Traces of the Real: The Absent Presence of Photography in South Asian Literature - by Bidisha Banerjee (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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

"This book subtly and convincingly navigates the space between the word and the visual image in South Asian texts. Where many might assume photography offers the picture of reality, Banerjee examines the absent presence of photographs to unearth the complex traces of the real in the intersections between literature and photography. In doing so she provides a new perspective on both of these fields and opens up a new space for literary exploration." Professor Bill Ashcroft, UNSW, Australia

"Traces of the Real is a remarkable contribution to the fields of photography, word and image, and postcolonialism. Through an impressive account of the history of photography and its relationship with both literary criticism and the colonial enterprise, this important book offers a new take on South Asian diasporic literature. Moving away from the "sclerosis" of photography's "double indexicality," as described by Mitchell, as well as from the stalemate reached by the "visual turn" in South Asian culture, whose focus on the vernacular is still haunted by the hegemony of Western photographic discourse, Bidisha Banerjee posits a "fourth stage of photography" relying on affect and emotion. Drawing from Azoulay, Rancière, and others, the book offers a new way of looking at South Asian postcolonial literature by discarding the materiality of the visual image to focus on its performative absent presence as metaphor and trace. In so doing, this exciting work presents a subversive form of visual intermediality, or "countervisuality," whose "optics of blindness" purports to "decolonize trauma studies." - Laurence Petit, Université Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3

"Traces of the Real opens up fresh insightful readings by focusing on the postcolonial through the complex lens of absent photographic presences. In this truly original book, Bidisha Banerjee offers us an important and empowering contribution to studies of South Asian fiction." Professor Peter Childs, Birmingham Newman University