| 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. |
