Papers by Bidisha Banerjee
English Studies, Aug 2, 2022
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Jul 3, 2016
Abstract Academy Award-winning author and illustrator Shaun Tan’s 2007 graphic novel The Arrival ... more Abstract Academy Award-winning author and illustrator Shaun Tan’s 2007 graphic novel The Arrival poignantly tells the story of the typical immigrant experience. Tan creates an ostensibly alienating and unfamiliar terrain which may be described as a “posthuman landscape”. Instead of presenting the traditional native-versus-immigrant framework typical of diasporic stories, Tan chooses to delineate an inter-species relationship where the immigrant man is assisted by a native animal. An odd-looking creature becomes the protagonist’s guide in the new country and assists him in a myriad of ways throughout the story. This article explores the implications of such a relationship in the age of the Anthropocene where the privileged anthropocentrism of western humanism has been replaced by an egalitarianism of species. Using Donna Haraway’s notion of “companion species” and Rosi Braidotti’s recent articulation of the posthuman, it suggests a connection between the posthuman and the postcolonial in Tan’s text and thereby explores the significance of a non-human Other coming to the assistance of the immigrant Other within the space of a posthuman, postcolonial world. Thus the article seeks to study the reconfiguration of otherness in the face of incommensurable difference, and articulate its implications for diasporic thought.
Journal of Postcolonial Writing
English in Education, 2020
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2010
In the long story “Hema and Kaushik” that comprises Part II of Jhumpa Lahiri’s most recent collec... more In the long story “Hema and Kaushik” that comprises Part II of Jhumpa Lahiri’s most recent collection Unaccustomed Earth (2008), we find the recurrent trope of photographs and photography. Kaushik, the child of immigrants, becomes a photojournalist who visits war-torn areas documenting the destruction with his camera. The loss of homeland for second-generation immigrants like Kaushik is a phantom loss, since they cannot access the originary moment of departure in their memories. I argue that photography allows Kaushik to counter his unrootedness by providing him with a sense of presence. However, given photography’s double edge — its ability to capture a moment and preserve it for posterity and, conversely, its inalienable connection with absence, loss and even death — it ultimately renders his efforts false and exacerbates his sense of phantom loss and diaspora mourning. Using writings on photography theory by Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag and others, I posit a relation between the ...
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2013
The city-state of Hong Kong had a unique postcolonial birth in 1997, when it was handed over to t... more The city-state of Hong Kong had a unique postcolonial birth in 1997, when it was handed over to the motherland, China, after the expiration of a hundred year lease on Hong Kong held by the British. In this paper, I suggest that Hong Kong's unique attainment of postcoloniality, and the evolution of her subsequent complicated relationship with Mainland China, leads to a deep sense of anxiety in Hong Kong's identity as a global city. This anxiety, I further argue, is mapped on to the physical landscape of Hong Kong. By analysing the portrayal of Tin Shui Wai, a marginal and isolated area of development in Hong Kong, and the contrasting depiction of public and private spaces in Ann Hui's 2009 film Night and Fog, I attempt to explore the Freudian “uncanny,” the return of the repressed, which constantly threatens to erupt. In the concluding section of the paper, I use Kristevian theories of abjection and the spatialization of identity to argue that the figure of Ling, the Mainland mother in Hui's film, brings to the fore Hong Kong's anxiety about its postcolonial identity and relationship with China. She epitomizes the othered self, the return of the repressed, the foreigner who must necessarily be expelled (through murder) from within the nation-space of Hong Kong.
Postcolonial Text, 2010
Page 1. Postcolonial Text, Vol 5, No 2 (2009) Revisions, Reroutings and Return: Reversing the Tel... more Page 1. Postcolonial Text, Vol 5, No 2 (2009) Revisions, Reroutings and Return: Reversing the Teleology of Diaspora in Sunetra Gupta's Memories of Rain Bidisha Banerjee Hong Kong Institute of Education There is significant ...
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2020
This article considers traumatic representations of violence in the stories of the Bengali writer... more This article considers traumatic representations of violence in the stories of the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi that do not readily fit into trauma studies discourses which emphasise the aporia and unspeakability of trauma. Instead, the protagonists of these stories gesture towards defiance and agency in the face of trauma, thereby calling for justice and social change. Such portrayals offer us opportunities to decolonize cultural trauma theory by focusing on the unexpected arising of agency and empowerment from victims of gendered violence. The article explores the complex ways in which the trope of rape operates in Devi’s work and posits that it is used by Devi to empower her female protagonists and make them powerful critiques of patriarchal systems of exploitation. In doing so, the article argues, these stories also decolonize established discourses of trauma. In "Draupadi", the protagonist Dopdi Mejhen is a tribal revolutionary who is arrested and gang-raped in custo...
