Reena Virk, Still/Again: Racial Violence and Recursivity in Hulu’s Under the Bridge

Abstract: In the spring of 2024, almost twenty-seven years after the actual event, the American streaming channel, Hulu, released its limited television series on the murder of 14-year-old Reena Virk in Victoria, British Columbia. In this paper, I draw upon assemblage theory, theories of temporality, intersectional feminism, and scholarship on the Virk case, to ask: what is the point of re-telling this story? Methodologically, I do a close reading of the televisual text, including its intertext and paratexts; I argue that far from being a compassionate, critical account that centers the actual victim, Under the Bridge works to reassert white terror, re/center white femininity, and remind racialized Others that their (our) survival depends on their (our) eternal abjection. At points, I offer autoethnographic observations that speak to my own positionality as a South Asian viewer/researcher engaging with this violent textual assemblage. I conclude by suggesting that the text denies South Asian viewers the possibility of forgetting past racial traumas, and I reflect on its specific implications for South Asian girls. I also re-articulate the need for racialized communities to stubbornly refuse what Indigenous (Unangaxˆ) feminist Eve Tuck has famously called damage-centered stories, which tell us that no matter how hard we fight, we will always be the dead or traumatized bodies of colonialism.