based on the memories of the protagonist as well as the memories shared by the people he meets, which together create a narrative “fugue” that both hides and illuminates the central conflicts of the novel. Julius can be described both as fugueur (someone who is in a dissociated mental state and travels compulsively) and flaneur (someone who walks the streets and is obsessively observant), two concepts of ambiguity. This paper will analyze the main character’s development through three stages: reunion, repression, and reconstruction, in relation to Walter Benjamin’s reading of the flaneur as both criminal and detective, and Ian Hacking’s book on fugueurs in the 19th century. Furthermore, this memory-based narrative can be read in relation to Wai Chee Dimock’s idea of deep time, as well as Rothberg’s view of memory as multidirectional and productive, two theories that can be linked to “mad” travelling and obsessive observation. This paper tries to bring clarity to this opaque novel of solitude and repression, and sort out the clues given by the narrator.

Directed by: Professor James E. Young This dissertation explores where historical memories concerning colonization, genocide, and racism intersect, merge, and overlap in multidirectional ways. The text opens by exploring the possibilities of using a multidirectional model of world history and then moves to a discussion of certain aspects of world political history that interrogates why some nations have dominated others. The focus then shifts to England's attitude toward perceived "others" in the crucial late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by examining contemporary theater drama. From there, the text moves on to current voices that have spoken out against the racism and genocide that have emerged as byproducts of empire building. Finally, possibilities for where we, as citizens of the world, can go from here in thinking through framing justice and equality for all its occupants is given the final voice in this text. My approach may be thought of as somewhat philosophical.

This essay’s primarily focus is on the common discourse about the persisting effects of the past in the present in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale(1985)and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979).These novels are the testimonies of the protagonists Offred and Dana who shares their experience of traumatic violence and oppression. Dana, with her ability to time travel, will see her present time in clearer light as she experiences the life of a slave on an antebellum plantation. Offred, the Handmaiden owned by the totalitarian regime Gilead, portrays her contemporary life in parallel to remembering her former and thus describing Gilead’s increasing authority. Based on different theorists and concepts in the field of cultural memory studies, this essay examines the tension between memory and history, the distantness towards the past and the problematics with representations of traumatic events. As I argue that the voices of Dana and Offred calls attention to the importance of perspective and of sharing stories, they are also an act of hope, therapy and resistance; an act that also make possible a critique of the processes of the production of historical knowledge.

Le roman indien et pakistanais de langue anglaise est habité par le trauma de la Partition à travers des tropes de l’esthétique moderniste comme la fragmentation et l’ellipse. Il est aussi structuré par des métaphores de mutilation, de déracinement, d’exil, ainsi que par la figure symbolique du réfugié. Non exploré jusqu’ici, le trope visuel et poétique des ombres inscrit en creux dans la fiction la violence inexprimable de la Partition. Signes prémonitoires de la rupture cataclysmique de 1947, dans le roman Twilight in Delhi (1940), les ombres dramatisent les conséquences dévastatrices de la modernité coloniale sur la haute culture musulmane de l’Inde. Dans quatre romans publiés après la fracture du sous-continent – Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), Clear Light of Day (1980), The Shadow Lines (1988), Burnt Shadows (2009) –, les ombres sont les traces-mémoires indélébiles, poreuses, et instables qui imprègnent la cartographie régionale et les psychés individuelles. Associée aux tropes ambivalents du fantôme et du miroir, l’ombre subvertit l’historiographie officielle en ouvrant un espace mémoriel dans lequel les souvenirs d’individus et de familles subalternes, transmis sur plusieurs générations, lient la Partition à d’autres traumas internationaux à travers des nœuds de mémoire multidirectionnelle. Par sa dimension visuelle, l’ombre produit une mémoire corporelle qui implique le lecteur dans une sémiotique empathique et réflexive du regard. / Partition inhabits the Indian and the Pakistani novel in English through modernist tropes such as ellipsis and fragmentation, metaphors of mutilation, dislocation and exile, and the symbolic figure of the refugee. The unspeakable violence of this trauma is also embedded within the narrative through the visual and poetic trope of the shadows, which has not been examined yet. In the novel Twilight in Delhi (1940), the shadows are premonitions of the cataclysm of 1947 as they stage the devastating impacts of colonial modernity on the high Muslim culture of India. In four novels published after the division of the subcontinent – Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), Clear Light of Day (1980), The Shadow Lines (1988), Burnt Shadows (2009) –, the shadows are indelible, porous and unstable memory-traces that permeate the regional cartography and individual psyches. Together with the dual motives of the ghost and the mirror, these shadows subvert the official historiography and open up a discursive space in which the memories of subaltern individuals and families, transmitted over several generations, connect Partition to other international traumas via knots of multidirectional memory. Through their visual dimension, the shadows shape a body memory which involves the reader in an empathic and reflexive semiotics of the gaze.

