This paper explores the performance and negotiation of embodied memories among the female Bangladeshi diaspora in Tower Hamlets, London. Highlighting embodied mnemonic practices such as dancing and acting to sustain and negotiate shared, lost and competing past, this research focuses on the performance of memories of political ruptures such as the 1947 Partition of British India, the Bangladeshi independence war and ensuing migration to London in women-only spaces.
Celebrations in women-only spaces are activated by the mnemonic authority of local memory choreographers, who lead negotiations of third space memories in the diaspora. Due to the fragmentation of communities after the end of empire, diasporic subjects have complex, plural and often conflicting relationships to shared pasts. It is important to account for the creative and strategic agency the participants of women-only events apply during commemorative celebrations, which are embedded in existing mnemonic norms but strategically engage in a negotiation with them. These processes further heteropathic memory and identification among its attendees and increasingly emancipate them as agents in the making of their past, present, and future. This agency solidifies structures, which allow their third space memories that are an ever-negotiated product of their experiences of Partition, the liberation war of Bangladesh, and their migration to London, to take part in wider forms of active cultural memory in Britain. In getting together and engaging in pleasurable mnemonic practices, the women set up conditions for a future in which they prevent forgetting and the isolation of their memories.
Responding to the limitations of social science research methods in gathering data on diasporic memory, including its form and content, practices of remembering, and its embeddedness in wider socio-political discourses, this paper proposes performance-based methodologies as having significant potential in the field of memory studies to address alternative ways of knowing and relating to the past. Applying methods borrowed from ethnographic and participatory approaches, this paper is based on participant observation during women-only celebrations among the Bangladeshi diaspora in London and a two-months dance workshop facilitated in collaboration with dancer Kesha Raithatha at Mulberry School for Girls.
