The Spectral Wound

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 of birangonas as 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.

The war of 1971 that created Bangladesh was the most significant geopolitical event in the Indian subcontinent since partition in 1947. It tilted the balance of power between India and Pakistan steeply in favor of India. Srinath Raghavan contends that the crisis and its cast of characters can be understood only in a wider international context.

Bangladesh was once East Pakistan, the Muslim nation carved out of the Indian Subcontinent when it gained independence from Britain in 1947. As religion alone could not keep East Pakistan and West Pakistan together, Bengali-speaking East Pakistan fought for and achieved liberation in 1971. Coups and assassinations followed, and two decades later it completed its long, tumultuous transition to parliamentary government. Its history is complex and tragic—one of war, natural disaster, starvation, corruption, and political instability. First published in India by the Aleph Book Company, Salil Tripathi’s lyrical, beautifully wrought tale of the difficult birth and conflict-ridden politics of this haunted land has received international critical acclaim, and his reporting has been honored with a Mumbai Press Club Red Ink Award for Excellence in Journalism. The Colonel Who Would Not Repent is an insightful study of a nation struggling to survive and define itself.

Since its inception in 2001, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been met with resistance by various African states and their leaders, who see the court as a new iteration of colonial violence and control. In Affective Justice Kamari Maxine Clarke explores the African Union's pushback against the ICC in order to theorize affect's role in shaping forms of justice in the contemporary period. Drawing on fieldwork in The Hague, the African Union in Addis Ababa, sites of postelection violence in Kenya, and Boko Haram's circuits in Northern Nigeria, Clarke formulates the concept of affective justice—an emotional response to competing interpretations of justice—to trace how affect becomes manifest in judicial practices. By detailing the effects of the ICC’s all-African indictments, she outlines how affective responses to these call into question the "objectivity" of the ICC’s mission to protect those victimized by violence and prosecute perpetrators of those crimes. In analyzing the effects of such cases, Clarke provides a fuller theorization of how people articulate what justice is and the mechanisms through which they do so.

This book includes some very recent applications and the newest emerging trends of hyper-spectral imaging (HSI). HSI is a very recent and strange beast, a sort of a melting pot of previous techniques and scientific interests, merging and concentrating the efforts of physicists, chemists, botanists, biologists, and physicians, to mention just a few, as well as experts in data crunching and statistical elaboration. For almost a century, scientific observation, from looking to planets and stars down to our own cells and below, could be divided into two main categories: analyzing objects on the basis of their physical dimension (recording size, position, weight, etc. and their variations) or on how the object emits, reflects, or absorbs part of the electromagnetic spectrum, i.e., spectroscopy. While the two aspects have been obviously entangled, instruments and skills have always been clearly distinct from each other. With HSI now available, this is no longer the case. This instrument can return specimen dimensionalities and spectroscopic properties to any single pixel of your specimen, in a single set of data. HSI modality is ubiquitous and scale-invariant enough to be used to mark terrestrial resources on the basis of a land map obtained from satellite observation (actually, the oldest application of this type) or to understand if the cell you are looking at is cancerous or perfectly healthy. For all these reasons, HSI represents one of the most exciting methodologies of the new millennium.

After seventy-five years of independence, the history of Pakistan remains centered on the state, its ideology and the two-nation theory. Towards Peoples' Histories in Pakistan seeks to shift that focus away from histories of an imagined nation, to the history of its peoples. Based on the premise that the historiographical tradition in Pakistan has ignored the existence of people who actually make history, this book brings together historians, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists to shed light on the diverse histories of the people themselves. Assembling histories of events and peoples missing from grand narratives of national history, the essays in this collection incorporate a diversity of approaches to the past as it opens the possibilities of multiple histories, the archives through which they are registered, and the various temporalities in which they persist. The volume highlights and recuperates the entangled nature of history and memory within Pakistan's social and cultural life. By critically examining both leftist and nationalist thought, Towards People's Histories in Pakistan explores competing visions of what is meant by 'the people', and charts new ground in developing the promise of people's histories both within Pakistan and beyond.

Bangladeshi women recall the sexualized violence of the war of 1971, fought between India and what was then East and West Pakistan.

With its focus on wartime sexual violence, this book examines the traumatic memories of wartime rape in context of contemporary theories of war. The translated testimonials of the raped women of the Bangladesh war emphasize the importance of critical discussion on gendered violence, war trauma, and the restructuring of policies regarding recovery and rehabilitation of the war victims, especially in the global South.