Full Description
In 'Art, Politics and the Environment in Bangladesh' the notion of staging guides the authors to explore how shifting social and political realities of Bangladesh unfold from historical events and cultural processes that are neither straightforward nor self-evident. The essays trace these unfoldings from varied disciplinary perspectives. The trope of staging that is investigated is multivalent. Consider, for instance, the massive enthusiasm for staging local elections for villages that have disappeared owing to the movement of rivers or the resistance to the shrimping industry in areas disastrously poldered by previous Dutch development interventions. They help visualize the impact of the continuous rewriting and remaking - and at times erasure - of the spaces and histories of a region variously known as East Bengal, East Pakistan and Bangladesh. The quandaries that colonial bureaucratic classifications pose for staging the boundaries of indigenous peoples in contemporary Bangladesh, or the politics of reception of the cinematic representations of the 1971 war, produced decades apart, are examples of such ground-making. Each essay rethinks long-standing assumptions drawing on a combination of new empirical research and theoretical perspectives within anthropology, theatre and film studies, political science and development studies.
Contents
Introduction, Lotte Hoek and Nusrat Sabena Chowdhury; 1. The Flow Forms of Elections on the Sand Bars of the Jamuna River, Naveeda Khan; 2. Aquacultural Disposessions: Shrimp, Land and Agrarian Politics in Coastal Bangladesh, Kasia Paprocki and Jason Cons; 3. 'They Went Directly into "Accident"': Accidents, Crowds and Intimate Politics in Phulbari, Bangladesh, Nusrat Sabena Chowdhury; 4. Feminism and Nationalism in Cold War East Pakistan, Elora Shehabuddin; 5. Repeat Viewing: Plagiarising Film and the Responsibilities of Creativity in South Asia, Lotte Hoek; 6. Transnational Discourses of Indigeneity, the Nation-State and the Figure of the 'Adivasi' rights activist in Bangladesh, Mahmudul Sumon; 7. A Looking-Glass War: Two Films on 1971, Four Decades Apart, Naeem Mohaiemen; 8. Transmission and Transformation in the 'Ever-Present' of Bangladesh: From the 'War Generation' to the 'Post-71 Generation', Syed Jamil Ahmed; 9. Markets, Fields, Leaves: Tobacco Trails in Northern Bengal, Sahana Ghosh; Epilogue Across Generations: A Conversation, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Nazmul Sultan; Index.
