Graphic Memory, Connective Histories, and Dalit Trauma: A Gardener in the Wasteland

The collage-style merging of histories of oppression in Srividya Natarajan and Aparajita Ninan’s A Gardener in the Wasteland is an exercise in memorializing. Here memorialization has its ontological and etiological foundations in the Dalit narratives’ fusion, without reduction, of different histories of oppression. The national signifier of caste appropriates the global form of the graphic narrative. The spatial rhetorics of the graphic page enable Dalit memories to locate themselves in the global memory landscape. Together, these generate a “concentrationary imaginary.”