Transnationalisation and Regionalisation of Mnemonic Belonging

This chapter will expand on the previous one, and explore alternative mnemonic terrains to the nation. As national identities do not quite capture British Bangladeshi women’s diasporic politics of belonging nor their remembering practices, they often reach out to hyperlocal and regional frameworks of identification. British Bangladeshi women actively navigate and negotiate different complementary, overlapping, and competing mnemonic spatialities, which intersect with their gender, class, and religious identities as well as their migratory trajectory. With a closer look at the Bengali village—a trope that the dancers employ to construct and embody notions of hyper-local, regional, and transnational belonging, this chapter discusses how British Bangladeshi women evoke Sylhetiness, Bengaliness, and even Indianness in their embodied negotiation of the past. Their bodies play an important but, at times, dangerous role allowing them to make their past and belonging tangible in a diasporic present and to engage with found solidarities but also divisions.