Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh by Elora Halim Chowdhury (review)

Reviewed by: Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh by Elora Halim Chowdhury Nadine Shaanta Murshid (bio) Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh by Elora Halim Chowdhury, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2022. 225 pp. , 32. 95 paper. Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh is a #MeToo dossier written by a transnational feminist scholar in which rape victims are not reduced to their trauma; women are powerful agents of their own bodies; wars are multifaceted; and oppressors are allowed humanity. This monograph is what I, as a transnational feminist, had expected from the #MeToo movement: a chance to reckon with our violent histories and pave a path toward restoration and rectification; a recognition of the role of the state—and capitalism—in producing violence instead of individualizing the problem to let the system off the hook. In this beautifully crafted critical examination of Muktijudhho films—cinema focused on the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971—Elora Halim Chowdhury offers readers an opportunity to think beyond the nationalist reading of Bangladesh's history and historiography. Importantly, Chowdhury produces a unique experience for the reader through an exposition of the complexity of the Bangladesh War of Independence beyond the "singular representation" of the war as a site of rape and mass murder (32). In doing so, Chowdhury moves away from a masculinist-nationalist reading of the birth of Bangladesh to center narratives that are marginal in the grand narrative of the Liberation War through cinema. That allows her to speak to the representation of both the war and the Birangona, women survivors of sexual violence during the war, an issue that is sometimes seen as minor, to discuss how departure from the conventional narrative of 1971 is vilified even in the realm of art, not just by consumers of art but also artists. Chowdhury complicates the reading of not just Bangladesh's War of Independence, but all wars, by introducing notions of love, friendship, vulnerability, healing, forgiveness, memory, necropolitics, sexuality, and privilege in the war narrative. Indeed, as wars are waged, lives are still lived, even when many are lost. And much happens in those lives. Chowdhury departs from extant texts to discuss women's experiences of war through its representation on cinema alongside the response that those films receive from viewers. As a scholar of women's and feminist films and the discursively enacted anti-feminist pushback against them, Chowdhury excels and educates readers about the geopolitics and intimate politics of war. End Page 122 In Chapter One, "When Love and Violence Meet: Women's Agency and Transformative Politics in Rubaiyat Hossain's Meherjaan, " Chowdhury writes about the multiple sources of chagrin related to the "irreverent depiction of Birangona women and the liberation struggle" in Meherjaan (78). The departure from a "patriotic rendition of 1971" is a site of emotional struggle for Meherjaan's viewership, not only because they think Bengali men are presented as weak but because the protagonist, Neela, the Birangona, is shown as "wayward, " Chowdhury informs us. Indeed, it is not just a particular sensibility about the Muktijudhho that such films must preserve, she writes, but a "gender ideology" in which the Birangona, as survivors of rape, must be presented as sexually inagentic and naïve, completely innocent of the violence committed against them. Neela, presented as sexually alluring and sexually interested in Wasim, the Baloch warrior who is innocent of killing Bengalis but still an irredeemable enemy of the state, underscores how the Birangona is only acceptable as an innocent figure bereft of sexuality and sexual appeal. The representation of the Birangona in Meherjaan goes against the normative construction of victims. As Laina Bay-Cheng has shown, only a particular kind of woman—strong, assertive, self-interested—is seen as agentic while victims must be weak and powerless. As she writes, only those who are "pathetically under the control of others or shamefully out of control of themselves" are seen as victims (Bay-Cheng, 2019). That Neela is not "pathetic" but displays agency detracts from her victimhood in the schema of the Bangladeshi viewer. In the second chapter, "Ethical Reckoning: Gender, Vulnerability, and Agency in. . .