Foreword ix
Preface: A Lot of History, a Severe History xv
Acknowledgments xxi
Introduction: The "Looking-Glass Border" 1
Part I
1. The Month of Mourning and the Languid Floodwaters: The Weave of
National History 31
2. We Would Rather Have Shaak (Greens) Than Murgi (Chicken) Polao:
The Archiving of the Birangona 47
3. Bringing Out the Snake: Khota (Scorn) and the Public Secrecy of
Sexual Violence 67
4. A Mine of Thieves: Interrogting Local Politics 91
5. My Own Imagination in My Own Body: Embodied Transgressions in
the Everyday 107
Part II
6. Mingling in Society: Rehabilitation Program and Re-membering the
Raped Woman 129
7. The Absent Piece of Skin: Gendered, Racialized, and Territorial
Inscriptions of Sexual Violence during the Bangladesh War
159
8. Imagining the War Heroine: Examination of State, Press,
Literary, Visual, and Human Rights Accounts, 1971–2001
177
9. Subjectivities of War Heroines: Victim, Agent, Traitor?
228
Part III
Conclusion. The Truth is Tough: Human Rights and the Politics of
Transforming Experiences of Wartime Rape "Trauma" into Public
Memories 251
Postscript: From 2001 until 2013 264
Notes 277
Glossary 291
References 293
Index 309
Nayanika Mookherjee is Reader in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at
Durham University.
Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at the
Johns Hopkins University.
"The Spectral Wound is an exceptional book. It has thoroughly
explored its subject from every conceivable angle in such
a way as to give it a real intellectual richness."
*Economic and Political Weekly*
"It is a pleasure to review books that offer an innovative reading
of important areas of recent scholarship. Nayanika Mookherjee’s
book throws an epistemic challenge to previous authors and
interpretations on the subject."
*Social History*
"Mookerjee's exemplary and closely argued The Spectral Wound
highlights the central conundrum of making wartime rapes public:
heroism, implied and acknowledged by the designation birangona, can
only be acquired by making your shame public....[An] uncommonly
complex and delicately observed study..."
*Women's Review of Books*
"[Mookherjee] asks, ‘What would it mean for the politics of
identifying wartime rape if we were to highlight how the raped
woman folds the experience of sexual violence into her daily
socialities, rather than identifying her as a horrific wound?’ That
is the central question of this powerful and perceptive book."
*Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute*
"Critical, reflective, and transformative to our understanding of
gender violence, memory, and recuperation, Mookherjee’s
extraordinary ethnography is undoubtedly essential reading for
scholars and students of feminist theory, anthropology, Bangladesh,
and South Asia studies."
*Journal of Asian Studies*
"Engaging and lucidly written, The Spectral Wound raises a host of
theoretical and ethical considerations. How might we
re-conceptualize the experience of wartime rape without reducing
survivor subjectivities to their “wounds?” To whom is the feminist
activist accountable? . . . This thoughtful and provocative text
calls on the reader to revisit such dilemmas instead of taking the
answers for granted."
*International Feminist Journal of Politics*
"Nayanika Mookherjee’s research is important as a testimonial, a
guide, and as a recovery of the individual experiences of those
raped in 1971."
*Dhaka Tribune*
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