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

Bidisha Banerjee is Associate Professor of English in the Literature and Cultural Studies Department at the Education University of Hong Kong. She has published widely on South Asian diasporic literature and film, visual culture, and the refugee graphic novel. She leads the transdisciplinary project Thanatic Ethics: The Circulation of Bodies in Migratory Spaces.

• IntroductionPart I: The Absent Image as IconChapter 1: The False Promise of Affective Intentionality: The Violence of Documentary Photography in Khushwant Singh’s Train to PakistanChapter 2: Optics of Blindness: Countervisuality in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s GhostChapter 3: Photography’s Sonic Recall: Decolonizing Trauma Studies in Mahasweta Devi’s “Behind the Bodice”Part II: The Absent Image as MetaphorChapter 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 LowlandPart III: The Absent Image as TraceChapter 6: Imagistic Haunting: Posthuman Photography and Photographic Traces in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s PeopleChapter 7: A “fresh way of looking at the photograph”: Citizenship and Photographic Spectatorship in Siddhartha Deb’s SurfaceCoda

"Bringing together photography studies, post-colonial studies, and diaspora studies, this book sheds light on a pervasive trope in contemporary South Asian literature. Traces of the Real reveals how photographs evoked by writing may undermine the very texts they appear in, raising urgent questions about observational distance, gendered visibility, diasporic loss, and humanitarian mediation." Kartik Nair, Temple University