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Introduction:This is a curious time we are living in. When in the last decadesof the 20th century the world witnessed a spectacle of a Wall beinghammered down, the second decade of the 21st is in trepidation ofanother one being built. If the globalised world, had brought with ita promise of fluid borders and notions of belonging, along withnew theories and terms like ' transnation' and ' postglobal', the lastfew years have somehow curbed our enthusiasm and brought backghosts of the past. Rolling back the years, when one bet their dimesin essentialist ideas of race, ethnicity and nationalism, worldpolitics has seen the emergence of neo-nationalists and fascistgroups fighting to prove the superiority of their Gods, countriesand races. In the process, there has been a constant threat tominority communities, with refugee crisis swelling and constantconflicts have lead to a systematic ethnic cleansing, in Africa, theMiddle East and allegedly even in Burma. Such acts of ethniccleansing, lead to an erasure of history and culture, creating a voidin societal and political time, only to be replaced by the moreacceptable and official versions of history and events. And underthe dominant glare of meta-narratives, little, seldom reported andconstantly under threat "stories" live, grapple and fight nervouslyfor auditors. One might argue, that in today's world, where most ofour lives are lived and recorded on social media, be it Facebook,Instagram or B(V)logs, nothing is lost, nothing is beyond recoveryor unarchiveable. Yet reading and dealing with such issues, onecannot help but be bitten with pessimism and fear. Jhumpa Lahiriin The Lowland, talks about the Naxal movement and remarks thatwhen the female protagonist, tries to 'google' out reports of the so

Postcolonial Interventions, Vol. II, Issue 1 (ISSN 2455-6564)many 'disappearances' at the hands of the State Police, she draws acomplete blank. It is then that we realise that in the war betweenprivate and personal narratives, between the local and the official,some stories remain unrecorded, untranslateable and even worse,untraceable.In the current issue of Postcolonial Interventions, we try tolook into these issues and more. We have Esra Santesso talkingabout the difficulties of fitting in and belonging as a Turkish inEuropean soil ( more specifically German, for she has Fatih Akin'sfilm Head On as her case study) and the perceptive and incisiveanalysis uncovers certain pointers which generally get lost in theconflict of belonging for the migrant worker or refugee. On onehand, we have the memories of a long lost home and a desire topreserve one's memory of it and their native culture, and on theother, the possibility of belonging and self- fashioning in the moreliberal West. The refugee/ migrant labourer is constantly shuttlingbetween these two islands, never fully accepted in either without asense of guilt or shame.Stories need to be told, re-told and circulated, lest we forget.And as Milan Kundera had remarked so many years ago, that themost crucial and poignant struggle is between power and memory.Ayesha Begum talks of the plight of the people of Palestine in herpaper, something that has been in the news in recent times,troubling us with the reported atrocities and images of helplesscivilians fleeing and cowering in ravaged buildings. A similar issueis dealt with by Claire Gallien in her in- depth analysis of LarissaSansour’s and Wael Shawky’s Artwork. Gallien's sharp insights open upnew avenues of thought, stimulating us, and making us question certaintaken for granted ideas and assumptions.Natasa Thoudam in her article looks at issues closer tohome. For years, the North East of India has complained of a step-ii

Postcolonial Interventions, Vol. II, Issue 1 (ISSN 2455-6564)fatherly treatment from the Indian Government, leading to aclamour for self- determination and the imposition of the draconianAFPSA, which gives the Indian Army almost carte blanche tosearch, interrogate, arrest and torture without a warrant. As apredictable outcome, reports have surfaced of human rights abuse,reports that have been hushed up and dismissed by the CentralGovernment. Thoudam's analysis brings under the scanner theassault, alleged rape and death of a Manipuri civilian at the handsof the Indian Army on the pretext (?) of her being a terrorist andpart of an insurgency group. The struggle is not only between twopolitical factions as it were, it is between memories, lived andimposed.The threat to minorities is not merely based on the twin axis ofrace and ethnicities but as Kapil Sharma shows in his analysis ofthe plight of the queer community in India, it is also an entwinedwith gender and sexuality. The LGBTQ community and asignificant portion of the civil urban society have been voicingtheir support for the withdrawal of the Article 377 of the IndianPenal Code, which criminalises homosexuality. As the article triesto highlight, the assumption that homosexuality is a Westernimport is a hollow one, which tries to erase a long standing andoften pictorial documentation of the presence and practice of samesex love. What this does, is to replace the multicultural past andhistory of a land, by a more essentialist, totalising andhomogenised version of it, for the benefits of a neo-liberal, fascistand hegemonic regime.In fact, this is just one instance of how our present remainsfissured by our problematic engagement with the past and as aresult some of the ghosts we thought we had buried return to hauntour cherished gardens. This is evident from the paper by AllieFaden who looks at the uncanny resemblance between Danieliii

