“Ordinary” Women in Stories from the Edge : An Exploration of Affect and Ethics in the Narratives of 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh

Abstract: Drawing on six personal narratives of women’s experiences of the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh, as documented in the anthology Stories from the Edge: Personal Narratives of the Liberation War (2017) edited by Razia Sultana Khan and Niaz Zaman, this paper employs an affective-ethical lens to analyze the narrators’ situated acts of resistance and survival in the precarity of the war. In three main parts, “Resisting the Body,” “Affect as Agency,” and “Maternal Body at War,” we engage with the text to argue that while in recent decades, academic scholarship regarding women’s experience and participation in the war have expanded and enriched, there is an intellectual gap in understanding how women who considered themselves ordinary survived the war that framed each female body as an invading space of abjection and annihilation. In bringing Judith Butler’s concept of ethics and Sara Ahmed’s theory of affect to bear on the personal narratives, the paper foregrounds the hitherto unexplored affective-ethical dimensions of women’s war-time decisions and actions that made their own and their loved ones’ lives livable in the precarity of the Liberation War within and beyond the actual warzone.