New Book Brings Together Photography Studies and South Asian Literature

Dr Bidisha Banerjee, Associate Head and Associate Professor from the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies, has published a monograph titled Traces of the Real: The Absent Presence of Photography in South Asian Literature with Liverpool University Press (January 2025). The book builds on recent definitions of the photographic as encompassing experiences that do not necessarily contain a material photograph, arguing that the absent presence of photography affords South Asian postcolonial writers opportunities to enhance the themes of their novels in ways that the inclusion of actual photographs may not. 

By bringing together photography studies, postcolonial and diaspora studies, and word-image relations, Dr Banerjee offers an interdisciplinary framework based on photographic ‘events’ in South Asian postcolonial literature. Moving beyond the haunting spectre of colonial visual regimes in South Asian representations, she calls for new ways of seeing while discarding the materiality of visual images to focus instead on their performative absent presence as icon, metaphor, and trace. ‘Traces of the Real’ attends carefully to the intermedial aspects of language, particularly as it is mediated through photography.

 

 

 

 

Dr Bidisha Banerjee

 

 

 

 

Dr Banerjee’s new monograph