Counter-Storytelling Memories of Pain: Refugee Youths' Intergenerational Inquiry Into the Partition of India

• In Event: Sense of Place: Context, Indigeneity, and Migration

Abstract

This paper advances a contrapuntal view of “making” through centering how young refugee women of color sought to remedy curricular omissions of the histories of erstwhile colonized lands, namely the Partition of India in 1947. The youth axiologically reframed their understanding of painful legacies of forced migration by unsilencing worlds of pain and loss that follow communities of color generationally as they are cast into refugeehood and migration. Our work builds on the emphasis on the dignity-affirming, proleptic approaches to center lifeworlds of refugee learners and Southern solidarities, locating the youth’s ethical practice of ‘deep care’ (Banerjee et al., 2022) as deeply intertwined in material and symbolic practice as they subvert dominant paradigms through community-focused interviewing and filmmaking.

Authors

• Santanu Dutta, University of Calgary

• Megha Sanyal, University of Calgary

• Pallavi Banerjee, University of Calgary

• Pratim Sengupta, University of Calgary