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ENQUIRE PROJECT DETAILS BY GENERAL PUBLIC |
| Project Details |
| Funding Scheme : | General Research Fund | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Project Number : | 18605515 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Project Title(English) : | "Traces of the Real": The Absent Presence of Photography in Postcolonial and Diasporic Literature | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Project Title(Chinese) : | “真實的痕跡：後殖民及離散文學中攝影缺席的在場” | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Principal Investigator(English) : | Dr Banerjee, Bidisha | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Principal Investigator(Chinese) : | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Department : | Department of Literature and Cultural Studies | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Institution : | The Education University of Hong Kong | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| E-mail Address : | banerjee@eduhk.hk | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tel : | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Co - Investigator(s) : |
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| Panel : | Humanities, Social Sciences | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Subject Area : | Humanities and Arts | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Exercise Year : | 2015 / 16 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Fund Approved : | 218,000 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Project Status : | Completed | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Completion Date : | 31-12-2017 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Project Objectives : |
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| Abstract as per original application (English/Chinese): |
Literature and photography are often regarded as sister arts, their cominglings latent in the very etymology of the word “photography” meaning “writing with light.” While many scholars have studied their productive interactions, there is scant scholarly work about the use of photography as a trope or metaphor in literary texts. This project aims to shift the scholarship from an intense focus on text-image relations to the presence and function of verbalized or narrated images in literary texts. Some scholars have propounded the textuality of images by viewing images as texts that can be read and deciphered (Mitchell 1995, Petit 2006), but none have analysed the narrated image in literature. I argue that narrated images in literary texts provide a moment that is twice removed – once in being captured as a photograph (which doesn’t really exist) and again in being described by the narrator. Photographs are often seen as absent presences – making a now absent moment from the past, present for eternity. The narrated image in literary texts I argue, function as a similar absent presence.
By limiting the scope of the project to the study of postcolonial and diasporic literature, I attempt to hypothesise on the relationship between postcoloniality and photography. Photography in colonial times, often served to justify the project of colonialism by presenting the colonized as fetishized types rather than as real individuals. Photography in postcolonial literature may then be seen as an attempt at authentic self-representation, an attempt to regain voice and agency. However, I argue that while the power of images may give agency and validity to the photographer, the inherently paradoxical nature of photography, always/already undercuts such attempts at representing the “real.”
Diasporic literature with its attendant themes of loss, longing, mourning and trauma, has obvious resonances with photography. By studying the presence of the narrated photographs in many recent diasporic novels, I attempt to hypothesize the ways in which photography represents an endless regression of infinite melancholia for the diasporic characters in these novels.
By bringing together the multidisciplinary fields of postcolonial literature, migration studies and photography, this project aims to overcome the disciplinary divisions between these fields and shift the debate on the interactions between these sister arts. It attempts to study not the interaction of the written word and the visual image, but rather the written image which functions as a photographic metaphor to enhance the themes of the literary text.
