This article explores the various ways in which Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy privileges the affective (and aesthetic) quality of reticence. I begin by addressing the broader political significance of such moderation—relating it, more specifically, to the placatory content of the speeches made by Jawaharlal Nehru during the late forties and early fifties. I then trace the process by which Nehru’s “meandering pleas for mutual tolerance” eventually find their way into the very structure of A Suitable Boy, directly influencing its formal qualities and creating a general discursive “climate” of order and stability. In other words, I would like to suggest that the narrative not only privileges this Nehruvian virtue at the level of content—by explicitly advocating the renunciation of strong feeling—but also practices it at the formal or structural level. And by doing so, I shall argue, it ultimately obliges the reader to adopt a similar affective stance.

The tension between the use of postcolonial memory to bear witness to the past and the aestheticization of memory lies at the center of Malaysian-born writer Tan Twan Eng’s second novel, The Garden of Evening Mists (2012), a work that features the Japanese occupation of Malaya during World War II and the postwar period of the Malayan Emergency. The main protagonist is a former judge named Yun Ling who, faced with the prospect of eventual memory and speech loss, is moved to record her past experiences including the time she was a prisoner of war interred and when she was an apprentice to the gardener, Aritomo. In this article, I examine the novel’s self-conscious musings about the nature of memory and the ways in which memory may be represented and preserved. Tan’s novel attempts to provide a meditation on the transcultural mediation and aestheticization of memory by deliberately intermingling and overlaying various cultural features, artistic traditions and ethno-cultural subjectivities when it comes to processes of remembering. The attempt to transculturally aestheticize memory is on one level a metafictional and ostensibly inclusive move to affirm the plurality of stories and multiple perspectives. Yet, this is undermined by the novel’s very strategies of aestheticization, which run the risk of making memory an artistic object so “precious” and rarefied as to counter the more avowedly political function of memory—that of bearing witness to history.

The prophetic encomia—panegyrics dedicated to the prophet Muhammad—are one of the most often recited forms of Arabic poetry up to today and are grounded in a cultural milieu where hagiography, competitive circulation of narrative and counter-narratives, rituals and esoteric practices, and educational institutions have a role in its formation. The unifying of the classical erotic poetic with the postclassical devotional created out of the encomium a vehicle that encapsulated palpable memory, nostalgia, and aspirational ideal for a greater past and beloved subject and successfully left a lasting cultural imprint. Against a general disregard for the postclassical tradition as one of decadence argued by Arab modernists, I join the ongoing effort to debunk the myth of premodern decadence as interrogated by Muhsin al-Musawi’s two-part article “The Republic of Letters: Arab Modernity?” by considering the role of the postclassical prophetic encomia’s amatory prelude—a convention from the classical Arabic ode—as a site of continuity and innovation. Within specifically the famous Qaṣīdat al-Burdah (trans. The Mantle Ode) by Muhammad ibn Sa'īd al-Būsīrī (d. 693/1294) and the badī’iyyāt modeled after the Burdah in meter and rhyme initiated by Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī (d. 750/1349), the prelude takes a significant poetic turn replacing the classical abandoned desert campsites of the Arabic ode with the city of Madīnah. Operating as a unifying repository of the medieval Islamic Republic of Letters, the amatory prelude continued to perform its classical function as a liminal space but innovatively transformed that space for the reading/listening public as a collective reimagining of the Beloved as Muhammad and the abandoned desert campsite as the City of the Prophet outside of the discursive borders of the imperial.

This article, which focuses on David Dabydeen’s long poem “Turner” (1994), addresses acts of eating/excreting as reflections of power relations while also figuring cultural regeneration as a pursuit of nourishment. Through acts of consumption, the speaker of “Turner” seeks to forge a continuum whereby the past feeds the future and the future satiates the emptiness caused by colonialism and the slave trade. Nevertheless, in “Turner,” this emptiness cannot be overcome, and acts of cultural feeding are not regenerative but instead destructively self-consumptive.

Thomas King’s novel Green Grass, Running Water stands as an indictment of North American colonialism and the continuing injustices facing indigenous peoples; it also offers valuable insights in terms of what constitutes good teaching. With reference to personal experiences of teaching the novel in a large lecture course, this article discusses its author’s efforts at implementing the novel’s implied pedagogical principles, which include a scepticism about granting authority to certain texts over others; a collaborative model of learning; a wariness regarding totalizing narratives and claims of interpretive mastery; and a need to wrestle in class discussion with texts’ unresolved problematics.