Reviewing women-centric cinema in Bangladesh

This week in North Philly Notes, Elora Halim Chowdhury, author of Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh, writes about female representation in Muktijuddho films.

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A modern remake of Ajoy Kar’s 1961 film Saptapadi, Shameen Akhtar’s film Rina Brown (2017) unfolds intimate geographies of love and loss among individuals from India, and West and East Pakistan. One of few independent women filmmakers in Bangladesh, Akhtar offers a tale about unfulfilled dreams of love and freedom, set in contemporary Bangladesh (or, Dhaka City), that traces the return of Rina, an Anglo-Christian, to the now-independent nation that she left during the Bangladesh Liberation War (or, Muktijuddho). Forty years after the war’s end, Rina comes back to participate in a seminar about women in conflict. She seeks out her adolescent love, Darashiko, a Bengali Muslim freedom-fighter-turned-business-executive. Over the course of a long afternoon, the two reminisce about the fading aspirations of the nationalist struggle and its unreconciled trauma.

Though Rina’s past is indelibly linked to the history of Bangladesh, she is now a stranger whose suffering is incomprehensible to the post-war generation. As the couple look out on the sweeping urban landscape of Dhaka City, and think about what could have been, a vacant footbridge bereft of pedestrians serves as a metaphor to all that the war has torn asunder and imaginary borders, intractably entrenched. War changed everything, yet as Darashiko expresses forlornly, “We could not change the country.”

The poster for Rina Brown

I begin with this vignette from Akhtar’s film—a woman-centered Muktijuddho film—because it highlights what the essays in Ethical Encounters strive to do: reimagine a Muktijuddho gender ideology that through visual culture engages with, disrupts, and incites a new imaginary for gender justice. The collection defies conventional readings of the aesthetics and politics of Muktijuddho narratives. They tell stories of the birth of a nation from its margins, constructing a ‘Bangladeshi’ identity that embraces Bengali Muslims, as well as non-Muslims and non-Bengalis, coalescing into a national cinema that crystallizes an emergent Bangladeshi modernity. Yet at the same time, this modernity also relies on a middle-class and masculinist reading of the nation and its history. Ethical Encounters, inspired by women-centric cinema in Bangladesh, illuminates a feminine aesthetic as well as the politics of disruption and agency, healing, and reconciliation.

The poster for Meherjaan

The attempt to memorialize the varied experiences of women in the Liberation War is a way to advocate for and ingrain their complex, agential roles into the national history. Notably, instead of primarily focusing on state-level negotiations or masculine combat, films in this genre highlight the intimate, domestic, or “feminine” sphere as the site of struggle and meaning. By a “feminine” sphere, I mean those spaces that are usually considered feminized—and thus subordinated—within dominant patriarchal ideology. However, reframed, they can also be read as portrayals of nonconformity, mutuality, and solidarity. By allowing the viewer to remember, imagine, and work through traumatic events such as war and conflict through a feminine aesthetic, cinema can encourages appreciatiation of the moral choices and interpretive acts of women, previously consigned to only the “feminine” sphere, cast as passive victims or witnesses. Women in these films instead make unexpected, sometimes jarring, choices: nursing a wounded enemy soldier; seeking the assistance of a sympathetic Pakistani soldier after having been raped by others like him; and embracing a child of rape even when the nation rejects them. Recognizing these moral choices is a legacy of the war that viewers learn to appreciate through the cinematic medium, and these films are an evolving archive where diverse women’s stories are memorialized, as significant and precious as the memorials and museums the state erects to commemorate martyrs.

These films redefine what humanity, loss, and justice mean for victims, and reconfigure relationships between viewer, witness, and ally. They point to the open wound that 1971 still is, especially for women. This foundational trauma remains constitutive of the nation, and Muktijuddho cinema plays a pivotal role in constructing—and disrupting—the gendered subjectivities beget by the war’s legacy. Women’s cinema, and human rights cinema, capture more broad, transnational visions of feminist filmmaking. They recast the relationships of women to war—as plunder of the nation, as dislodged women from that nation—and question the terms of what constitutes the human in these fraught circumstances.

Ultimately, women-centric Muktijuddho films emplot global human rights narratives and aesthetics that defy reductive and monolithic renditions of social reality. They offer complexity and nuance beyond just a tussle between victims and aggressors, loss and triumph, and colonization and liberation. Simultaneously, they strive for more ethical recognitions, drawing on a multiplicity of histories, struggles, and experiences. Woman-centered films provide an alternative reading toward decolonizing notions of agency, freedom, and justice; they imagine a new kind of feminist knowledge-making.

Recommending a book that anticipated the 1619 project by more than 50 years

This week in North Philly Notes, William Cross, author of Black Identity Viewed from a Barber’s Chair, recommends a lost classic of African American writing. (That was alas, not published by Tempe University Press).

For those interested in the African American experience, I want to recommend Lerone Bennett, Jr’s generally overlooked masterpiece: Before the Mayflower, a History of the Negro in America 1619-1962. I read it, at a much younger age, and although at the time, my consciousness was evolving; it was, nevertheless, too limited to fully appreciate that Bennett—considered merely a historian who popularized history—evidenced what in fact was a level of historical consciousness the likes of DuBois, Herbert Guttman and others. 