Research in Education, 2018
In the spirit of reformulating notions of critique, this response builds on the creative research... more In the spirit of reformulating notions of critique, this response builds on the creative research experimentation that the authors enacted to consider air differently. The authors continue to be lured by generosity, curiosity, surprise, and wonder and suggest two feminist responses that relate to and generate knowledge in alternative ways. Two experimentations (collective experimental story writing and erasure poetry) are offered to readers with the aim of activating new thinkings, doings, and relations with air.
Global Studies of Childhood, 2013
MINDY BLAISE Department of Early Childhood Education, Centre for Childhood Research and Innovatio... more MINDY BLAISE Department of Early Childhood Education, Centre for Childhood Research and Innovation, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong BIDISHA BANERJEE Literature and Cultural Studies Department, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong VERONICA PACINI-KETCHABAW School of Child and Youth Care, University of Victoria, Canada AFFRICA TAYLOR Faculty of Education, Science, Technology and Mathematics, University of Canberra, Australia
Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 2013
This article engages with air from a posthuman performative perspective to prompt new thinking ab... more This article engages with air from a posthuman performative perspective to prompt new thinking about postcolonial Hong Kong. Drawing from a small experiential study of Hong Kong air, this article shows how three becoming-with research practices; sensing air, tracing childhood memories, and cominglings were enacted to engage with data differently. Becoming-with Hong Kong air illuminates how new connections are made with data through inter- and intra-actions between human, nonhuman, and the material and discursive. This article argues that becoming-with practices are productive and necessary to rethink postcoloniality in Hong Kong.
Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2016
Academy award winning illustrator Shaun Tan’s 2006 graphic novel The Arrival, poignantly tells th... more Academy award winning illustrator Shaun Tan’s 2006 graphic novel The Arrival, poignantly tells the story of the typical immigrant experience through a series of beautifully rendered, sepia toned images. Tan’s illustrations provide us the perspective of the immigrant to whom the new city appears strange, alienating and even fantastical. Throughout the novel, Tan depicts a number of objects- some are familiar, iconic images of iteration such as a suitcase and a family photo, while others are the strange and alienating objects the man encounters in the new country. Using theories that bring together material culture and identity formation, this paper posits that Tan presents his narrative of the immigrant experience as a project of familiarization and naturalization, of home making and the creation of a comfortable “well-fitted habitus.” Domesticating and familiarizing himself with the alien objects he encounters and furnishing his home with these objects alongside the familiar ones from home, allows the protagonist to construct his immigrant being within the space of the host nation.
Global Studies of Childhood, 2013
The 1998 picture book The Rabbits, written by John Marsden and illustrated by Shaun Tan, is an al... more The 1998 picture book The Rabbits, written by John Marsden and illustrated by Shaun Tan, is an allegory of the colonisation of Australia. The book has been controversial for a number of reasons. While some have read it as too politically correct, others have argued that the portrayal of the Aboriginals is patronising and silencing, and still others have been confounded by its categorisation as children's literature. For the author of this article, the overwhelming message of the book is the destruction of the landscape due to colonialism. In the reading of The Rabbits in this article, the author attempts to bring together the postcolonial and the posthuman ‘contact zone’ perspectives, as theorised by Mary Louise Pratt and Donna Haraway respectively. The author analyses the textual pages of The Rabbits as representative of a troubled contact zone where text and image exist in tension with each other such that two separate but interwoven strands ultimately come together to deliver...
International Networks & Events by Bidisha Banerjee
Shocking images of migrant bodies washed ashore, epitomized in Ai Wei Wei’s re-enactment of the S... more Shocking images of migrant bodies washed ashore, epitomized in Ai Wei Wei’s re-enactment of the Syrian infant Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body on a beach in Lesbos, have almost become a macabre shorthand for migrant deaths on foreign shores as more and more refugees undertake perilous sea crossings and other hazardous inland journeys, in search of a better life. We may wonder what happens to these bodies, what happens to these bones; are they repatriated back to the homeland? If not, are they in a cruel twist of fate, simply buried in mass graves on the foreign shores they tragically failed to reach while alive? How are the victims memorialized, if at all? This also raises related questions about the immigrant’s desire for a home burial. How is the longing for home manifested as a longing to die in the homeland? What about those who are criminalized and refused a burial? How is the right to die linked to citizenship and human rights in the context of migration and diaspora? “Thanatic Ethics: The Circulation of Bodies in Migratory Spaces” seeks to explore these questions as they are articulated in literary and visual culture, and across disciplines.
