Ethical Encounters: Women, War, and Cinema in Bangladesh

A Presentation by Elora Chowdhury

Ethical Encounters is an exploration of the intersection of feminism, human rights, and memory to illuminate how visual practices of recollecting violent legacies in Bangladeshi cinema can conjure a global cinematic imagination for the advancement of humanity. By examining contemporary, women-centered Muktijuddho cinema—features and documentaries that focus on the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971—Newhouse Center fellow Elora Chowdhury (UMASS Boston) shows how these films imagine, disrupt, and reinscribe a gendered nationalist landscape of trauma, freedom, and agency. Chowdhury analyzes Bangladeshi feminist films including Meherjaan, and Itihaash Konna (Daughters of History), as well as socially-engaged films by activist-filmmakers including Jonmo Shathi (Born Together), and Shadhinota (A Certain Liberation), to show how war films of Bangladesh can generate possibilities for gender justice. 

Elora Halim Chowdhury is Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is the author of Transnationalism Reversed: Women Organizing Against Gendered Violence in Bangladesh, which won the National Women’s Studies Association’s Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize. She is the coeditor of South Asian Filmscapes: Transregional Encounters; Interdisciplinary Approaches to Human Rights: History, Politics, Practice; and Dissident Friendships: Feminism, Imperialism, and Transnational Solidarity.

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