“The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War of 1971,” a book on the construction of public perception regarding Biranganas, victims of rape during the Liberation War, was launched in Bangladesh in the capital’s Kamal Ataturk Avenue yesterday.
The book has been authored by Nayanika Mookherjee, a reader in social anthropologist at Durham University in the UK, who has been involved in a research for years on the memories of wartime rape during the Liberation War.
Published by Duke University Press this year, the book is focuses on the existence of the Biranganas in public consciousness – which Mookherjee refers to as a spectral wound – even the the Bangladesh government has publicly designated the Biranganas as heroes equal to the freedom fighters.
“Dominant representations of Biranganas as dehumanised victims with dishevelled hair, a vacant look, and rejected by their communities create this wound, the effects of which flatten the diversity of their experiences through which Biranganas have lived with the violence of wartime rape,” says the synopsis of the book.
The book’s launching in Bangladesh was organised by The Anthropology Collective and the Anthropology Students’ Forum under the department of economics and social sciences (ESS) at Brac University.
Chaired by Dr Dina M Siddiqui, professor at the ESS department, the programme was also attended by the department’s Assistant Prof Dr Seuty Sabur, Prof SM Shamsul Alam and Naeem Mohaiemen, visual artist who is also a PhD candidate at Columbia University in the US.