Bidisha Banerjee

• Education University of Hong Kong

CALL FOR PAPERS - SPECIAL ISSUE SPACES OF PRECARITY: Migration, Spatiality and the Refugee Graphic Narrative (Francophone & Anglophone texts). We are calling for abstracts on the topic “Spaces of Precarity: Migration, Spatiality and the Refugee Graphic Narrative” for a guest-edited special issue of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (or simi...

Ten years after the publication of Meena Alexander’s memoir Fault Lines (1993), she published a revised and expanded edition, including a new Coda where she confronts memories of a childhood trauma, that of being sexually abused by her maternal grandfather. While the original memoir is primarily concerned with her sense of diasporic displacement an...

Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi (2015) tells the story of her father Ahmad’s childhood spent in Baddawi, a camp for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Given that the refugee status of Palestinians has now lasted over 70 years, Palestine occupies a unique position in refugee studies. Camps like Baddawi form a distinctive model of refugee diasporic space wh...

This longitudinal study examines three female Chinese students’ responses to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at a Hong Kong university. We interviewed them about their attitudes towards dating, marriage and divorce, before reading the play; we then elicited responses to a first reading. Finally, we interviewed them after six hours of class discussion. Seven...

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 jus...

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 expe...

Responding to recent calls for the invention of research approaches that move away from traditional humanist notions of research to more situated, performative, and material ways of enacting research, this chapter foregrounds the authors' performative surveillance data practices and shows how disappointing, failing, or malfunctioning data productiv...

Hong Kong has a unique postcolonial identity. After being colonised by Britain for over a century and a half, it was ceremoniously handed over to China in 1997, without necessitating any bloody wars or even skirmishes. Hong Kong has continued to enjoy a privileged status within China due to the doctrines enshrined in the ‘one country two systems’ p...

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 dias...

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 t...

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 Mainla...

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...

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. B...

For diasporic populations, the space of diaspora, whether it be the space of home or of nation, is often a fragmented and unsafe space that must be bounded and controlled in order to make that space one's own,. Often it becomes incumbent upon the women to carry the burden of the creation of diaspora space. As essentialized representatives of a nati...

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 secon...

In a collection entitled Queer Globalizations, Gayatri Gopinath argues that films like Deepa Mehta's film Fire traverse a complex transnational space in their trajectory of production and consumption that necessitates a supple analysis of the discourses they generate. Following Gopinath and using Fire as a case in point, I wish to argue that the tr...

Gurinder Chadha’s film, Bhaji on the Beach , explores the issues of home, identity, hybridity, and belonging with respect to Indian women in Britain. The film revolves around a group of Indian women ranging from the age of 16 to 60, all members of the Saheli (girlfriend) Women’s Centre who go on a day-trip to Blackpool, a popular beach resort for w...