文學和攝影經常被認為是姊妹藝術，它們的混合性可見於攝影 (Photography) 的詞源，即「以光書寫」。儘管不少學者已研究過兩者在製作方面的共通之處，可是針對文學作品中以攝影作比喻或象徵的研究卻仍見貧乏。 本研究正是旨在離開一般只集中在文字和影像之關係的學研方向，並將焦點轉移至影像在文學作品中以口述或敘述的存在形式和作用。部份學者曾提出影像有其文本性：它們能被閱讀和闡釋(Mitchell 1995, Petit 2006)，但仍未有研究分析過文本中被敘述的影像。我認為這種敘述影像是被雙重移除的：它們曾經被攝為一幀照片(這照片其實也是不存在的)，而後又被敘事者轉述。攝影經常被視為“缺席的在場”— 再現了一個已成過去的瞬間，並使這瞬間永遠存在。我認為在文學作品中被敘述的影像也有一種類似的—“缺席的在場”的—性質。 我希望將研究範圍限於後殖民和離散文學，並對後殖民性和攝影的關係作出推測。在殖民時期，攝影經常被用來再現被殖民者，將他們的血肉之軀物化為影像，從而合理化殖民主義。而在後殖民文學裏的攝影則可被視為一種主權的自我表現、一種重奪發言權和代理權的嘗試。然而，我認為影像的力量固然有機會給予攝影者代理權和真確性，但攝影固有的弔詭本質經已削弱了這“真實”的表現。 離散文學與其伴隨的主題—失落、渴望、哀悼和創傷—與攝影有明顯的共鳴。透過研究大量近期離散小說中被敍述照片的狀態，我希望揣摩離散小說的角色如何藉著照片回顧他們無盡的哀傷。 此研究結合後殖民文學、移民研究和攝影等不同學科，旨在克服學科之間的差異和轉移有關研究中的固有側重。這項研究的重點不在於文字和影像的互動性，反之為探討被書寫的影像、其攝影性的象徵作用和對文學主題的提升。 |
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| Realisation of objectives: | All 7 objectives of the project have been fully realized. The project was proposed as a book project. I have now completed drafts of 5 of the 6 proposed chapters of the book and also prepared the book proposal which is currently under review for publication. I am currently working on the introductory chapter. The book comprises of the following chapters: Introduction: Photography and the Postcolonial Chapter 1: The False Promise of Affective Intentionality: The Violence of Documentary Photography in Train to Pakistan Chapter 2: Imagistic Haunting: Photographic Traces and Posthuman Photography in Animal’s People and Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha Chapter 3: Picturing Atrocity: Postcolonial Trauma and the Photographic Eye in Anil’s Ghost and Choli ke Pichhe Chapter 4: The Punctum of Loss: Photography and the Vision of Loss in “Hema and Kaushik.” Chapter 5: Finding Gauri: Photography and a Reappraisal of Diasporic Womanhood in The Lowland. Conclusion Traces of the Real shifts the scholarship from an intense focus on text-image relations to the presence and function in literary texts of the photographic in various absent or indirect forms – primarily the image in absentia, either ekphrastically evoked or via allusions to iconic photographs that exist outside the fictional text - but also the photographic eye or characters who are photographers in the texts. In doing so it overcomes the disciplinary divisions between literature, photography and postcolonial studies and provides new ways of reading this literature. (Objectives 1 and 2). The book opens at the cusp of South Asian postcoloniality with a discussion of Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan, written nine brief years after Indian independence. Contrary to the book’s avowed intention of focusing on the image in absentia, the opening chapter of the book does include analyses of real photographs. However, these are photographs that were added fifty years after the first publication of the novel; so these photographs, by dint of their belatedness, are also an absent presence in the novel. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, Roli Books launched a special illustrated edition of the novel in 2006. Edited by Pramod Kapoor, this edition of Singh’s novel is supplemented by sixty five hitherto unpublished photographs taken by the celebrated American photographer Margaret Bourke-White for LIFE magazine during her stay in India in 1946 and 1947. The chapter begins by tracing the history of photography in India from its indexical origins under the project of colonialism to its opposing practices which attempted an authentic self-representation running counter to colonial representations (Objective 3). I situate Bourke-White’s Partition photographs within this spectrum while also attempting to understand what she wanted her images to convey. Citing critics like John Tagg who have called into question documentary photography’s capacity to bear witness, I argue that despite being politically progressive, Margaret Bourke-White’s photographs of Partition convey an ideological naivete and evidence of what Tagg calls “the pleasures of the paternalistic gaze” (xxxiii). This chapter also considers the affective consequences of the coupling of Singh’s text with Bourke-White’s images. Despite the affective intentionality of the belated inclusion of photographs in Singh’s novel, I read this as an act of violence and violation. The always already present discourse of colonial photography, coupled with Bourke-White’s often staged and artificial documenting of the Great Migration of India’s Partition and the trauma it brought to millions, ensures that such a naive coupling of text and image can never be straightforward (Objective 4 and 5). Rather than add affective dimensionality to Singh’s powerful novel, I argue that Bourke-White’s photos work at cross purposes to Singh’s storytelling in Train to Pakistan. In Chapter 3, I provide a reading Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost (2000) and Mahasweta Devi’s short story “Choli ke Pichhe” (Behind the Bodice) as