ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores the role of objects of memory and their relationship with global visual politics. She examines how public memories of wartime sexual violence perpetrated during the Bangladesh war of 1971 are remembered through photography. The author shows how visualising wartime sexual violence contributes to the politics of a public memory of wartime rape, enabling the "internationalising" of the issue and shaping in various ways the public debate about the figure of the raped woman. She attempts to show that rather than romanticising either history or memory as distinctive, authentic tools, her work on the public memories of wartime sexual violence is a contribution to the scholarship that focuses on the interrelationship between memory and history. The author shows how dominant historical accounts on sexual violence draw from the individual memories that are in circulation.
