While new translations of Bengali literature have contributed to the shaping of Bangladesh’s contemporary global literary identity, the sizable diaspora living in the United States and Great Britain has not been adequately represented in Bengali literature. While diaspora lives are largely missing in the Bangladeshi vernacular tradition, the postcolonial novels in English like Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, and Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know or the very recent Bangladeshi diasporic novel from the US, Fariha Roisin’s Like a Bird, have depicted the lives of the diaspora in England and the U.S.

If the diaspora identity is visible in the novels written by writers of Bangladeshi origin living in the West, Bengali literatures present us with regional life-worlds including the urban and rural milieu, refugee crisis precipitated by internal circumstances including environmental calamities, the 1971 War and its multilayered repercussions and the post-War socio-political transformations in Bangladesh.

Informed by an Anglophone perspective, the literary works of the diaspora writers deal with the life of the migrants, whose spoken language includes Sylheti, a Bangladeshi dialect. In contradiction, Bangladeshi writers writing in Bengali depict the local milieu and the lives of its people by converting the many dialects into the mainstream standard literary Bangla of the bhadralok. Therefore, the question of multilingualism is fraught in these two parallel as well as exclusive traditions.

The four panelists approach multilingualism and its implication on Bengali and diasporic Bangladeshi literature from a range of perspectives. As Bangladesh-born scholars, who teach Global, Postcolonial and Multicultural literature in the US academy, each of the panelists will explore Bangladesh’s literary culture and its multilingual iterations including Bengali literature in translation, the Anglophone novels and the colonial and postcolonial contexts shaping the cultural and literary articulations. Suhail Islam’s paper “Multicultural Bangladeshi Literary Canon: Impact of Colonial English Studies and Hegemonic Bengali Literary Canon Formation” examines the discursivity of canon formation mediated by the English language education apparatus that privileged upper caste Hindu bhadraloks. Islam contends the ideology behind this language policy had significant sociopolitical implications as the hegemony of the Hindu bhadralok came at the cost of the marginalization of the Hindu lower caste and the Muslim peasantry.

The colonially informed silencing of the peasantry is taken up in Asif Iqbal’s paper “The Multilingual Aspirations of Freedom: Motherhood and Sacrifice in Selina Hossain’s River of My Blood (2016),” as it traces the contours of language and silencing in the intersections of class, gender and disability in rural East Pakistan. Boori Ma, a subaltern woman and the central character of the novel, deploys a metaphoric multilingualism to inscribe her motherhood onto the national struggle. In the process of expressing the many languages of freedom, which is part of her lived experience, she ends up usurping her disabled son Rais’ agency.

The concept of the “subaltern” may well be used while looking at translation work when a story is written about someone who is not the actual writer. Take for example, Marina Budhos’ Ask Me No Questions which is a “transliterature” about an undocumented Bangladeshi family. The experience behind this “translation” comes from Budhos’ own background as well as the present day crisis of the undocumenetd immigrants. Umme Al-wazedi’s paper “Reimagining the Undocumented in Marina Budhos’ Ask Me no Quesitons” asks in what way is this “cross over” important for translation work in literary studies and in the Bangladeshi diaspora?

Diaspora is also a concern of Md Rezaul Haque's paper “Beyond Nationalist Paradigm: The Construction of Identity in Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know,” which examines the representation of Pakistanis. His paper postulates that the novel can build a bridge between the seemingly irreconcilable adversaries, Bangladesh and Pakistan.