Salah D. Hassan: Barbara Harlow’s work shows how drawing the lines of partition coincided with the nominal end of one form of imperialism, but introduced new, equally insidious postcolonial political regimes, governed by opportunists, who celebrated partition as the national independence of new states (the Republic of Ireland, the Republic of India, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, and the State of Israel); all of them are misbegotten entities to be sure, as is evident by the violence that accompanied their creation and still characterizes their contentious geo-political condition. In a characteristically layered and qualified historicization, Harlow evokes the nastiness of imperial partitions:
Britain`s withdrawal from these three of its colonially occupied and administered territories incised a deep and violently protracted scar across the political, geographical, and cultural terrains of those arenas, a scar that has been writ again and again—racially, religiously, ethnically—along the unsettled “green line” dividing Israel from the militarily occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, on the disputed “border” between the northern and southern parts of the island that is Ireland, and across the tense national boundaries that divide India from Pakistan.
In Harlow’s critical practices, lines of partition drawn across the maps of Ireland, India, and Palestine are signs of past conquests and the site of ongoing resistances that remain urgently relevant in the current global geo-politics of fragmented and fortified nation states. Harlow’s approach to the literatures of partition, like her work on political assassinations, torture, and political prisoners, questioned unpretentiously, but decisively, the mandate of literary studies, undoing the fixed categories of genre, period, and nation, rejecting the hierarchies of literary value, and distrusting the US academy’s uncritical embrace of continental theory. More here.