Our panel will explore these issues through a focus on genre so that we can compare not only how geopolitical divides created or exacerbated by colonial and postcolonial histories function across different regions, but also the range of ways they have been imagined. We chose papers that represented a broad range of regions and that takes up a startling variety of forms to explore this question, including the joke and the fragment, virtual reality, the short story and the memoir, and film.

Eunjin Choi’s paper, for example, foregrounds the question of genre that the panel as a whole takes up by looking closely at the different genres that subdivide the Korean division film. Arguing that both the form and content of Korean division films morph over time in response to regime change, she takes up the question of how different forms of cinema—propaganda, melodrama, and action-adventure —understand the North-South divide. She also investigates how and why espionage plays a key role in the representation of division across all these genres. Aparajita De explores a different kind of movie, the virtual reality film, and how it is used by Project Dastaan to address the trauma of Partition; through a combination of data-collection, story-telling, and VR, this contemporary peace-building initiative attempts to redress the legacy of the India-Pakistan divide by providing virtual “returns” for the displaced. Siddharth Bhogra also looks at the innovative forms generated in response to the creation of Pakistan but focuses on one particular work produced directly in its wake: Saadat Hasan Manto’s genre-defying Black Margins, which uses literary fragments to confront the psychic fractures of Partition. Bhogra brilliantly explores the way Manto exploits the form of the joke to defy the expectation of pleasure that its humor normally provides, and produces a sense of violence and rupture instead. Our final paper, by Alan Ye, brings two more genres to the discussion—a memoir and a short story—in its investigation of transnational and diasporic Vietnamese literary texts that challenge the silences about the war and its divisions perpetuated both by the state and within individual families. Though richly varied in their approaches, each of these papers, in exploring the relationship between historical trauma and the creative ways it is mediated through genre, highlights the importance of attending to the rupture of partition as a distinctive part of postcolonial experience.