Representing others through text and performance: British Bangladeshis in London

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Representing others through text and
performance British Bangladeshis in Londons
East End John EadeCRONEMRoehampton and
Surrey, UK

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Urban Sociology and the Global City

• Opportunity to combine the political economy
  tradition within British and American urban
  sociology with the cultural turn
• Sassens The Global City (1991) and subsequent
  work has encouraged an economistic perspective
• Zukins analysis of city cultures,
  commodification and globalisation

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Urban Sociology and the Global City

• Analysis of how the global city has been
  represented textually has been less developed
• Few attempts to link the two perspectives in a
  non-deterministic way
• Global city model has emphasised the ways in
  which global flows of capital, people, goods and
  information have created a sharply polarised
  world dominated by the service sector
• Limitations of this approach the
  anthropological contribution and culturalism

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The Global City and the East End

• The transformation of the East End with the
  decline of the industrial order and the expansion
  of the service sector, 1960 onwards
• The south of Tower Hamlets the derelict docks
  transformed into Docklands (Canary Wharf etc)
  with white middle class settlement
• The north of Tower Hamlets classic East End
  territory with a strong poor immigrant tradition
  based in industry and the low end of the service
  sector but the city fringe being gentrified and
  drawn into cool fashion edge of the service
  sector

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Textual Representation of the Metropolis

• vast suburban hinterland has been largely ignored
  in most textual representation (see Hanif
  Qureshis flight from boring Beckenham to
  happening inner London and the West End in The
  Buddha of Suburbia
• The celebration of West End by the tourist
  industry
• the East End explored in much greater detail by
  an array of writers (novelists, playwriters,
  poets, academics, missionaries, social reformers,
  community representatives, politicians,
  organisations and urban planners).

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Contradictory Representation of Londons Other

• The East End has until recently been represented
  as a place where the west London middle class
  were careful to tread
• Interconnected negative tropes from Dickens
  onwards (poverty, criminality,
• immigration etc)
• Yet co-existing with positive tropes of strong
  community, family and kinship ties (from Young
  and Willmott 1947
• onwards)

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Gaps and Silences

• This wealth of textual representation would seem
  to exhaust the possibility of gaps and silences
• Yet many gaps and silences remain and this will
  be as much a focus in my analysis of a particular
  representational process as the utterances and
  performances

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Analysing a Performative Event Our Meeting at
the Kobi Nazrul Centre

• The exchange between the baul singer, the
  Centres Director and the three journalists
  involved a performance in front of insiders
  (Bengalis) and outsiders (the rest of us) where
  certain themes were established.

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Authentic Representatives of a Community and
Performativity

• The exchange between the singer and the director
  could be interpreted as engaging implicitly with
  the issue of authenticity and who had the right
  to represent the 'community
• It could also be seen as a performance shaped by
  the intersection of gender, sexuality, generation
  and class as well as ethnicity

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Two Performative Traditionsand Journalism

• Also an exchange within two different
  performative traditions - the hybrid tradition of
  baul singing in the Bengal cultural region and a
  more recent hybridised mode of using Bengali
  music to speak about racism and anti-racism in
  Britain
• Younger generations appropriation of baul music
  through new musical idioms (bhangra etc)
• The media representatives gave another
  performance which revolved around what they could
  and could not do in terms of journalistic writing
  and the community constraints on them

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Communication between Performer and Audience

• The mutual engagement of performer and the
  audience in the event
• Performers adaptation to the audiences
  reactions across the insider/outsider boundary
• Through language (English, standard Bengali and
  Sylheti) performer and audience communicate with
  each other and signal the boundary between us
  and them
• The power of language and the status of English
  as the dominant mode of discourse

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Absence and Boundaries

• Absent from this encounter was the significance
  of Islam as another dominant discourse
• Also absence of director of Brick Lane film and a
  young Bengali woman singer
• Selecting boundaries around an event - my
  selection of contributors secular Bangladeshi
  Muslims
• Islamist critiques of the baul tradition and
  secular anti-racist politics reflecting the
  glocal process of Islamisation

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Historical Context

• 1960s/1970s first generation, village politics
  and the independence struggle
• Anti-racist struggles of the late 1970s and the
  1980s and secular second generation activists
• Islamisation from the late 1980s onwards, which
  has engaged the second and third generations

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Textual Representation Some Academic Analyses

• Tracing a history (Visram, Kershen)
• Identity politics, the nation-state and
  transnationalism (Eade et al, Glynn)
• Islamisation changing physical space, bodies
  and thinking through purification (Eade, Gardner,
  Begum)
• Generation, gender and sexuality (Gardner,
  Alexander, Ahmed)

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Novels and Autobiographies

• Brick Lane
• Mapmakers of Spitalfields
• The Islamist

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Oral Histories

• Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers
• Tales of Three Generations of Bengalis in Britain

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Bengali Cultural Production

• Changing face of Bengali music and lyrics
• Changing character of Bengali-language newspapers
• Bengali-run media outlets

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Conclusion

• How to link these three types of textual
  representation and the broader context of
  political economy and cultural turn perspectives?
• How to link with multi-locality, diaspora, global
  city and glocalisation?