Vassanji nancy

This collection was born of a conviction that Vassanji's contributions to the global literary scene merit more in-depth scholarly notice.
Vassanji / Amin Malak -- "Mahabharata is yet to happen": communal violence and diasporic time in M.G. Vassanji's The Assassin's Song and A Place Within / Nancy.
M.

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M.G. Vassanji

Essays On His Works

By Asma Sayed

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 ar

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M.G. Vassanji

Moyez J. Vassanji was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1950 and raised in Tanzania. His parents were a part of a wave of Indians who immigrated to Africa. Vassanji studied at the University of Nairobi and then at MIT on a scholarship. He earned a Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics from the University of Pennsylvania. He worked at the Chalk River atomic power station and then moved to Toronto in 1980. He and his wife, Nurjehan Aziz, started the Toronto South Asian Review, in 1981, which continues today as Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad.

Vassanji also began writing his first novel in 1980, The Gunny Sack, which was published in 1989. The novel won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and established Vassanji as an important voice in the emerging field of immigrant/minority writers. In The Gunny Sack, Vassanji tells the story of four generations of Asians in Tanzania. He examines the themes of identity, displacement and race relations. He also tries to preserve and recreate oral histories and mythologies that have long been silenced.

In 1992, Vassanji published

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M.G. Vassanji : essays on his works

354 pages ; 18 cm

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 det