As shown by the title, his book, published in 1966, anticipated the ongoing 1619 project by 56 years! Like the 1619 Project, Bennett’s narrative anchors the beginning of Africana within American history much sooner than is often argued. He links the accumulation of wealth from slavery that made it possible to capitalize the beginnings of industrialization in America as well as Europe. Bennett, much as anyone, captures in great detail, Abraham Lincoln’s tortured ambivalence and conflicting attitudes about race, Lincoln’s thoughts on the solution of the race problem through colonization, and the pressure put on Lincoln to sign the Emancipation proclamation. 

Bennett’s unique chapter on miscegenation interrogates the outrageous sexual lust and hypocrisy of the founding fathers that should be required reading in any contemporary history course. Most of the chapters are exciting to read because of his detailed, nuanced, elaborate, and telescopic narratives, as his words and phrases stimulate—within the mind of the reader—rich, colorful, dark as well brilliant images.  Time and again the writing creates in the mind of the reader, actions, verbal exchanges, and vivid descriptions that emote. Frankly, sections reflect the compositional style of an accomplished novelist. 

Ironically, he wrote to educate the average reader; but for those who are well informed, the book is an unexpected delight. Bennett helps one revisit familiar information and ideas and plays it back the way Miles Davis could transform a jazz standard. Given the disjuncture between how Bennett envisioned and narrated black history from what at the time was considered settled-history, the word that captures a great deal of the book is “daring.” 

History tends to favor “looking back” but Bennett’s narrative grounded the reader in the present, made it possible to understand the past in such a way as to make the future less surprising. Before the Mayflower is a hidden gem.

Beyond a Monolith

This week in North Philly Notes, James Lai, author of Asian American Connective Action in the Age of Social Media writes about what the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard Lawsuit Reveals about Emerging Political Identities in the Asian American Community and the role of Social Media Networks.

On January 24, 2022, the United States Supreme Court announced that it would be hearing the appeal of the federal Harvard Admissions case (Students for Fair Admissions v. Presidents and Fellows at Harvard College) in which a federal judge ruled that Harvard University did not discriminate against Asian American applicants. Arguably, in no other community has felt the divisions of the affirmative action issue than the demographically and ideologically diverse Asian American community. Despite these divisions, a common narrative by journalists has been to portray Asian Americans as a monolithic group in their stance against affirmative action policies creating a zero-sum game that pits Asian Americans on one side and other racial minorities (African Americans and Latinx) on the other side. Such depictions are inaccurate and fail to grasp the larger picture as one recent public opinion poll and study found that a majority (nearly sixty percent) of various Asian American ethnoracial groups generally support affirmative action policies since 2016. 

Upon closer examination, the Harvard lawsuit, in addition to others like it, reveals emerging political and group identities taking shape among the over 30 ethnoracial groups that comprise of the larger, contemporary Asian American community as well as how the process of connective action is facilitating the motivations behind these lawsuits. These identities among Asian Americans are shaped by emerging political contours such as class status, educational background, immigrant status, and political ideology, and amplified through social media platforms or digital counterpublics,  which refer to spaces where racial and ethnoracial groups can share experiences and challenge larger narratives in the mainstream media. Digital counterpublics can take the shape in the form of inward social networks (i.e. WeChat, a common app used by Chinese American immigrants that seeks to build consensus on issues along ethnoracial lines) and outward networks (i.e. common social media platforms like Twitter that typically seek to build consensus beyond a specific ethnoracial group). Political motivation represents one of the critical facilitators of connective action that has served as an adaptive political strategy for Asian Americans, which has the nation’s largest foreign-born population (nearly 70 percent in 2020), to mobilize politically both online and offline for their ideologically divergent voices in the public arena and discourse around various contentious topics.  

In the Harvard case, WeChat will continue to serve as a vehicle for framing, mobilizing, and fueling the political motivations around Harvard’s policy of the highly educated and working class Chinese American immigrants who make up a key constituency of the plaintiffs known as the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), which was created by Edward Blum, a conservative activist who has previously challenged affirmative action policies as seen with the University of Texas case. In addition to online counterpublics like WeChat, on February 3, 2022, sixteen days after the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would review the Harvard case, Edward Blum and SFFA released the full version and a trailer of the same video on YouTube entitled “Admissions” to serve as an online commercial on SFFA and their concerns now that they find themselves in the nation’s spotlight.  

However, what is often lost in the discussions are the connective action efforts by progressive Asian American activists, community leaders, and national Asian American civil rights organizations, who refuse to be portrayed as “racial mascots” or a racial wedge group. On Twitter, an outward social media network, Asian American progressive hashtags such as #NotYourWedge and #DefendDiversity have become synonymous with the tweeting and subtweeting of information related to the reasons for defending higher education diversity and why this issue matters for Asian Americans even if Asian American applicants are not likely to benefit from affirmative action policies. 

In this regrouping along ideological lines as illuminated by the Harvard case, new political coalition possibilities emerge in the Asian American community on both sides of the ideological spectrum where social media platforms have become a critical vehicle for online and offline political mobilization and shaping of public opinions around affirmative action. This will likely be the case for the diverse Asian American community on other bellwether issues in the future.