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Meghana Nayak, PhD
Professor, Political Science

What is the central theme of your book?

My novel proposes that we cannot understand the events and systems that have had the most planetary significance without examining the destruction wrought on generations of families, kinship networks, and communities. Intergenerational trauma is not just about being changed by ancestors’ experiences but also about witnessing, suffering, or inflicting some form of trauma-related fracturing, grieving, estrangement, or abuse in family/kinship networks. In some earlier academic work, I showed how intergenerational interpersonal violence is often theorized as indicative of “backwardness” and “harmful cultural practices” that need to be fled or eliminated, rather than emblematic of the staying power of oppressive and traumatizing political orders and systems. This novel is an immersive examination of what it means for our bodies, families, and global politics to hold onto oppression, wherein personal and political wounds get stored and reenacted.

What inspired you to write this book?

Over the years, students have expressed how hard it is to learn/study about the very events that are profoundly impacting, and sometimes killing, their loved ones. I have also taught about colonialism without fully appreciating that my very ability to stand in front of the classroom in New York City has been shaped by the legacies of colonialism—why my parents left India, why they had the privilege to do so, etc. ​On top of that, I have seen firsthand the historic trauma weighing down first-generation students, students from immigrant and Indigenous families, and students whose families descended from people who were enslaved, and I've tried navigating academia as a woman of color while also trying to mentor students of color.  It felt important to weave these themes together.  Feminist fiction made the most sense.

Why is this book important in your field? What does it contribute to the current body of knowledge on this topic?

While several books address how global politics happen in the “everyday,” I am not aware of another book in the field of feminist international relations (IR) that neither integrates fiction and pedagogy, nor articulates the politics of intergenerational trauma. I stitched together multiple, fragmented narratives that have been told to me, some experienced by me, and many that I have directly witnessed, to create the protagonist, “Kavya.” Kavya is an Indian American professor and single mother struggling to navigate western academia as a woman of color and dealing with debilitating panic attacks and flashbacks. She decides to confront legacies of family violence by creating a writing project, one that she explores with a student and plans to teach, and that can be used by readers as a classroom/community resource. Kavya dives into her family’s history with colonialism, colorism, and casteism and more broadly with the racist legacies of settler colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. As such, the book positions pedagogy as a way to negotiate the pain and intimacy of topics that are very personal to us as teachers or to our students but that we wish to still teach. A lesson plan can be a way to gently “hold” the swirl of sadness, terror, rage, and even hope that a topic provokes so that instructors and students can thoughtfully and critically engage.

Tell me about a particularly special moment in writing this book.

I had a couple of readers of the earlier manuscript drafts give me feedback. One reader had over the years witnessed the severe impact of intergenerational trauma in her adoptive son, and she said that I really captured the agony of that kind of pain. Through our conversation, I realized that maybe someone might pick up this book and feel a little less alone. That really pushed me during the hardest days of writing and revising. 

What is the one thing you hope readers take away from your book?

I hope they realize that even though they don't owe anyone else their story, they always have the right to tell their truth. 

Is there anything else you would like to share about your book?

I had "Kavya" teach and develop something like a community workbook—which I'm actually using "in real life" to develop programming with various community organizations to address intergenerational trauma. So, I hope this book generates a lot of conversations about the stuff we are not supposed to talk about.

What other books have you published?

Who is Worthy of Asylum? Gender-Based Asylum and US Immigration Politics (2015, Oxford University Press). 

Decentering International Relations, Co-published with Eric Selbin. (2010, Zed/Bloomsbury Press). 

Fun Facts

When did you join Dyson?

September 2003.

What motivates you as a teacher?

When a student is able to do something (write, win an award, learn a difficult topic, engage in public speaking, etc.) that others had told them they couldn't or shouldn't do!

What do you do in your spare time; to relax/unwind?

I love traveling with my family, cooking, playing the ukulele and piano, reading, and playing with my dog.

What are you reading right now?

Alexis Pauline Gumbs's Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, which is blowing my mind, and Samin Nosrat's Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, which is making me super hungry.