correctives to the Eurocentric bias of much of trauma studies (Objective 6). Ondaatje’s novel about the Sri Lankan civil war is the story of Anil Tissera, a Sri Lankan born, western educated forensic expert who returns to her homeland to investigate possible atrocities committed by the government. In Ondaatje’s novel, as a Westernized, diasporic individual, Anil replicates the Eurocentric view of trauma. I argue that by making his protagonist somewhat of an outsider and by further aligning her gaze to the Western gaze and the supposedly “objective” camera eye, Ondaatje complicates the notion of postcolonial witnessing and representation. Ondaatje considers the utility of photographs as a means of witnessing, recording and providing testimonials about postcolonial trauma. Drawing on discussions of the photography of torture and atrocity (Prosser 2005; Sontag 2004 and Butler 2009), this chapter seeks to explore the ways in which photography and the narrated image complicate Ondaatje’s themes of trauma, truth and testimony. I question whether photography’s inherent contradictions – objectivity vs framing, immediacy vs. distance - allow the characters in the novel to access the truth about violence and trauma in an alternative way or whether they painfully heighten the impossibility of this endeavor (Objectives 5 and 6). Finally, I argue that Ondaatje proposes several modes of seeing in this novel. He aligns the photographic eye with a western notion of documentation and truth telling which, he argues fails in the context of postcolonial trauma which calls for a more localized, grounded, intuitive and even spiritual way of seeing (Objective 5). This alternative vision is what I call “the optics of blindness” or, somewhat contradictorily, a blind seeing, a way of intuitively apprehending what is not obvious. I turn my attention to the figure of the photographer in postcolonial literature in the latter half of Chapter 3 (Objective 7). In “Behind the Bodice” Devi connects visuality and trauma (Objective 6) through the figure of Upin Puri whose photographic gaze is transformed into a scopophilic one and works to objectify the protagonist Gangor’s body. At the end of this story we have a strange but powerful reversal. Instead of the photograph standing in and speaking for the unspeakable traumatic act, the victim remains articulate and resilient, while Upin the author of the image, becomes traumatized, haunted by his work of art and his own unwitting role in causing the traumatic act. Chapter 4 further explores the relationship between trauma studies and postcolonial literature (Objective 6). Through a reading of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novella Hema and Kaushik, I argue that the contradictions within photography provide Lahiri with the means to reflect on the ambivalent nature of home, belonging and diaspora for characters like Hema and Kaushik. Instead of providing him with roots and an access into the past that can give him a secure sense of his diasporic identity, photographs and photography simply exacerbates Kaushik’s sense of phantom loss and diasporic mourning. Parallels between photography, on the one hand, and the trauma and haunting that sometimes come with diasporic movement, on the other, suggest both the appropriateness of Lahiri’s use of photography as a trope as well as the necessity of its deliberate structural failure in the story. Using writings on photography theory by Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag and others, I analyze the trope of photography in the story and posit a relation between the desire to photograph and the immigrant condition. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Summary of objectives addressed: |
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| Research Outcome | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Major findings and research outcome: | The major research outcome of the project is the monograph, Traces of the Real. I have also published two refereed journal articles, delivered one invited lecture and presented my work at three international conferences. In addition to the 2016 conference paper which led to a subsequent publication in 2017 (summarized in the midterm report), I had the opportunity to present parts of Chapter 5 (“Photography and a Reappraisal of Diasporic Woman hood in The Lowland”) at two separate talks in 2017. The first of these was for an invited lecture at St. Lawrence University. The talk was titled “Becoming Udayan: Photography and the Devastating Doubling of Brothers in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland.” This talk was derived from the second part of the chapter where I analyze a death portrait to suggest that the brothers in the novel, Subhash and Udayan are inextricably “twinned” such that the protagonist Gauri remains haunted by the past and her memories of Udayan even after she comes to