Authors Bio
Md. Arafat Mostofa is a Lecturer in the Department of English at North Bengal International University (NBIU), Rajshahi, Bangladesh. He holds both an MA and a BA in English from the University of Rajshahi. His research interests include Cultural Studies, diaspora studies, postmodern literature, and literary theory. He has published two peer-reviewed research articles and has two international conference proceedings in his name.
Abstract
This paper extends existing critiques of empiricist notions of authentic experience by reading Amitav Ghosh’s 1988 novel The Shadow Lines as a literary case study in the epistemology of diaspora. This study draws on phenomenology, postmemory theory, and narrative identity studies to guide its close textual analysis. It shows inherited memory, secondhand experience, and vicarious knowledge to be legitimate and richly authentic modes of knowledge in postcolonial diasporic contexts. The book’s unnamed narrator embodies what this study calls a “diasporic epistemology,” one that prioritizes desire and imagination as sources of knowledge. He is familiar with places he has never visited and carries traumas he has never witnessed firsthand. This study argues that displacement itself functions as an epistemological condition in the text. Apparent limitations such as distance, mediation, and belatedness are transformed into sophisticated tools for accessing truths that immediate presence often obscures. By foregrounding the philosophical dimensions this study locates within The Shadow Lines’ and offering new perspectives on how displaced people construct knowledge and identity via mediated, inherited, and creative engagement with the past, this study contributes to the scholarship on the book.
Keywords
Epistemology, Postmemory, Secondhand experience, Phenomenology, Partition.
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