The Setting Sun: A Memoir of Empire and Family Secrets
- Submitting institution
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Goldsmiths' College
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 2802
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Verso
- ISBN
- 9781781682685
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- April
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This book is the result of lengthy research into historical records and archives from the last years of the Raj; interviews with the author’s father’s surviving colleagues and acquaintances, with victims (and/or descendants) of the alleged abuses; and personal visits to relevant locations in India – tracked down through meticulous research and difficult journeys. The book results from extensive practice research into and development of a form of writing that weaves together, through the filter of the personal account, academic and political discourse; historical and biographical research; personal memories; and analysis of emotional reaction to the discoveries.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The Setting Sun is memoir of the author’s father, interwoven with the author’s childhood memories; a mystery to be solved through biographical, historical, archival research; a travelogue to the locations of the mystery, and a personal meditation. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Professor of Postcolonial Literature, receives an email from an Indian historian asking about his father’s activities in the Indian Police Service shortly before independence, and about atrocities he is alleged to have perpetrated. Triggering memories of childhood in Tanganyika and of receiving, while at boarding school in England, news of the death of the father he idolized, the email sends him on a quest to investigate a period of his father’s life of which he knew little. The book is also an account of the research process through archives, college libraries, police records; of interviews with serendipitously encountered or meticulously traced individuals who had known his father or the environment in which he worked; visits to places where the father lived and the alleged abuses occurred; encounters with surviving victims and their descendants; of the contradictory findings, depending on whether the perspective was sympathetic to the Raj or to nationalism; of the gaps in records and memories. The trip, in December 2008, a few days after the Mumbai bombings and during the Israeli attack on Gaza, brings together the principal strands of Moore-Gilbert’s academic expertise (Anglo-Indian literature, life-writing, Palestine and Postcolonialism) in a personal, intellectual, political and historical journey that is as much about the father’s past as it is about overcoming the childhood myth he had constructed of his father. The innovative generic form and its combination of academic, political, ethical and personal self-reflection led to short-listing for the Pen Ackerley Prize (2015); an early chapter won the Wasafiri life-writing prize (2009).
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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