America. The second talk was delivered at the conference of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers in July 2017 entitled “Allo-portraits of a mother: Photography and Diasporic motherhood in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland.” This talk was based on the first part of the chapter where I use Marianne Hirsch’s work on family photographs, the familial gaze and the connection between photography and motherhood, to argue that Lahiri’s protagonist Gauri is a more sympathetic character than critics have argued who fails to fulfil the hegemonic familial ideology imposed upon her. During my visit to Canton, NY to deliver the invited lecture, I also attended a conference at Cornell University called Utopia After the Human where I delivered a paper, “Posthuman Utopias: Inter-species Assemblages and Migranthood in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival.” Though this is not from the book itself, it helped me consolidate my ideas on posthumanism, particularly in relation to the postcolonial, in preparation for what became Chapter 2 of the book – “Imagistic Haunting: Photographic Traces and Posthuman Photography in Animal’s People and Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha.” I was also able to include a version of a small part of Chapter 3 in a forthcoming publication, “Defiance and the Speakability of Rape: Decolonizing Trauma Studies in Mahasweta Devi’s Fiction” included in Trauma, Memory and Healing in Asian Literature (Routledge, 2019) edited by Sharanya Jayawickrama. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Potential for further development of the research and the proposed course of action: |
This project has allowed me to continue to explore the relation between visual studies and postcoloniality more generally. I have just submitted another RGC grant application for a project on the refugee graphic novel called “Picturing Precarity.” Following critics like Simon Gikandi (2010) and Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2000) who have theorized the refugee as a new kind of Other that challenges global cultural flows, “Picturing Precarity” calls for an alternative migration framework based on spatiality as well as a more individualized and humanized visual frame for depicting the refugee. These I wager, can be found in the refugee graphic novels of the last decade. In particular, this project considers the depiction of “nonplaces” such as the open sea, detention centres and refugee camps in refugee graphic novels, arguing that these offer us a new migration framework based on reconfiguring spatiality. This project considers the politics of photographic depictions of refugees in the media. I argue that despite the visibility of such coverage, the dehistoricized and dehumanizing visual framing of refugees in these images, negatively influences the discourse framing questions of asylum in particular countries. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Layman's Summary of Completion Report: | In the first of his “Seven theses on photography” (2012), Christopher Pinney laments what he calls the “problem of ex-nomination” in photography studies. This arises from the predominance of Western photography in the field which gives it a privileged place of global recognition while photography from the non-Western world is always characterized as having a local rather than a global flavor. While in literature, the Empire has written back and has been doing so for several decades, the harnessing of photographic discourses to bolster the truth of dominant ideologies, often remains unacknowledged. This book argues that by using photography as a metaphor in a variety of ways in their writing, South Asian postcolonial writers are undermining the truth-telling power and indexicality of photography, thereby challenging the hegemony of Western photographic discourse. In the discussion of novels by Michael Ondaatje, Jhumpa Lahiri, Indra Sinha and others, this book proposes alternative photographic visions more suited to the postcolonial project. This is the first extensive study of photography as a metaphor in South Asian postcolonial and diasporic literature, and as yet, there are no obvious direct competitors to the book. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Research Output | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Peer-reviewed journal publication(s) arising directly from this research project : (* denotes the corresponding author) |
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| Recognized international conference(s) in which paper(s) related to this research project was/were delivered : |
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| Other impact (e.g. award of patents or prizes, collaboration with other research institutions, technology transfer, etc.): |
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| SCREEN ID: SCRRM00542 |