My dissertation is a study of digitally mediated, diasporic and intergenerational collective memories of the anti-Sikh violence of 1984. The violence unfolded in two separate but related events in June and November of that year. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with Sikhs in North America, and content analysis of websites about 1984, I show that even though community members in India suffered the losses of 1984, the Sikh diaspora is finding ways to represent these previously marginalized experiences. Public discourse on 1984 is caught between dichotomous narratives. The first consists of dominant state and mass media representations, which justified the violence, dismissed it as spontaneous “riots,” and blamed and shamed the Sikh community for its own victimhood. The state and mass media told a distorted story of Sikhs as “outsiders” in a “Hindu nation state.” The second set of voices comes from the resistance struggle for Khalistan, which was a counternarrative to the state, a mostly territorial movement, advocating militancy and violence. I argue that Sikhs in the diaspora are disrupting polarized narratives of the state and counternarratives that emerged from within the community, re-presenting memories of 1984 in and through digital media to form “crevices” in dominant, static and rigid “walls” of representations and popular counternarratives. Crevices are multi-layered experiential narratives that are a work-in-progress, an ongoing process of dissension defying the fixity and rigidity of dominant narratives. An intergenerational cohort of Sikhs in the diaspora are doing “memory work,” deliberate and conscious public practices of searching for fragments of painful pasts and piecing them together to give cultural meaning and shape to broken traumatic experiences. My study addresses gaps in literature in two main ways: first, I examine heterogeneous voices within the Sikh community, narrated through more personalized, intimate and interactive medium of communication, digital media; and second, my dissertation is one of few studies examining a non-Western group’s construction and representation of trauma. I extend frameworks of collective memory and trauma to include Sikh-specific cultural apparatus in giving meaning to experiences of loss and suffering.
Subject (authority = RUETD)
Topic
Sociology
RelatedItem (type = host)
TitleInfo
Title
Rutgers University Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Identifier (type = RULIB)
ETD
Identifier
ETD_6568
PhysicalDescription
Form (authority = gmd)
electronic resource
InternetMediaType
application/pdf
InternetMediaType
text/xml
Extent
1 online resource (x, 257 p. : ill.)
Note (type = degree)
Ph.D.
Note (type = bibliography)
Includes bibliographical references
Subject (authority = ETD-LCSH)
Topic
Collective memory
Subject (authority = ETD-LCSH)
Topic
Sikhs
Note (type = statement of responsibility)
by Shruti Devgan
RelatedItem (type = host)
TitleInfo
Title
Graduate School - New Brunswick Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Identifier (type = local)
rucore19991600001
Location
PhysicalLocation (authority = marcorg); (displayLabel = Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey)
Rutgers University. Graduate School - New Brunswick
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Type
License
Name
Author Agreement License
Detail
I hereby grant to the Rutgers University Libraries and to my school the non-exclusive right to archive, reproduce and distribute my thesis or dissertation, in whole or in part, and/or my abstract, in whole or in part, in and from an electronic format, subject to the release date subsequently stipulated in this submittal form and approved by my school. I represent and stipulate that the thesis or dissertation and its abstract are my original work, that they do not infringe or violate any rights of others, and that I make these grants as the sole owner of the rights to my thesis or dissertation and its abstract. I represent that I have obtained written permissions, when necessary, from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis or dissertation and will supply copies of such upon request by my school. I acknowledge that RU ETD and my school will not distribute my thesis or dissertation or its abstract if, in their reasonable judgment, they believe all such rights have not been secured. I acknowledge that I retain ownership rights to the copyright of my work. I also retain the right to use all or part of this thesis or dissertation in future works, such as articles or books.