Bidisha Banerjee – författare

This book emerges from "Thanatic Ethics: The Circulation of Bodies in Migratory Spaces", an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary project uniting social scientists, postcolonial scholars, and artists worldwide to raise critical issues related to the death of migrants. It urgently calls for migration studies to confront the consequences of Western governments' restrictive and necropolitical migration policies.The volume introduces thanatic ethics as a moral compass—a code of conduct that re-endows migrant deaths with meaning, ensuring they are remembered and mourned. Through diverse perspectives, contributors examine how social practices, political mobilizations, and artistic and literary representations can serve dual purposes: memorializing the dead while changing the gaze of the living on the unidentified dead. Enhancing awareness in the wider community could lead to the overturning of current migration policies.Thoughtfully organized into four sections, the book first explores how oceanic waters have been constructed as bordering agents—spaces of exclusion and death. The second section focuses on the politics of death, burial, and mourning, while the third confronts the fraught questions inherent to visualizing the Thanatic. The concluding section advances essential conversations about care, repair, and restitution.This essential text speaks to a diverse audience including scholars and students in migration studies, postcolonial studies, human rights, ethics, cultural studies, literature, and political science. It will also prove valuable for policymakers, human rights advocates, artists, and anyone concerned with the multi-layered aspects of migration. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open intiative.In Traces of the Real: The Absent Presence of Photography in South Asian Literature, Bidisha Banerjee brings together cutting edge photography studies, postcolonial and diaspora studies to explore the status of the photograph in contemporary South Asian literature. Playing on the dual meaning of trace – both as index and imprint, a copy or stencil of the real as well as inadequate remains of the original – she argues that the absent presence of photography affords postcolonial writers opportunities to enhance the themes of their novel in ways that the inclusion of actual photographs may not allow. This practice critiques photography's truth claims and instead considers the power of photographic erasures and absences in engaging the civil imagination (Azoulay) in the postcolonial moment. Banerjee makes connections between the absent presence of photography and themes of postcolonial literature such as memory, trauma, diasporic loss and mourning, agency and identity, demonstrating the ways in which the absent images powerfully undercut the apparent messages of the text. In contending that the absent image functions as an icon, metaphor, and trace, through the photographic “events” discussed in the chapters, Banerjee moves the focus away from photography’s colonial disciplining gaze to postcolonial civic engagements via new materialist understandings and attending to the intermedial aspects of language, particularly as it is mediated by photography.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open intiative.In Traces of the Real: The Absent Presence of Photography in South Asian Literature, Bidisha Banerjee brings together cutting edge photography studies, postcolonial and diaspora studies to explore the status of the photograph in contemporary South Asian literature. Playing on the dual meaning of trace – both as index and imprint, a copy or stencil of the real as well as inadequate remains of the original – she argues that the absent presence of photography affords postcolonial writers opportunities to enhance the themes of their novel in ways that the inclusion of actual photographs may not allow. This practice critiques photography's truth claims and instead considers the power of photographic erasures and absences in engaging the civil imagination (Azoulay) in the postcolonial moment. Banerjee makes connections between the absent presence of photography and themes of postcolonial literature such as memory, trauma, diasporic loss and mourning, agency and identity, demonstrating the ways in which the absent images powerfully undercut the apparent messages of the text. In contending that the absent image functions as an icon, metaphor, and trace, through the photographic “events” discussed in the chapters, Banerjee moves the focus away from photography’s colonial disciplining gaze to postcolonial civic engagements via new materialist understandings and attending to the intermedial aspects of language, particularly as it is mediated by photography.