On June 23, 1985, the bombing of Air India Flight 182 killed 329 people, most of them Canadians. Today this pivotal event in Canada's history is hazily remembered, yet certain interests have shaped how the tragedy is woven into public memory, and even exploited to advance a strategic national narrative. Remembering Air India insists that we "remember Air India otherwise." This collection investigates the Air India bombing and its implications for current debates about racism, terrorism, and citizenship. Drawing together academic analysis, testimony, visual arts, and creative writing, this innovative volume tenders a new public record of the bombing, one that shows how important creative responses are for deepening our understanding of the event and its aftermath.
Contributions by: Cassel Busse, Chandrima Chakraborty, Amber Dean, Rita Kaur Dhamoon, Angela Failler, Teresa Hubel, Suvir Kaul, Elan Marchinko, Eisha Marjara, Bharati Mukherjee, Lata Pada, Uma Parameswaran, Sherene H. Razack, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Maya Seshia, Karen Sharma, Deon Venter, Padma Viswanathan
Chandrima Chakraborty is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies and University Scholar at McMaster University. She has published extensively on nationalism, masculinity, and cultural memory, with a focus on South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. Publications include, Masculinity, Asceticism, Hinduism: Past and Present Imaginings of India (2011), Mapping South Asian Masculinities: Men and Political Crises (2015), a feature section on the Air India bombings in Topia (2012), and a double special issue, "Translated Worlds: History, Disapora, South Asia" in Postcolonial Text (2015). Her SSHRC-funded research project, The Unfinished Past: Turbans in an Age of Terror, examines the cultural ramifications of post-9/11 violence against South Asian communities in North America. She co-organized an international conference on the Air India tragedy in 2016 and she is conducting interviews with Air India families to learn more about memories of the Air India Flight 182 tragedy and its aftermath for her research project, "A Study of the Afterlives of the 1985 Air India Bombings." Amber Dean is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Her first book, Remembering Vancouver's Disappeared Women: Settler Colonialism and the Difficulty of Inheritance (2015), offers a critical analysis of the public representations, memorials, and activist strategies that brought the story of Vancouver's disappeared women to a wider public. In addition to publishing work on the topic of Air India, she has also published several journal articles and book chapters on artistic and (counter)memorial responses to murdered or missing women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, and on gentrification in Edmonton, Hamilton, and Vancouver. With Vancouver writer Anne Stone, she has guest edited a special issue of West Coast Line on representations of murdered or missing women, and she has contributed chapters to several edited books, including Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress. Angela Failler is Canada Research Chair in Culture and Public Memory, and Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg.
