Abstract
Geetanjali Shree’s Hindi novel Khālī jagah (2006, An Empty Space) is a twenty-first century work that questions the modern topos of exile and contrasts it with postmodern preoccupations with emptiness, fragmented identities and the erosion of traditional values. Shree treats the contemporary “age of terrorism” focusing on the results of a bomb attack whose unspeakable cause seems to be born out of an unpredictable world deprived of any rule and lacking any stable roots. In this paper I show in which ways the “empty space” results from this loss of structure and identity and how it deals with the questions and doubts of the narrator. Khālī jagah invites us to consider contemporary history mainly as the absence of history, the presence of emptiness, and the fundamental impossibility of belonging to any place or homeland.
Pozza, Nicola