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The raped woman as a horrific sublime and the Bangladesh war of 1971

Mookherjee, Nayanika

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Abstract

This article examines the relationship between aesthetics and politics when invoking the imagery of war-time rape. It explores the prevalent way in which the raped woman of the Bangladesh war of 1971 is imagined in contemporary Bangladesh through the circulation of rumours, narratives of encounters and photographs. In 1971, faced with a large number of rape survivors after the war, the Bangladeshi government publicly designated any woman raped in the war a birangona (meaning brave woman/war-heroine). Over the last 40 years in Bangladesh, there has existed a public memory of wartime rape through various literary, visual and testimonial forms. These aesthetic representations of the war-heroine can be understood through Rancière’s politics by other means – of that of the distribution of the sensible – through the horrific sublime figuration of the birangona. As an idea that is not readily apparent, these diverse oral, visceral and visual strategies make the birangona visible and comprehendible as bhoyonkor (horrific). The figuration of the birangona as a horrific sublime also brings to the surface Lyotard’s formulation of the ‘encoding’ – the underlying moral values and judgment – that are implicit in the feelings that enable the readability of the war-heroine. I interrogate these hegemonic affective aesthetics (the way wartime rape is often narrowly described) through a nuanced ethnographic account of the birangona’s life trajectory. This less categorised, non-semiotic figuration of the birangona is the interventionary mode, the politics – in Rancière’s formulation – through which this idea of the horrific sublime can be disrupted.

Citation

Mookherjee, N. (2015). The raped woman as a horrific sublime and the Bangladesh war of 1971. Journal of Material Culture, 20(4), 379-395. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183515603742

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Sep 30, 2014
Online Publication Date Sep 16, 2015
Publication Date Sep 16, 2015
Deposit Date Apr 5, 2017
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Journal of Material Culture
Print ISSN 1359-1835
Electronic ISSN 1460-3586
Publisher SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 20
Issue 4
Pages 379-395
DOI https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183515603742

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Copyright Statement
Mookherjee, Nayanika (2015) 'The raped woman as a horrific sublime and the Bangladesh war of 1971.', Journal of material culture., 20 (4). pp. 379-395. Copyright © 2015 The Author(s). Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.





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