What We're Reading
1
Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, "Where Scenes of Catastrophe Reappear: On Armenian and Palestinian Solidarities", Social Text Journal, 2024.
"What does it mean to be from a place in the world where scenes of catastrophe reappear from one century to the next, but remain invisible in both temporalities?" Writing on diptychs of Armenian and Palestinian catastrophes as indices of the repetition of colonial violence, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian notes also their potential for viewing the transhistorical linkages between the Armenian and Palestinian liberation struggles, and their demand the cultivation of solidarities, and a praxis of collective witnessing and coalitional action.
2
Anna M M Vetticad, "The ethical and legal violations of the Oscar-nominated ‘To Kill a Tiger’ ", Himal Southasian, 2024.
Journalist Anna M M Vetticad brings to fore the legal and ethical dilemmas of visual narratives around sexual assault. Through a socio-legal critique of the award-winning documentary To Kill A Tiger, about a father's quest for justice after his 13-year old daughter was gang-raped in a village in Jharkhand in 2017, situated within the context of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, she sheds light on the responsibility of the artist-activist, particulalry when navigating the tension between narration and intervention.
3
Naeem Mohaiemen, "A Burning House on Road 32", e-flux, 2024
"When future generations want to hear the story of the birth of Bangladesh, how will we navigate all those moments that centered around this house in the late 1960s and 1970s?," Naeem Mohaiemen asks, reflecting on the vanishing archives and mob justice in the aftermath of the spectacular fire that set ablaze the historic residence and museum of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, following Sheikh Hasina's resignation.
4
Rahaab Allana, "Art and the political imagination" Frontline Magazine, 2024.
An ongoing exhibition in Paris upholds Palestinian right to statehood by displaying works by artists from populations uprooted or exiled by violence.
5
Christine Smallwood, "A Reviewer’s Life: The material constraints of writing criticism today", The Yale Review, 2024.
"If the criticism I write is always limited by the fact that it is I who am writing it, bounded as I am by material constraints, it is also true that within that limit a profound freedom of thought persists," writes Christine Smallwood for "The Moment" in The Yale Review for their new summer issue.
6
Sanabel Abdelrahman, "Approaches to Palestinian Liberation: Magical Realism as Resistance Literature", NO NIIN Magazine, 2023.
Can literary magical realism be considered a type of resistance literature in the Palestinian context? Sanabel Abdelrahman argues that magical-realistic manifestations—death-defying ghosts, the black goat, soil with resurrection powers, and the malleability of time—found in contemporary Palestinian literature play a significant role in resisting the ongoing effects of the Nakba.
7
Lisa Trivedi, "(In)visible Subjects: Pranlal Patel's Women at Work in Ahmedabad, India, 1937", Trans Asia Photography, 2023.
Through this article, Lisa Trivedi argues that historical photography may provide what Elizabeth Edwards terms a “historiographical think-space” that challenges conventional historical sources and the narratives they produce. By engaging Ariella Azoulay's ethical spectators in the civil contract of photography, historians can use historical photography to confront the historical roots of inequality that shape our world today.
8
Kaashif Hajee, "Saffronizing Bollywood", South Asian Avant-Garde, 2024.
An anthropologist explores Bollywood creatives to trace BJP's carrot-and-stick strategy with Bollywood creatives: both controlling and regulating Bollywood in order to create a consistent and normative film culture that perpetuates Hindutva ideology.
9
Jatin Gulati, "Notes on Southasian photography beyond borders", Himal Southasian, 2023.
Jatin Gulati writes on Rahaab Allana’s 'Unframed' and the way it explores how lens-based practices confront the divided realities of South Asia, yet also point to the region’s overlaps and entanglements.
10
Caroline Herbert, "Documentary Form and Spectral Citizenship in Madhusree Dutta’s 7 Islands and a Metro", BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 2023.
Despite its aesthetic experimentation, its intervention into urgent questions about citizenship and belonging in contemporary India, and its attention to the most iconic of Indian cities, Mumbai, Madhusree Dutta’s 2006 documentary film 7 Islands and a Metro—and Dutta’s work more broadly—has yet to receive the critical attention it demands. Addressing this gap, this article examines Dutta’s use of spectrality to structure her search for a documentary form that makes room for Mumbai’s marginalised subjects to narrate themselves into its representational histories and contemporary spaces.
11
Koonal Duggal, "The “Vexed” Status of Guru Images: Visuality, Circulation and Iconographic Conflicts", South Asian Popular Culture, 2022.
In 2007, the Dera Sacha Sauda (DSS) guru Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Insan wore an attire similar to calendar image of tenth Sikh guru, Guru Gobind Singh, and performed a ritual baptism, which became controversial. This article will show how this controversy opens up two significant issues: first, questioning the egalitarian ethos of caste equality upheld by the Sikh religion, and second, with regard to authenticity of religious practice – of what is deemed Sikh and non/un-Sikh practices.
12
Zahra Malkani and Shahana Rajani, "War, Visuality, and the Militarized City War, Visuality, and the Militarized City", Karachi La Jamia, 2019.
Using the examples of the Karachi Operation and the private mega-development project of Bahria Town, Zahra Malkani and Shahana Rajani explore the linkages between visuality, war, and urbanism. Focusing on the discursive and spatial production of the ‘no-go zone’, they highlight the ways in which militarization and development intertwine to naturalise each other’s conquering, settling and colonising acts.
