Through its 300 pages, Kuang exposes the performative nature of anti-racism in publishing: showcasing the boxes that people of colour get put in and how difficult it is for them to be heard.
Perhaps the book's best aspect is how it allows space for the stories of those who perpetrated violence during Partition.
Identity is mercurial: it shifts and morphs into a new being at the change of a breeze. That change is glacial, and often happens on its own volition; but one can also grasp a new identity, hold it tight till it engulfs the old, and thereby change the trajectory of their life completely.
In the 1700s, there lived an Italian artist, architect, and archaeologist who saw in the world far more than what was in it. Giovanni Battista Piranesi captured his world, among other things, through prints: the most famous of which are the Views, an imitation of the classical remains of Rome, and the imaginary renditions of the Prisons.
Partition holds a strange place in our memories. For Bangladeshis, it may be far overshadowed by the more recent memory of the Liberation War, but across the Radcliffe line, it is recalled in families as a scar to forget, and in film as a reason to remember and to hate.
With the demise of Game of Thrones, Netflix seems best poised to offer a replacement—with The Witcher gearing for a second season and now
After half a century from where we began, Daily Star Books will spend all of this year—the 50th year of Bangladesh—revisiting, celebrating, and analyzing some of the books that played pivotal roles in documenting the Liberation War of 1971 and the birth of this nation.
There are two kinds of children’s stories: those which you dust off as an adult and find yourself discovering new depths to upon revisiting, and those that you flick through and donate.
Humans are a storytelling species. Yet history, which is but the stories of yesteryears, is taught like a chain of facts and dates.
