https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i4.088
From Archive to Algorithm: Algorithmic Postmemory in Anjali Enjeti’s The Parted Earth (2021)
NAZER SHEMEEM FARATHNA
PhD Scholar
Department of English Language and Literature
International Islamic University Malaysia
Email: shemeemfarathna@gmail.com
Abstract: This paper examines how Anjali Enjeti’s The Parted Earth (2021) reworks Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory for a digital age, in which inherited trauma is mediated not only by photographs, stories, and testimony but by searchable digital archives whose metadata, indexing, and classification systems shape what can be retrieved. Hirsch’s foundational model emphasizes photographs, stories, images, and other mediated forms through which the second-generation encounters trauma it did not directly experience. This paper argues that the novel’s engagement with crowd-sourced oral history infrastructure, modelled on the 1947 Partition Archive, requires an extension of that framework: its third-generation protagonist does not simply inherit memory passively. She actively retrieves and reconstructs it through digital systems whose tagging and indexing logics shape what can be found, and how the past is encountered once retrieved. Reading the novel’s archival subplot against scholarship on digital memory infrastructures, this paper adapts the concept of algorithmic postmemory to describe inherited trauma transmitted through the query as much as through the fragment. It asks how what the searcher knows to look for, and what an archive’s organizational logic renders visible or keeps buried, shapes the experience of postmemory. The paper considers the ethical stakes of this shift. Crowd-sourced archives democratize access to testimony, but their very searchability risks reducing individual testimony into discrete, decontextualized data points, stripped of the relational fabric that gave it meaning. In extending postmemory into the conditions of digital archival retrieval, this paper addresses a gap in Partition literary criticism: how digital archival resources themselves function as infrastructures through which postmemory is transmitted for later generations.
Keywords: Digital Archives, Algorithmic Postmemory, Memory Studies, Postmemory, Partition Literature, Trauma Studies
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