Metaphors of "journey" or "rootlessness" are often used to describe
movements of people across cultural and social spaces, and physical geographies.
Such journeys whilst revealing stories that speak of a people's voice, are rarely
seen as embodying an implicit quest for a narrative unity with a teleology and
pedagogy, sui generis. This inquiry focuses upon the narrative journey of one
such community of "travellers," the Indian Ismailis, who left their timeworn
homeland in the North Western region of the Indian Subcontinent at the end of
the nineteenth century and travelled to colonial Eastern Africa to make the land
their new home. In the early 1970' s , however, political unrest in this now
"postcolonial" region prompted the succeeding generations of the earlier pioneers
to once again uproot their African home and undertake yet another journey, this
time towards the so-called modern societies of Canada and other Western
countries. This historical and often turbulent intergenerational voyage of over a
hundred years is also a continuous journey of a modern selfhood in aporia as it
experiences and traverses the various institutions, practices, and milieus of
modernity, while attempting to engage with or update its own biographical
narrative.
Using the important and primary genre of shared conversations implicit
within a narrative and hermeneutical inquiry, this project acts as witness and
delves into the narratives of a diverse group of individuals from four generations
of these travellers. It is proposed that in these intergenerational conversations
and stories lie experiences and expressions of praxis that also reveal or point
towards moral enablements of practices and virtues, and arguments that make
present a "living tradition." This tradition, it is felt, can act as a significant and
inescapable horizon - a robust historical consciousness - from which a modern
selfhood in aporia can once again begin to update its own narrative as part of a
continuous story of a community with a teleology, and which the current and
future generations of these "travellers" can recognize, argue, update, and
ultimately possess as they venture purposefully into the community's shared
future.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/13613 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Vellani, Al-Munir |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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