Congratulations Dr. Aarzoo Singh
Thesis Blurb/abstract: My dissertation was an interdisciplinary study into unheard narratives of the 1947 Partition of India as they inform legacies of trauma, violence, and displacement for South Asian diasporic communities. In exploring the limitations of official state accounts of Partition, I turned to alternative epistemological sites in archives of the personal, in my own familial story of Partition, as a point of analysis. These sites take up the form of what I call “affective objects”: sites, things, heirlooms, and artefacts that, because they are intimately linked to familial and community histories, are laden with in-articulatable feelings. I argue that affective objects can be space- and knowledge-making for unheard intergenerational narratives of displacement as they ruminate in realms of undefinition and nonverbal modes of communication. The turn towards the affective object, archives of the personal, and the sharing of familial stories creates spaces of possibility and potential for knowing Partition and its legacies of violence differently.
Plans for the future: I will be starting as an Assistant Professor, teaching stream, at the University of Toronto Scarborough at the department of Historical and Cultural Studies.
