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Ambivalent Heritage

Between Affect and Ideology in a Colonial Cemetery

Stanford University, USA

This article examines the significance of colonial cemeteries and explains why they are sites of neglect and decay in contemporary India. By examining the ideological and affective meanings of a colonial funerary landscape like the Park Street cemetery in Calcutta, it shows how monuments of colonial memories have transformed into signs of temporal ruptures, which disturbs the dichotomy between the colonial and the post-colonial. It argues that the discard and abandonment of colonial cemeteries in the postcolonial landscape stems from the ambivalent meaning that such a heritage site generates. Using three pairs of conceptual constructs - Kristeva’s genotext and phenotext; Freud’s melancholy and mourning; and tropological metaphor and metonymy - I demonstrate that this ambivalence is located in an intersection between the funerary monument as a cultural product of a colonial ideology, and as a memorial artifact of personal bereavement.

Key Words: affect • Calcutta • death in the colony • funerary landscape • ideology • postcolonial

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