Dissident Feminisms. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. xi, 201 pp. (B&W photos.) US$28.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-252-08039-5.
Beyond Partition, a powerful commentary on the “cultural history of violence associated with divergent ideas of India after 1947,” complicates how the meaning of the “floating signifier ‘India’, is secured and unsecured time and again through violence” (4). An exploration of representational practices of violence, Beyond Partition traverses literary texts such as short stories and memoirs, visual representations such as photographs and cartoons, and performance texts such as theatrical or embodied performances. Moving across a multitude of historical, social, and political contexts, Misri explores frame-by-frame diverse and contradictory ways of seeing violence in postcolonial India. Beyond Partition argues that it is crucial to underscore how forms of representations and creative expressions “figure violence” since these “lead to uncovering the ways in which violence itself is a representation” (10).
Chapter 1, “Anatomy of a Riot,” directs the reader to the genealogy of male-on-male violence often elided in Partition writings. The chapter opens with Manto’s powerful Black Marginalia to offer a reading of sexualized violence on male bodies. The reflection on Manto’s sketches explores the “logic of metonymy” (38) underlying the practices of identification of victims in a communal riot. The illegibility of the evidence of religious identity when read off the body materializes the fiction of “body-as-proof” (43). While pointing towards the “intersecting logics of commerce, communal hate and patriarchy” (39), Misri argues that “in [a] communal riot men become vulnerable by the same patriarchal rules that first appoint them as the privileged somatic bearers of religious identities, into which women enter merely by association” (53). The figure of the Sikh man or the violence of de-turbaning is evoked to destabilize this reading of Manto to highlight how the categories—minority, citizenship, and secular—come to be configured in the conversations between men who transact violence. Chapter 2, “The Violence of Memory,” moves our gaze from the inscription of violence on male bodies to women, who are “pre-figured in the sinister scripts of patriarchal representation—symbolically and literally—as dead metaphor” (86). Juxtaposing Krishna Mehta’s memoirs Kashmir 1947 with Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers, Misri concurs with Veena Das that “transgression of patriarchal norms is staged alongside and even through an observance of them” (69). She thereby points to the complex gendered politics of remembrance and mourning 1947.
Chapter 3, “Atrocious Encounters,” brings together two series of violence routinized in postcolonial India: the intersecting violence of caste atrocity with the state-sanctioned murder of suspects by the police, dubbed as encounter killings. Reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Misri notes that Roy “steered clear of the Dalit woman as the ‘most subaltern of subalterns’ … and focussed instead on the vulnerability of the Dalit male body to caste and state violence” (103). Misri is interested in how caste violence may be represented without being reduced to certain imaging of victimhood. Here we are led to an important discussion on atrocity photographs and what kind of testimonial burden is put on Dalit and Adivasi women. Misri takes seriously the critique of Dalit feminist Madhuri Xalxo, who critiqued how a 2007 photograph of an Adivasi woman who had been stripped and paraded was used during the Delhi protests in 2013. The use of the victim’s real name and the circulation of the photograph of the stripped body is critiqued for re-enacting repeatedly the original moment of stripping and parading. However, activists also use the atrocity photograph as evidence of injury and suffering. While Misri recognizes that activists may require the magnification of the “visual and visceral evidence of caste atrocity” (112), she points out that circulating photographs of mutilated and naked bodies may entail the re-inscription of unspeakable suffering.
If stripping and parading is a routinized technique of power, how do we make sense of those “naked protests” where women strip to protest against sexual violence challenging thereby the visual economy of shame and honour? Chapter 4, “Are You a Man?” is an examination of the “cultural specificities in which nakedness becomes intelligible as a ‘feminist’ mode of protest to the violence of the Indian state, while also examining the epistemic stakes of nakedness as a gendered mode of protest by women” (132). This chapter offers a complicated reading of Mahasveta Devi’s Draupadi that sits along her reading of the protests by Manipuri women who stripped in front of the army headquarters to protest against rape by army officials. Misri evokes other kinds of naked protests that do not quite displace appeals to paternalism and protectionist masculinities, thereby also suggesting that these protests may not inaugurate a new vocabulary of protest. Rather it may be folded back into circuits of voyeurism and spectacles of impunity.
Misri ends with a powerful commentary on the optics of state power and the protests over disappearances in Kashmir. In chapter 5, “This is not a Performance,” Misri argues that enforced disappearance “involves the literal and metaphorical re-organisation of perception. It is a process that extends beyond the mere abduction of a person: it is the process by which the seen is rendered unseen” (138). The protests of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) emphasize the fact that the grieving mothers, whose public performances challenge the scopic regime of forgetting and erasure, are not only “icons of grief” but also generate counter-knowledge around the form of violence enacted by the state. The centrality of the scopic regime to the maintenance of militarized state power institutes an entire apparatus for destroying visual evidence of impunity and regulates what “its citizens must, may or may not see” (138). Beyond Partition could be made to speak to the optics of power, where the split between development and violence finds terrifying enactment in India today. It allows us to contemplate how resistance itself operates within stabilized scripts of power. This brilliant and exciting book illuminates how representational practices of violence are co-constitutive of power and resistance.
Pratiksha Baxi
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
pp. 921-923