Postcolonial Interventions, Vol. II, Issue 1 (ISSN 2455-6564)Defoe's rhetoric in The Shortest Way with the Dissenters and the 21stcentury rhetoric of Evangelical Republican office holders in the U.S.A.such critique is particularly significant in the context of global flows ofpeople and the xenophobic and fundamentalist spectres such movementsoften confront. Chinoko Ngulube explores these issues as well bylooking at migrant voices, their repression and representation inAbdourahman A. Waberi’s Transit, positing the novel in the largercontext of a locus of multicultural tolerance and freedom.This particular issue looks at such diverse areas,interrogating official discourses and reports, trying to give voice tothe ones that have been muffled, so that private memories, livedexperiences and personal narratives, do not descend into whatAmitav Ghosh in The Shadow Lines called the craters of silence,hatched by the striated structures of Nation. And even as more andmore voices scream, “What ish your nation?” the quest for a spacebeyond otherising binaries in the future, through an examination ofpast and present, continues unabated. Read on.P.S. A special note of thanks to Barnamala, Sagnik and Semantifor the wonderful last-minute assistance you provided. We aredelighted to call you one of us.iv

Claire Gallien:Trouble in the Archive: Of CounterMemories, Breakable Memories andOther Proleptic Moves into the Pastin Larissa Sansour’s and WaelShawky’s Arts.Postcolonial Interventions, Vol. II, Issue 1

Postcolonial Interventions, Vol. II, Issue 1, (ISSN 2455-6564)AbstractThis article focuses on the solo exhibitions of Larissa Sansour entitled “In the FutureThey Ate from the Finest Porcelain” and “Archeology: In Abstentia” (2016), alongwith Wael Shawky‟s “Cabaret Crusades” trilogy (2010-2014). Their exhibitions offerfascinating reflections on the archive as construction and on the articulation ofmemory in traumatic contexts, whether these are the Nakba and the on-goingcolonisation of Palestine by Israel or the Christian Crusades to regain Jerusalem.In their films and their creations of breakable objects, such as the porcelain plate andthe glass puppet, they open up new possibilities to think and write about the past inmodes that take ambivalence and subjectivity at face value. Furthermore, byarticulating chronotopes that are fundamentally disjunctive, not only do the artistssuggest alternative and counter-modes of remembering the past, they also draw ourattention on the act of narrating the past as political process. Thus, not only do theycreate alternative narratives drawn from other perspectives – here the Arab one –, butthey also debunk the myth of the archive as a factual and objective piece of literatureand foreground perspectivism and precariousness instead.In other words, Sansour and Shawky's artistic projects do not just aim at developingan Eastern historiography of traumatic times only, and certainly do not participate in asimplistic clash of civilisations narrative. Their works are eminently contextualised,but they also resonate well beyond the Middle-East and show what art can do with/tothe archives, escaping adversarial narratives and using them to create dissonance,critical distance, personal and social ional/NationalMythology,Archive,Dissonance, Precariousness.2

Postcolonial Interventions, Vol. II, Issue 1, (ISSN 2455-6564)“The question of the archive is not a question of the past. It is not the question of aconcept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal and not at ourdisposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, thequestion of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of aresponsibility for tomorrow”(Derrida 36).“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls thepast”(Orwell Part I, chap. 3, 88).Larissa Sansour and Wael Shawky are two contemporary artists from theMiddle East – Shawky is from Alexandria in Egypt and lives mostly there; Sansourwas born in East Jerusalem and lives in London. Both have strong artistic connectionswith Europe,1 their arts are exhibited internationally, and they work with a variety ofmedia, including drawing, sculpture, photography, and film making. Both artists arefascinating to study comparatively not only because their trajectories are quite similar,both being connected with the Middle East and the West, but also, more importantly,because both engage with similar topics. Indeed, they interrogate human relations tomemory, and in particular the past shared between Western Europe and the MiddleEast, and how it resonates in the present. They outline the politicisation of the archiveand of archaeology, the role played by fiction and myth in history making, theelaboration of exclusionary national imaginaries. Sansour described the central themeof her work as exploring “the tug and pull of fiction and reality in a Middle-Eastern3