Carnivalesque Memoryscapes of Multiculturalism: History, Memory, Storytelling in Tash Aw’s Harmony Silk Factory

Abstract

ABSTRACT What is the place of the excluded memories, stories, and narratives in the historical imagination of a nation? This study approaches the multiple temporalities and spatialities that constitute the time-space of history through Bakhtin’s concept of chronotopia. While a chronotopic approach to the past grounds its experience in time and space, the network of chronotopes and their inter-relationships establishes the past as a realm of relationality that is open to engagement. This is especially relevant in multicultural postcolonial societies where official history has emerged as a contested zone with multiple narratives – colonial, nationalist, migrant – all vying with and against each other. Through a close reading of Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory, this study explores the multiplicity of chronotopes that characterize the narratives of a historical event at any point of time and their dialogic relationships with each other. Such multiplicity of narratives, the paper argues, is a hallmark of histories emerging from the postcolonial multicultural nations. The latter part of the paper explores the relationship between history and literature to propose literature as time and space that carnivalizes the monologic drive of history.