For more details about the Programme and the events to be organised in partnership with the University Paul Valery Montpellier 3, France, and the Maison Française d'Oxford, please refer to http://www.cpch.hk/thanatic-ethics-the-circulation-of-bodies-in-migratory-spaces/
Or: https://emma.www.univ-montp3.fr/fr/valorisation-partenariats/programmes-européens-et-internationaux/thanatic-ethics
If interested, feel free to contact us at:
Dr Bidisha Banerjee <banerjee@eduhk.hk>
Dr Judith Misrahi-Barak <judith.misrahi-barak@univ-montp3.fr>
Dr Thomas Lacroix <thomas.lacroix@cnrs.fr>
News by Bidisha Banerjee
Thanatic Ethics: The Circulation of Bodies in Migratory Spaces
International Conference: Bodies... more Thanatic Ethics: The Circulation of Bodies in Migratory Spaces
International Conference: Bodies on the Edge: Life and Death in Migration
Full description of the Thanatic Ethics Project:
https://www.thanaticethics.com
Venue: Maison Française of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Dates: April 28 to 30, 2022
Language: English
Deadline for submitting proposals: 15 December 2021
Notification of acceptance: 15 January 2022
● This conference will be held in person and participants will be expected to travel to Oxford at their own cost.
Project Co-convenors:
Dr Bidisha Banerjee, Centre for Popular Culture in the Humanities, the Education U. of Hong Kong
Dr Thomas Lacroix, Sciences Po-CERI / Maison Française d’Oxford
Dr Judith Misrahi-Barak, EMMA, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France
Organisation Committee:
Dr. Justine Feyereisen, Ghent University/Maison Française d’Oxford
Dr. Marie Godin, COMPAS-RSC, U. of Oxford
Dr. Alessandro Corso, ODID, U. of Oxford
Prof. Judith Rainhorn, Maison Française d’Oxford
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Papers by Bidisha Banerjee
International Networks & Events by Bidisha Banerjee
For more details about the Programme and the events to be organised in partnership with the University Paul Valery Montpellier 3, France, and the Maison Française d'Oxford, please refer to http://www.cpch.hk/thanatic-ethics-the-circulation-of-bodies-in-migratory-spaces/
Or: https://emma.www.univ-montp3.fr/fr/valorisation-partenariats/programmes-européens-et-internationaux/thanatic-ethics
If interested, feel free to contact us at:
Dr Bidisha Banerjee <banerjee@eduhk.hk>
Dr Judith Misrahi-Barak <judith.misrahi-barak@univ-montp3.fr>
Dr Thomas Lacroix <thomas.lacroix@cnrs.fr>
News by Bidisha Banerjee
International Conference: Bodies on the Edge: Life and Death in Migration
Full description of the Thanatic Ethics Project:
https://www.thanaticethics.com
Venue: Maison Française of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Dates: April 28 to 30, 2022
Language: English
Deadline for submitting proposals: 15 December 2021
Notification of acceptance: 15 January 2022
● This conference will be held in person and participants will be expected to travel to Oxford at their own cost.
Project Co-convenors:
Dr Bidisha Banerjee, Centre for Popular Culture in the Humanities, the Education U. of Hong Kong
Dr Thomas Lacroix, Sciences Po-CERI / Maison Française d’Oxford
Dr Judith Misrahi-Barak, EMMA, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France
Organisation Committee:
Dr. Justine Feyereisen, Ghent University/Maison Française d’Oxford
Dr. Marie Godin, COMPAS-RSC, U. of Oxford
Dr. Alessandro Corso, ODID, U. of Oxford
Prof. Judith Rainhorn, Maison Française d’Oxford
For more details about the Programme and the events to be organised in partnership with the University Paul Valery Montpellier 3, France, and the Maison Française d'Oxford, please refer to http://www.cpch.hk/thanatic-ethics-the-circulation-of-bodies-in-migratory-spaces/
Or: https://emma.www.univ-montp3.fr/fr/valorisation-partenariats/programmes-européens-et-internationaux/thanatic-ethics
If interested, feel free to contact us at:
Dr Bidisha Banerjee <banerjee@eduhk.hk>
Dr Judith Misrahi-Barak <judith.misrahi-barak@univ-montp3.fr>
Dr Thomas Lacroix <thomas.lacroix@cnrs.fr>
International Conference: Bodies on the Edge: Life and Death in Migration
Full description of the Thanatic Ethics Project:
https://www.thanaticethics.com
Venue: Maison Française of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Dates: April 28 to 30, 2022
Language: English
Deadline for submitting proposals: 15 December 2021
Notification of acceptance: 15 January 2022
● This conference will be held in person and participants will be expected to travel to Oxford at their own cost.
Project Co-convenors:
Dr Bidisha Banerjee, Centre for Popular Culture in the Humanities, the Education U. of Hong Kong
Dr Thomas Lacroix, Sciences Po-CERI / Maison Française d’Oxford
Dr Judith Misrahi-Barak, EMMA, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France
Organisation Committee:
Dr. Justine Feyereisen, Ghent University/Maison Française d’Oxford
Dr. Marie Godin, COMPAS-RSC, U. of Oxford
Dr. Alessandro Corso, ODID, U. of Oxford
Prof. Judith Rainhorn, Maison Française d’Oxford