This session explores how postcolonial and diasporic literatures grapple with memory, trauma, and cultural haunting. Rather than thinking of identity as fixed or linear, selfhood is complex and palimpsestic due to colonial violence, migration, and historical erasure. This session invites papers that analyze how characters or narratives navigate misremembering, inherited trauma, or overwritten histories to reclaim belonging and agency. Topics may include narrative voice, transgenerational memory, silence, storytelling, and archival gaps in multiethnic and immigrant literatures. This session welcomes interdisciplinary approaches and encourages work on Asian American, Black, Indigenous, and other diasporic communities.
This session aims to examine how postcolonial and diasporic literatures use memory and trauma as narrative tools to interrogate identity and belonging. Drawing inspiration from the 2025 PAMLA theme “Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion,” this session engages with texts that explore the fractured, nonlinear, and layered nature of diasporic subjectivity, as well as looking into how the concept of a palimpsest, where past inscriptions haunt present narratives, applies to immigrant and postcolonial experiences.
Rather than emphasizing coherent national or cultural identities, many works in this tradition depict belonging as haunted, provisional, and persistently shadowed by what has been forgotten, silenced, or erased. This session invites papers that explore how literature captures this instability: -Intergenerational trauma and memory transmission -Language and silence as forms of cultural haunting -The role of archival absences, historical revision, and narrative gaps -Ghosts, spectrality -Migration as both rupture and remembrance
The significance of this session lies in its aim to foreground how literature resists dominant frameworks of memory and belonging by engaging with forgotten, silenced, or erased pasts. These narratives do not just remember; they reconfigure memory as a contested and embodied site of selfhood.