‘Never again’: aesthetics of ‘genocidal’ cosmopolitanism and the Bangladesh Liberation War Museum

This paper seeks to explore the affective aesthetics that are generated through the perceptions of ‘genocidal’ horrors in relation to accounts of sexual violence during wars, and to engagements with war memorials and museums commemorating such atrocities. In particular it focuses on the trope ‘never again’, which aptly captures the search for juridical and moral justice linked to events of conflict and violence in the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries. The cosmopolitan moral and aesthetic orientations by means of which such tropes come to represent the horrors of the Bangladesh War of 1971 are analysed via an examination of the Bangladesh Liberation War Museum. Through a study of exhibits and visitors to this ‘memorial museum’, the paper considers how ‘genocidal’ cosmopolitanism,…