When remembering back is not enough: Provincializing Europe in World War II novels from India and New Zealand

Abstract

While the participation of millions of non-European soldiers in global wars has often been neglected or told as a victimological tale of unwilling war participation, choice and agency play a major part in the complex mnemonic agenda that unfolds in two novels that have pioneered the literary re-imagination of World War II from a non-European perspective: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace and Patricia Grace’s Tu. Both novels provide fascinating insights into ongoing processes of memory revision that contribute to an altered global memory of global war. Setting the historical record right by highlighting the achievements and sacrifice of non-European soldiers certainly constitutes one component of these processes, but to reduce these novels to instances of an allegedly “postcolonial” act of “remembering back” not only misses what these novels are substantially about, but also ironically re-centers Europe as the hub of global memory rather than de-centring Eurocentric memory routines.