Visiting Scholar, Bidisha Banerjee-Traces of the Real: The Absent Presence of Photography in South Asian Literature

Traces of the Real: The Absent Presence of Photography in South Asian Literature

Liverpool University Press. January 2025

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-event” (Roberts) 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.

Bidisha Banerjee (PhD, University of Iowa) 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. She is a Visiting Scholar in the Comparative Literature Department at UMass Amherst for Fall 2024.