Performing Memory: Trauma and the Self in The Miniaturist of Junagadh and Forget Me Not

Abstract

Theorizations on the subversive potential of memory to resurrect and recover lost history have been a central preoccupation for the poststructuralist as well as the postcolonial theorists alike. Judith Butler, in her groundbreaking work entitled Gender Trouble: Feminism and The Subversion of Identity contends gender to be a performance while looking at performativity as a “repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization.”(Butler xv) Such a performance facilitates the endorsement of specific brands of identity. Memory, with its cognitive apparatus and discursive extensions, like gender, is a performative category that informs and refashions human subjectivity. The simultaneity of remembering, forgetting and strategically dismembering experiences involve a complex mechanism that is the domain of neuroscience as much as it is a cultural phenomenon. As an immediate site of memory, the trope of the body, then, becomes a crucial marker that determines acts of remembrance and forgetting. Using contemporary scholarship from a wide range of disciplines, this paper will endeavor to map memory as a performative category as it relates to the larger ideological project of re(producing) identities in the context of Kaushal Oza’s The Miniaturist of Junagadh (2021) and Srijit Mukherji’s Forget Me Not ( 2021) from the Ray anthology.

Keywords

• memory
• performativity
• remembering