Representing others through
text and performance: British
Bangladeshis in London’s
‘East End’
John Eade
CRONEM
Roehampton and Surrey, UK
Urban Sociology
and the Global City
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Opportunity to combine the political
economy tradition within British and
American urban sociology with the
‘cultural turn’
Sassen’s The Global City (1991) and
subsequent work has encouraged an
economistic perspective
Zukin’s analysis of city cultures,
commodification and globalisation
Urban Sociology
and the Global City
•Analysis of how the global city has been represented
textually has been less developed
•Few attempts to link the two perspectives in a nondeterministic way
•Global city model has emphasised the ways in which
global flows of capital, people, goods and information have
created a sharply polarised world dominated by the service
sector
•Limitations of this approach – the anthropological
contribution and culturalism
The Global City and the ‘East End’
•The transformation of the East End with the decline of the
industrial order and the expansion of the service sector,
1960 onwards
• The south of Tower Hamlets – the derelict docks
transformed into Docklands (Canary Wharf etc) with white
middle class settlement
• The north of Tower Hamlets – classic East End territory
with a strong poor immigrant tradition based in industry and
the low end of the service sector but the ‘city fringe’ being
gentrified and drawn into ‘cool’ fashion edge of the service
sector
Textual Representation of the Metropolis
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vast suburban hinterland has been largely
ignored in most textual representation – (see
Hanif Qureshi’s flight from boring Beckenham
to ‘happening’ inner London and the West End
in The Buddha of Suburbia
The celebration of ‘West End’ by the tourist
industry
the ‘East End’ explored in much greater detail
by an array of writers (novelists, playwriters,
poets, academics, missionaries, social
reformers, community representatives,
politicians, organisations and urban planners).
Contradictory Representation
of London’s Other
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The East End has until recently been
represented as a place where the west
London middle class were careful to
tread
Interconnected negative tropes from
Dickens onwards (poverty, criminality,
immigration etc)
Yet co-existing with positive tropes of
strong community, family and kinship
ties (from Young and Willmott 1947
onwards)
Gaps and Silences
 This
wealth of textual representation
would seem to exhaust the
possibility of gaps and silences
 Yet
many gaps and silences remain
and this will be as much a focus in
my analysis of a particular
representational process as the
utterances and performances
Analysing a Performative Event –
Our Meeting at the
Kobi Nazrul Centre

The exchange between the baul
singer, the Centre’s Director and the
three journalists involved a
performance in front of ‘insiders’
(Bengalis) and ‘outsiders’ (the rest of
us) where certain themes were
established.
Authentic Representatives
of a ‘Community’ and Performativity
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The exchange between the singer and the
director could be interpreted as engaging
implicitly with the issue of authenticity and
who had the right to represent the
'community‘
It could also be seen as a performance
shaped by the intersection of gender,
sexuality, generation and class as well as
ethnicity
Two Performative Traditions
and Journalism
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Also an exchange within two different
performative traditions - the hybrid tradition of
baul singing in the Bengal cultural region and a
more recent hybridised mode of using Bengali
music to speak about racism and anti-racism in
Britain
Younger generation’s appropriation of baul music
through new musical idioms (bhangra etc)
The media representatives gave another
performance which revolved around what they
could and could not do in terms of journalistic
writing and the community constraints on them
Communication between
Performer and Audience
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The mutual engagement of performer and the
audience in the event

Performers’ adaptation to the audience’s
reactions across the insider/outsider boundary
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Through language (English, standard Bengali and
Sylheti) performer and audience communicate
with each other and signal the boundary between
‘us’ and ‘them’
The power of language and the status of English
as the dominant mode of discourse
Absence and Boundaries
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Absent from this encounter was the significance
of Islam as another dominant discourse
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Also absence of director of Brick Lane film and a
young Bengali woman singer
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Selecting boundaries around an event - my
selection of contributors – secular Bangladeshi
Muslims
Islamist critiques of the baul tradition and secular
anti-racist politics reflecting the glocal process of
Islamisation
Historical Context
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1960s/1970s first generation, village
politics and the independence struggle
Anti-racist struggles of the late 1970s and
the 1980s and secular second generation
activists
Islamisation from the late 1980s onwards,
which has engaged the second and third
generations
Textual Representation –
Some Academic Analyses
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Tracing a history (Visram, Kershen)
Identity politics, the nation-state and
transnationalism (Eade et al, Glynn)
Islamisation – changing physical space,
bodies and thinking through purification
(Eade, Gardner, Begum)
Generation, gender and sexuality
(Gardner, Alexander, Ahmed)
Novels and Autobiographies
 Brick
Lane
 Mapmakers
 The
of Spitalfields
Islamist
Oral Histories
 Across
Rivers
 Tales
Seven Seas and Thirteen
of Three Generations of
Bengalis in Britain
Bengali Cultural Production
 Changing
lyrics
face of Bengali music and
 Changing
character of Bengalilanguage newspapers
 Bengali-run
media outlets
Conclusion
 How
to link these three types of
textual representation and the
broader context of political economy
and cultural turn perspectives?
 How
to link with multi-locality,
diaspora, global city and
glocalisation?