Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The Ordinary and Prophetic Voice of Postmemory Work

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
The Precarious Diasporas of Sikh and Ahmadiyya Generations

Part of the book series: Religion and Global Migrations ((RGM))

  • 281 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter offers a productive dialogue with Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, which is confronted here with the question of messianic time and prophetic language in the discourse of Ahmadi youth. The chapter considers the voices of young Ahmadi women in the Toronto region who are engaged in mosque-based religious organizations and who articulate a commitment to piety and spiritual guidance by their khalifa. Guided by an interest in the relationship between affiliative and familial memory structures, Nijhawan discusses how Ahmadi youth create continuities between (transnational) family and belonging to the Jamat. The chapter demonstrates that intergenerational transmission is a complex affair that entails languages of prophecy, dreams, and crisis motifs through which these young women make sense of their everyday and through which they imagine their own (religious) futures.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Ahmed, Asad A. 2010. The Paradoxes of Ahmadiyya Identity: Legal Appropriation of Muslim-ness and the Construction of Ahmadiyya Difference. In Beyond Crisis: Re-evaluating Pakistan, ed. N. Khan, 273–313. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ahmed-Ghoshi, Huma. 2004. Portraits of Believers: Ahmadi Women Performing Faith in the Diaspora. Journal of International Women’s Studies 6(1): 73.

    Google Scholar 

  • Amine, Laila, and Caroline Beschea-Fache. 2012. Crossroads of Memory: Contexts, Agents, and Processes in a Global Age. Culture, Theory and Critique 53(2): 99–109.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Anastasiadis, Athanasios. 2012. Transgenerational Communication of Traumatic Experiences. Narrating the Past from a Postmemorial Position. Journal of Literary Theory Articles 6(1): 1–24

    Google Scholar 

  • Balzani, Marzia. 2006. Transnational Marriage Among Ahmadi Muslims in the UK. Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs 6(4): 345–355.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Balzani, Marzia. 2010. Dreaming, Islam and the Ahmadiyya Muslims in the UK. History and Anthropology 21(3): 293–305.

    Google Scholar 

  • Berger, Benjamin L. 2015. Belonging to Law. Religious Difference, Secularism, and the Conditions of Civic Inclusion. Social & Legal Studies 24(1): 47–64.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bude, Heinz. 2005. Generation im Kontext. In Generationen: Zur Relevanz eines wissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs, ed. Jureit, Ulrike and Michael Wildt (Hrsg.), 28–44. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition.

    Google Scholar 

  • Creet, Julia, and Andreas Kitzmann, eds. 2011. Memory and Migration: Multidis-ciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Crouch, Melissa. 2011. Ahmadiyah in Indonesia: a History of Religious Tolerance Under Threat? Alternative Law Journal 36(1): 56–57.

    Google Scholar 

  • Das, Veena. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Derrida, Jacques. 1997. “The Villanova Roundtable” in: Deconstruction in a Nutshell. A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, ed. Derrida, Jacques, and John D. Caputo, 1–30. New York: Fordham University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dhamoon, Rita Kaur. 2013. Exclusion and Regulated Inclusion: The Case of the Sikh Kirpan in Canada. Sikh Formations 9(1): 7–28.

    Google Scholar 

  • Edmunds, June, and Bryan S. Turner. 2002. Introduction: Generational Consciousness, Narrative, and Politics. In Generational Consciousness, Narrative, and Politics, ed. ibid, 4–7. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Eisenlohr, Patrick. 2006. Little India: Diaspora, Time, and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Friedmann, Yohanan. 1989. Prophecy Continuous: Aspects of Aḥmadī Religious Thought and Its Medieval Background. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Henderson, Jennifer, and Pauline Wakeham. 2013. Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hirsch, Marianne. 2008. The Generation of Postmemory. Poetics Today 29(1): 103–128.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Iqtidar, Humeira. 2012. State Management of Religion in Pakistan and Dilemmas of Citizenship. Citizenship Studies 16(8): 1013–1028.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Karim, Karim H. 1998. From Ethnic Media to Global Media: Transnational Communication Networks Among Diasporic Communities. Working Paper Series, University of Oxford. Transnational Communities Programme. http://www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk/working%20papers/karim.pdf Last accessed on the Internet October 31, 2015.

  • Khan, Adil Hussain. 2015. From Sufism to Ahmadiyya: A Muslim Minority Movement in South Asia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Koselleck, Reinhart. 1979. Terror und Traum. Methodologische Anmerkungen zu Zeiterfahrungen im Dritten Reich. In Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, ed. Ibid, 278–299. Frankfurt: Surhkamp Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lacroix, Thomas, and Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh. 2013. Refugee and Diaspora Memories: The Politics of Remembering and Forgetting. Journal of Intercultural Studies 34(6): 684–696.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lavan, Spencer. 1975. The Ahmadiyah Movement: Ahmadiya History: A Muslim Reform Tradition in the Punjab. In Sources on Punjab History: A Study Sponsored by the Research Committee on the Punjab, ed. Gustafson, W. Eric, and Kenneth W. Jones, 87–129. Manohar Book Service.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lepsius, M. Rainer. 2005. Kritische Anmerkungen zur Generationenforschung. In Generationen. Zur Relevanz eines Wissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs, Jureit, Ulrike und Michael Wildt (Hrsg.), 45–52. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition.

    Google Scholar 

  • Macklin, Audrey, and Francṃois Crépeau. 2010. Multiple Citizenship, Identity and Entitlement in Canada. IRPP Study No. 6. 1–32. www.irpp.org

  • Maira, Sunaina. 2009. Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire After 9/11. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Mannheim, Karl. 1952 (1923). The Sociological Problem of Generations. In his Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1923: 276–322.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mas, Ruth. 2011. On the Apocalyptic Tones of Islam in Secular Time. In Secularism and Religion-Making, ed. Dressler, Markus and Arvind Mandair, 87–103. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • McDaniel, Susan. 2002. Generational Consciousness of and for Women. In Generational Consciousness, Narrative, and Politics, ed. June Edmunds and Bryan S. Turner, 89–110. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mittermaier, Amira. 2010. Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nijhawan, Michael. 2010. ‘Today, We Are All Ahmadi’: Configurations of Heretic Otherness between Lahore and Berlin. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 37(3): 429–447.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pilcher, Jane. 1994. Mannheim’s Sociology of Generations: An Undervalued Legacy. British Journal of Sociology 45: 481–495.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Powell, Avril. 1995. Contested Gods and Prophets: Discourse Among Minorities in Late Nineteenth-Century Punjab. Culture, Theory and Critique 38(1): 38–59.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2000. Duties of Ahmadi Women: Educative Processes in the Early Stages of the Ahmadiyya Movement. In Gurus and their Followers: New Religious Reform Movements in Colonial India, ed. A.R.H. Copley, 128–156. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Radstone, Susannah. 2011. What Place Is This? Transcultural Memory and the Locations of Memory Studies. Parallax 17(4): 109–123.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Regan, Paulette. 2010. Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Saeed, Sadia. 2007. Pakistani Nationalism and the State Marginalisation of the Ahmadiyya Community in Pakistan. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 7(3): 132–152.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sian, Katy Pal. 2013. Losing My Religion: Sikhs in the UK. Sikh Formations 9(1): 39–50.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Michael Nijhawan

Authors
  1. Michael Nijhawan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Copyright information

© 2016 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Nijhawan, M. (2016). The Ordinary and Prophetic Voice of Postmemory Work. In: The Precarious Diasporas of Sikh and Ahmadiyya Generations. Religion and Global Migrations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48854-1_7

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation