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BEYOND PARTITION: Gender, Violence, and Representation in Postcolonial India. Dissident Feminisms. By Deepti Misri. 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 ofvictims 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...