The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, And The Bangladesh War Of [Paperback]

Following the 1971 Bangladesh War, the Bangladesh government publicly designated the thousands of women raped by the Pakistani military and their local collaborators as birangonas, ("brave women”). Nayanika Mookherjee demonstrates that while this celebration ofbirangonasas heroes keeps them in the public memory, they exist in the public consciousness as what Mookherjee calls a spectral wound. Dominant representations of birangonas as dehumanized victims with disheveled hair, a vacant look, and rejected by their communities create this wound, the effects of which flatten the diversity of their experiences through which birangonas have lived with the violence of wartime rape. In critically examining the pervasiveness of the birangona construction, Mookherjee opens the possibility for a more politico-economic, ethical, and nuanced inquiry into the sexuality of war.

 

In this ethnography of sexual violence during the 1971 Bangladesh War for Independence, Nayanika Mookherjee shows how the public celebration of the hundreds of thousands of rape victims—called "birangonas" by the state—works to homogenize and silence the experiences of these women.

Nayanika Mookherjee is Reader in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at Durham University.

Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University. 

 

"Nayanika Mookherjee has made visible a scene of gendered violence in the Bangladesh War of Liberation that travels beyond its specific context to historical, theoretical, and lived realities that are global in range and scope."

 

"Nayanika Mookherjee has produced a brilliant profile of a society grappling with the impact of war centered on rape and its memory. Dealing with rape in war is a political act and memories serve many causes, from the nationalist to the personal. Mookherjee looks at th