Remembering Air India: The Art of Public Mourning

About

Chandrima Chakraborty is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies and University Scholar at McMaster University. She has published extensively on nationalism masculinity and cultural memory with a focus on South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. Publications include Masculinity Asceticism Hinduism: Past and Present Imaginings of India (2011) Mapping South Asian Masculinities: Men and Political Crises (2015) a feature section on the Air India bombings in Topia (2012) and a double special issue Translated Worlds: History Disapora South Asia in Postcolonial Text (2015). Her SSHRC-funded research project The Unfinished Past: Turbans in an Age of Terror examines the cultural ramifications of post-9/11 violence against South Asian communities in North America. She co-organized an international conference on the Air India tragedy in 2016 and she is conducting interviews with Air India families to learn more about memories of the Air India Flight 182 tragedy and its aftermath for her research project A Study of the Afterlives of the 1985 Air India Bombings. Amber Dean is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton Ontario. Her first book Remembering Vancouvers Disappeared Women: Settler Colonialism and the Difficulty of Inheritance (2015) offers a critical analysis of the public representations memorials and activist strategies that brought the story of Vancouvers disappeared women to a wider public. In addition to publishing work on the topic of Air India she has also published several journal articles and book chapters on artistic and (counter)memorial responses to murdered or missing women from Vancouvers Downtown Eastside and on gentrification in Edmonton Hamilton and Vancouver. With Vancouver writer Anne Stone she has guest edited a special issue of West Coast Line on representations of murdered or missing women and she has contributed chapters to several edited books including Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress. Angela Failler is Canada Research Chair in Culture and Public Memory and Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg.