Moving Bodies, Moving Pasts

To further comprehend the relationship between remembering and belonging among British Bangladeshi women, this chapter will conceptualise how the body features in such processes. The bodies of British Bangladeshi women were central to political processes in South Asia, including the 1947 Partition of British India and the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh, leading up to their migration. Their bodies were also central after migration to Britain, where they were subjected to government-led regulations, overcrowded housing, racism, Islamophobia, and the internal politics of identity and religion among the diaspora. However, their bodies are just as much a vital and productive site for processes of cultural maintenance and exchange of everyday practices, such as cooking, language, prayer, song, and dance. This chapter proposes the spectrum from professional to social dance as forms of embodied remembering, giving insight into processes of identification. A threefold typology of the making, doing, and being of embodied memory will further illustrate the workings of dance as a mnemonic practice. The reader will be prepared to encounter dance that makes the travelling nature of memories tangible and salient without ever immobilising them.