Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh

CSULB Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and CSULB Department of International Studies Presents 

Ethical Encounters:  

Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh

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. Inspired by critical Black and transnational feminist traditions, Chowdhury examines contemporary, women-centered Muktijuddho cinema—features and documentaries that focus on the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971—to show how these films imagine, disrupt, and reinscribe a gendered nationalist landscape of trauma, freedom, and agency. 

Author: Elora Halim Chowdhury, University of Massachusetts Boston 

Elora Halim Chowdhury is a Professor in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research and teaching interests include transnational feminism, human rights cinema, and gender violence. She is the author of Transnationalism Reversed: Women Organizing Against Gendered Violence in Bangladesh (2011), which won the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize from the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) in 2012, and South Asian Filmscapes: Transregional Encounters (2020). 

Discussant: Tammy Ho, University of California, Riverside 

Tammy Ho is an Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California Riverside. She is the author of Romancing Human Rights: Gender, Intimacy, and Power between Burma and the West (2015). She serves on the managing board of APARRI, the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative. She is a series co-editor of Hauntings: Queer/Trans Studies in Religion with NYU Press. Her research has been published in various journals, and edited collections focused on Asian American studies.

Conveners:  

Azza Basarudin, CSULB 
Barbara Grossman Thompson, CSULB 

Register at: Ethical Encounters Book Talk