“It’s sort of everything”: The thingness of diasporic memory in “Demons of the Punjab” (2018) and Ms Marvel (2022)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on two representations of the 1947 India–Pakistan partition in contemporary, 21st-century science fiction and fantasy – the Doctor Who episode “Demons of the Punjab” (2018) produced by the BBC, and the 2022 Disney television mini-series Ms. Marvel. The article studies how both television programmes use the genre conventions of science fiction and fantasy to depict how memories of partition are handed down to subsequent generations of diasporic South Asians. It uses thing theory to study the materiality of memory in these programmes, highlighting how memories of partition are constructed through relationships between humans and things. In the process, both programmes help to create memory-things whose significance is gendered and raced in particularly distinctive ways. Both programmes can then be seen to provide models for valuing a distinctively diasporic and matrilineal heritage that is used in turn to rewrite science fiction and fantasy genre conventions in gendered and racialized terms.