Diasporic memory ecologies: Creative explorations of intergenerational memories and identities in the British Bangladeshi community

The British Bangladeshi diaspora is located at a complex intersection in postcolonial Britain. On the one hand, it embodies the colonial histories of the erstwhile British empire and its unfolding legacy that continues to shape nations, communities, and identities in the South Asian subcontinent and beyond. On the other, it is a site of contemporary debates and contestations around the integration of Islamic communities in multicultural Europe and the western world at large. The thesis attempts to examine these together and locate how histories of colonialism, Partition, migration, and settlement, as embodied by generations of the British Bangladeshi diaspora, are implicated in the community's negotiations of the meanings of being British, Bangladeshi, and Muslim. Based on extensive fieldwork and analysis of data from arts-based workshops, interviews, and collaborative animation film production with 30 British Bangladeshi participants from East London and Loughborough, the study examines what narratives of Partition, independence, and migration are remembered by different generations of British Bangladeshis and how they inform their contemporary diasporic identities. It examines how the memories of these pasts are transmitted (or not) between these diasporic generations and how participatory arts and animation methods can be used as tools for exploring and facilitating the communication and co-construction of these (post)colonial pasts across generations.

In performing these examinations, the study seeks to make two key contributions to existing literature: It brings together the fields of Partition, diaspora, and memory studies and locates how a transcultural memory studies framework can be applied towards understanding the discursive construction of diasporic identities by different generations of British Bangladeshis. Secondly, it outlines the potential of participatory arts and animation film methodologies in going beyond traditional linguistic methods and performing more nuanced and sensitive enquiries into difficult pasts in cross-cultural settings.

The first part of the thesis locates the conceptual framework of the study. It argues that the site of the postcolonial British diaspora can offer key insights into the transnationalisation of Partition memory, help trace its multidirectional trajectories across space and time, and locate the complex ways in which it shapes belonging, nation, and community. In addition, by tracing the conceptual links between visual social sciences, arts-based research, and memory studies, it also establishes a mixed-methods framework for employing participatory arts methodologies to examine migrant memories. The second part of the thesis analyses how the multidirectional memories of anti-colonial and anti-racist pasts are gradually forgotten by younger generations of British Bangladeshis that increasingly mobilise a pan-Islamic identity framework to resist racialisation and alienation in Postcolonial Britain. By reanimating these memories of anti-colonial and anti-racist pasts through collaborative creative memory work, the study argues that the younger generations can be offered a diversity of subject locations, a more nuanced politics of recognition, and a critical vocabulary to articulate the challenges of their postcolonial condition.

Overall, the thesis provides an intergenerational examination of the British (Sylheti) Bangladeshi community and demonstrates how evolving socio-political contexts in the homeland, diaspora, and beyond transform the generational outlooks and identity positions of the migrant community over the decades. In examining these temporal and spatial locations of three generations of British Bangladeshi diaspora, the thesis considers how remembrance and transmission of memories of colonialism, decolonisation, and postcolonialism in the British diaspora can help understand the present-day realities of the postcolonial migrant condition in the UK.