Abstract
ABSTRACT In Running in the Family Michael Ondaatje plays the “family history detective” as he searches for his ancestry in Sri Lanka. This article explores the workings of family memory and the diasporic imagination as it emerges from both the colonial archive and the oral histories of his relatives in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. It argues that the text’s “familia-graphic” gaze reveals how “evidence” of inherited material culture, while touchable and concrete, remains ambiguous and interpretive. Through close analysis of both the text and images within the book, the article shows that a “familia-graphic” gaze is directed at Sri Lanka, its colonial history, and Ondaatje’s ancestors. This archaeological approach to family history differentiates between the role of the map and photograph in prompting familia-graphic memory as it seeks to piece together the traces of family, memory, and place held within the maps and photographs scattered throughout Running in the Family.
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