Between Homelands in Michael Ondaatje’s Fiction

Julie Banerjee Mehta holds MA and PhD degrees in English Literature and South Asian Studies from the University of Toronto, where she taught courses on the works of Michael Ondaatje and where she conceptualized and taught the Chancellor-endowed course on Asian Literatures and Cultures in Canada. Currently, she is a guest faculty at Loreto College, Kolkata. Her translation of Tagore’s play Dak Ghar/Post Office was performed by Pleiades Theatre, Toronto, in 2010, to critical acclaim and earned her the title of “One of Sixteen Most Influential South Asians in Canada.” She is the author of Dance of Life: The Mythology, History, and Politics of Cambodia Strongman: The Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen. Her research essays have appeared in books by Oxford University Press, University of Toronto Press, and Rodopi. Harish C. Mehta has an MA and a PhD in History from McMaster University, Canada, in the history of American foreign relations and Southeast Asia. He did graduate studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and taught history at McMaster, the University of Toronto, and Trent University. He is the author, most recently, of People’s Diplomacy of Vietnam: Soft Power in the Resistance War, 1965–1972, and of three books on Cambodian history. His research articles have appeared in International History Review, Diplomatic History, Peace and Change, The Historian, and History Compass. He has twice won the Samuel Flagg Bemis research award from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is currently editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed Rising Asia Journal (www.rajraf.org).