Remembering Air India

Chandrima Chakraborty is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies and University Scholar at McMaster University. She has published extensively on nationalism, masculinity, and cultural memory, with a focus on South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. Publications include, Masculinity, Asceticism, Hinduism: Past and Present Imaginings of India (2011), Mapping South Asian Masculinities: Men and Political Crises (2015), a feature section on the Air India bombings in Topia (2012), and a double special issue, “Translated Worlds: History, Disapora, South Asia” in Postcolonial Text (2015). Her SSHRC-funded research project, The Unfinished Past: Turbans in an Age of Terror, examines the cultural ramifications of post-9/11 violence against South Asian communities in North America. She co-organized an international conference on the Air India tragedy in 2016 and she is conducting interviews with Air India families to learn more about memories of the Air India Flight 182 tragedy and its aftermath for her research project, “A Study of the Afterlives of the 1985 Air India Bombings.” Amber Dean is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Her first book, Remembering Vancouver’s Disappeared Women: Settler Colonialism and the Difficulty of Inheritance (2015), offers a critical analysis of the public representations, memorials, and activist strategies that brought the story of Vancouver’s disappeared women to a wider public. In addition to publishing work on the topic of Air India, she has also published several journal articles and book chapters on artistic and (counter)memorial responses to murdered or missing women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and on gentrification in Edmonton, Hamilton, and Vancouver. With Vancouver writer Anne Stone, she has guest edited a special issue of West Coast Line on representations of murdered or missing women, and she has contributed chapters to several edited books, including Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress. Angela Failler is Canada Research Chair in Culture and Public Memory, and Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg.

"[Remembering Air India] is an important book. It explores, through a number of essays, poems and excerpts from the public record, a question that should haunt us all still: why has this terrible disaster been relegated to the very margins of public memory?... The focus of this book is not just on a failure of surveillance, policing, intelligence or the court system. Its theme is a wider, and painful, reality: the failure to embrace the Air India bombing and its aftermath as our own....” [Full review at http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2017/06/a-tragedy-of-our-own/]

• AcknowledgementsThe Art of Public Mourning / An Introduction // CHANDRIMA CHAKRABORTY, AMBER DEAN & ANGELA FAILLERRemembering in RelationRemembering in Relation: The Air India and Komagata Maru Disasters // AMBER DEANOn the Shores of the Irish Sea // UMA PARAMESWARANThe Ever After of Ashwin Rao (excerpt) // PADMA VISWANATHANRemembering across Place and Time: The Komagata Maru and Air India // RITA KAUR DHAMOONA Nation Outside of HistoryFrom Foreign to Canadian: Air India and the Ongoing Denial of Racism // MAYA SESHIAThe Impact of Systemic Racism on Canada’s Pre-Bombing Threat Assessment and Post-Bombing Response to the Air India Bombings // SHERENE H . RAZACKCourtroom 1 from the Flight 182 Series // DEON VENTERIn the Vestibule of the Nation // SHERENE H . RAZACKThe Political ApologyPolitics of (Im)moderation: The Production of South Asian Identities in the Canadian Apology for Air India Flight // CASSEL BUSSEStatement by the Prime Minister of Canada at the Commemoration Ceremony for the 25th Anniversary of the Air India Flight 182 Atrocity // PRIME MINISTER OF CANADAThe Canadian Government’s Apology to the Victims and Families of Air India Flight 182 // KAREN SHARMACreative ArchiveMediating Memories of the 1985 Air India Bombings: A Critical Dance with Lata Pada’s Revealed by Fire // ELAN MARCHINKORevealed by Fire: Artist Statement // LATA PADAAn Invocation Dance for Lata // UMA PARAMESWARANAn Ethics of Remembering: Air India 182 and Its Creative Archive // TERE SAHUBELPersonal Loss, Collective GriefModel Mourning, Multiculturalism, and the Air India Tragedy // CHANDRIMA CHAKRABORTYThe Management of Grief // BHARATI MUKHERJEEDesperately Seeking Helen: Film Synopsis // EISHA MARJARAair india, unsent / letters from the archive // RENÉE SAROJINI SAKLIKAR“Courting Aphasia, We Travel” // SUVIR KAULContributorsIndex