Asma Sayed – författare

The Transnational Imaginaries of M. G. Vassanji is a collection of scholarly articles that engages with, analyzes, and appreciatively critiques the fiction and nonfiction writing of M. G. Vassanji, a multiple award-winning author. Vassanji’s works have a sense of multiple connections across four continents: Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. He challenges the imperial centers of Western powers through the content of his work and his deeply-felt humanist engagements with the politics of displacement, settlement, partition and postcolonialism. Ranging across almost his entire oeuvre, the contributors to this book argue that Vassanji’s work should be read as one emerging from a transnational space that connects people, places and issues across the world. Collectively, the chapters in this book, using a range of theoretical frameworks, claim that Vassanji’s work both fits into and goes beyond the usual categorizations, structures and styles of analysis applied to writers from the colonies.

This collection was born of a conviction that Vassanji''s contributions to the global literary scene merit more in-depth scholarly notice. The articles herein, most of which are comparative in focus, provide various interpretations of Vassanji''s writings through a diversity of theoretical frameworks. The fulcrum of much of this research comes back to issues of globalization, transnationalism, identity, post-colonialism, cosmopolitanism and diaspora. It should also be noted that, while many critics have tried to fit Vassanji and his writing into national perimeters identifying him as Canadian, others as African or Indian, or all of these, none of the writers in this book argue that Vassanji, or his works, belong to any particular national paradigm. Rather, the articles recognize Vassanji''s engagement with transnational issues and his preoccupation with history and politics, and concerns of home, migration, exile, loss, belonging, dislocation, violence, trauma, and identity as central to his writing. Included are a new and detailed interview with Vassanji and a previously unpublished article, authored by Vassanji himself. Among the contributors: Annie Cottier, Jonathan Hart, Jonathan Rollins, Warris Vianni, Amin Malak, and Nancy E. Batty.