En s’éloignant de l’idée des frontières qui marque une compréhension de la construction des États-nations en tant qu’entités souveraines et homogènes, cette thèse adopte une approche différente en considérant les portes et les murs comme deux métaphores centrales de transgression et de transformation qui amplifient l’expérience des réfugiés et permettent une vision transnationale et trans-mnémonique de divers souvenirs dans deux romans: « Exit West » de Mohsin Hamid et « Go, Went, Gone » de Jenny Erpenbeck. Dans mon premier chapitre, j’explore comment les souvenirs des Allemands sont dialogiquement liés aux souvenirs des réfugiés à travers les paradigmes de l’espace et du temps, ainsi que du passé et du présent, en examinant l’impact durable du mur de Berlin dans « Go, Went, Gone ». Mon deuxième chapitre étudie la métaphore des portes dans « Exit West » qui défient les frontières et la revendication de souveraineté des États-nations. L’objectif de mon chapitre est de comprendre comment ces portes facilitent la mobilité sans contraintes à travers l’espace et le temps, en nous encourageant à réévaluer l’universalité de la migration. Je me réfère principalement au concept de mémoire multidirectionnelle de Rothberg, en relation avec l’étude de Brand sur les mémoires collectives et interconnectées de la traite transatlantique des esclaves qui mobilise les portes comme dispositifs mnémoniques. J’utilise également la notion du « living in the Wake » en relation avec « Afterlife of slavery » de Sharpe pour comprendre comment les souvenirs des réfugiés et des citoyens des États-nations sont dialogiques à travers différentes géographies et temporalités. De plus, je m’appuie sur le concept de « de-borderization » d’Achille Mbembe en lien avec les perspectives de Gloria Anzaldúa sur les frontières pour une meilleure compréhension de l’expérience des réfugiés. / Moving away from borders that signal an understanding of the construction of nation-states as sovereign and homogenous entities, this thesis takes a different approach by considering doors and walls as two central metaphors of transgression and transformation that dramatize the refugee experience and enable a transnational and trans-mnemonic reading of various memories in two novels: Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone (2015). The first chapter of the thesis addresses how memories of Germans are dialogically connected to the memories of refugees across the paradigms of space and time, past and present, through an exploration of the enduring impact of the Berlin Wall in Go, Went, Gone. The second chapter studies the metaphor of doors in Exit West that move beyond borders and challenge the nation-states’ claim to sovereignty to understand how they allow free movement across space and time and rethink the universality of migration. The thesis builds on Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory in relation to Dionne Brand’s study of collective and interconnected memories of the slave trade that mobilizes doors as mnemonic devices, and Jenny Sharpe’s notion of “living in the wake” in connection to the afterlife of slavery to understand how memories of refugees and natives of nation-states are dialogical across different geographies and temporalities. Additionally, I rely on Achille Mbembe’s notion of “de-borderization” and relate it to Gloria Anzaldúa’s views on borders to better understand literary representations of the refugee experience.