An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Professor Jill Didur (Visiting Research Fellow, April-May 2026).
Breathing Aesthetics, Thermal Comfort, and Shadow Places in Tahmima Anam’s The Bones of Grace
Jill Didur (Visiting Research Fellow, April-May 2026) will provide an overview of her current research interests and present a portion of a work in progress on Tahmima Anam’s 2016 novel The Bones of Grace. In this novel, the narrator, Zubaida, describes herself to as someone who “left home to find a new patch of air among the scrapheap of the world.” The puzzling contradiction of this statement challenges readers: How do we make sense of Zubaida’s search for “a new patch of air” in what is otherwise known as one of most physically dangerous and toxic labor sites on Earth—the shipbreaking yards of Sitakunda, Bangladesh? It is these ‘everyday of shadow places,’ or what Marco Armiero has called “the imposition of wasting relationships on subaltern human and more-than-human communities,” that I seek to better understand through the lens of ‘critical Southern ecologies’ in my reading of Tahmima Anam’s The Bones of Grace. As Plumwood points out, shadow places are also informed by the history of colonialism and globalization, and require “critical ecological thought” to “be able to reflect on how nice (north) places and shadow (south) places are related, especially where north places are nice precisely because south places are not so nice” (39). Through an examination of the novel’s references to air conditioning (something Plumwood calls the ultimate “put-it-somewhere-else-machine”), I argue the novel prompts readers to attend to the cultural, historical, and economic conditions that sustain bifurcated access to thermal comfort through its attention to breath, voice, language and narrative form.
Meeting ID: 384 971 962 716 1
Passcode: nV6Rg79e