Talking texts, writing memory
a Bakhtinian reading of Meena Alexander's fault lines
pp. 173-184
in: Lakshmi Bandlamudi, E. V. Ramakrishnan (eds), Bakhtinian explorations of Indian culture, Berlin, Springer, 2018Abstrakt
This chapter will use Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism and polyphony and the notion of the crisis of authorship and utterance to read South Asian American diasporic writer Meena Alexander's 1993 Fault Lines: A Memoir and the revised 2003 version as dialogic texts. Alexander's memoirs engage, contest, and alter each other to disrupt the possibility of singular meanings and absolute truth. Instead, the texts offer a conflicting and incommensurate idea of the past and fractured, yet intensely interconnected vision of the future. They testify to the impossibility of articulating one single way of knowing and being in the diaspora and acknowledge a dialogically constructed heteroglot world. Both can be read as competing centripetal and centrifugal texts that operate in simultaneity and in constantly shifting moments of utterance; cautioning us about the painful unreliability of history and memory, and the deeply ambiguous contours of language and discursive representation.
