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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.
Contents
Introduction
Part I: The Absent Image as Icon
Chapter 1: The False Promise of Affective Intentionality: The Violence of Documentary Photography in Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan
Chapter 2: Optics of Blindness: Countervisuality in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost
Chapter 3: Photography's Sonic Recall: Decolonizing Trauma Studies in Mahasweta Devi's "Behind the Bodice"
Part II: The Absent Image as Metaphor
Chapter 4: Diaspora's "Darkroom": Photography and the Vision of Loss in Jhumpa Lahiri's "Hema and Kaushik"
Chapter 5: Finding Gauri: Allo portraits of a Mother in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland
Part III: The Absent Image as Trace
Chapter 6: Imagistic Haunting: Posthuman Photography and Photographic Traces in Indra Sinha's Animal's People
Chapter 7: A "fresh way of looking at the photograph": Citizenship and Photographic Spectatorship in Siddhartha Deb's Surface
Coda
