Introduction

Today, the lives of British Bangladeshi women are central in integrationist discourses in Britain, with little nuance, and with a close eye on how they perform their Muslim identities. Collective and individual pasts are instrumentalised in public decision-making processes about belonging and citizenship—often fixating on the hijab-wearing body of Muslim women. Women like Shamima Begum and Nadiya Hussain, one routinely named “ISIS bride”, the latter depicted as a symbol for migration success, are revealing the polarising lens through which British Bangladeshi women are viewed. This book wants to paint a more holistic picture of British Bangladeshi women’s lives in London by considering moments in which they were implicated in the politics of exclusion and violence without neglecting moments in which they articulate agency to imagine possible futures in which memories, bodies, and belonging can be rearticulated. The book invites its readers to take a journey to East London to observe and participate in the pasts and presents of British Bangladeshi women to explore processes of belonging through their dancing bodies.