Writing Postcolonial France: Haunting, Literature, and the Maghreb

Brisley, Lucy

doi:10.1093/fs/kns305

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“…As Bishnupriya Ghosh suggests, the spectre 'bear[s] witness to erasures in the "living present" ' (2004, p. 207) and returns us to 'ethical questions of historical, cultural and economic violence' (p. 217). Much critical attention in postcolonial studies to what Esther Peeren terms the 'spectral metaphor' has focussed on literary fiction and feature films (see, for example, Barclay, 2011;Craps, 2013;Ghosh, 2004;Joseph-Vilain & Misrahi-Barak, 2009;Peeren, 2014;Sugars & Turcotte, 2009;White, 2020). Attuned to the potential limits of Derrida's focus on the relationship between the past and the future, Peeren analyses contemporary figures who are imagined as 'living ghosts' in the present by virtue of their specific positions of social marginalisation, namely the undocumented migrant, the servant or domestic worker, the medium and missing person (2013, p. 5).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Documentary Form and Spectral Citizenship in Madhusree Dutta’s 7 Islands and a Metro

Herbert

2023

BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

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Despite its aesthetic experimentation, its intervention into urgent questions about citizenship and belonging in contemporary India, and its attention to the most iconic of Indian cities, Mumbai, Madhusree Dutta’s 2006 documentary film 7 Islands and a Metro—and Dutta’s work more broadly—has yet to receive the critical attention it demands. Addressing this gap, this article examines Dutta’s use of spectrality to structure her search for a documentary form that makes room for Mumbai’s marginalised subjects to narrate themselves into its representational histories and contemporary spaces. Key to Dutta’s approach is a visual dialogue between the city’s historical ghosts and its spectral citizens—those who exist in a state of dispossession and social invisibility in the present, such as women, migrant workers, casteised and Muslim subjects, and the urban poor. Through this spectral framework—a dialogue between the living and the dead, which is also an intertextual dialogue between the past and the present, the fictional and the actual—Dutta’s film probes the complexities of representation and self-representation, agency and access to story-making processes and platforms. Dutta’s formal play foregrounds the multiple ways in which the city and citizenship are mediated, represented and claimed, and the multiple ways in which spectral subjects are produced and displaced. Her aesthetic experimentation—particularly her use of spectrality and performative modes of representation—enables reflections on the ways in which spectral subjects seek to render themselves visible in the city and claim themselves as active agents and participants in the making of Mumbai.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Documentary Form and Spectral Citizenship in Madhusree Dutta’s 7 Islands and a Metro

Herbert

2023

BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

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Writing Postcolonial France: Haunting, Literature, and the Maghreb

Cited by 1 publication

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Documentary Form and Spectral Citizenship in Madhusree Dutta’s 7 Islands and a Metro

Documentary Form and Spectral Citizenship in Madhusree Dutta’s 7 Islands and a Metro

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