Mardi 22 octobre 2024 18h15
Salle 126 Saint-Charles1
Traces of the Real: The Absent Presence of Photography in South Asian Literature
Dr Bidisha Banerjee
In this talk I bring together cutting edge photography studies, postcolonial and diaspora studies to explore the status of the photograph in contemporary South Asian literature. By looking at texts that include photographs in absent present ways – i.e. the material photograph is absent from the pages of the text, yet photographs play an important role – I play 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. In my monograph Traces of the Real: The Absent Presence of Photography in South Asian Literature, I argue that the immateriality of photography in these texts affords postcolonial writers opportunities to enhance the themes of their novel in ways that the inclusion of material photographs may not allow. This practice critiques photography’s “truth-event” (Roberts) and instead considers the power of photographic erasures and absences in engaging the civil imagination (Azoulay) in the postcolonial moment. In contending that the absent image functions as an icon, metaphor, or trace, through the photographic “events” discussed in the chapters, I move the focus away from photography’s colonial disciplining gaze to postcolonial civic engagements via new materialist understandings and attends to the intermedial aspects of language, particularly as it is mediated by photography.
Dr. Bidisha Banerjee is Associate Head and Associate Professor of English in the Literature and Cultural Studies Department at the Education University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, diaspora and refugee studies, cultural studies, photography and visual studies. Her monograph, Traces of the Real: The Absent Presence of Photography in South Asian Literature, is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press in January 2025. She has published in journals like Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Visual Studies, and Postcolonial Text. Dr. Banerjee is the Principal Investigator of a transdisciplinary, collaborative project on death in migration called Thanatic Ethics: The Circulation of Bodies in Migratory Spaces as well as a project titled Spaces of Precarity: Migration, Spatiality and the Refugee Graphic Narrative” on refugee graphic novels.