Dana A. Williams, the 2024–25 president of the MLA, writes, “For those of us committed to enacting the humanist impulse to include and to build diverse communities peaceably, what work can we do to examine the politics of visibility in ways that are fully inclusive?” This panel answers her question. Bangladeshi diasporic literature has been at the periphery for a long time. It has often been outside of what constitutes South Asian diasporic literature. However, it is no longer invisible because of a new and prolific group of second-generation US, UK, Canadian, and Australian-born Bangladeshi writers have begun to appear in the literary landscape of the South Asian Diaspora. There are many aspects of this new landscape, beginning from identity crisis to analyzing race relationships, trauma, and memory, to discussing queerness and disability issues. This panel will highlight some of this new literature, ranging from conventional novels, experimental novels, young adult novels to poetry.

This panel introduces a new direction in South Asian diaspora studies. The earlier literature focused on the experience of immigrants. The intended audience of this panel will include any scholar interested in postcolonial and diaspora studies. However, as the panel seeks to provide a stimulating forum focusing on diverse genres and scholars, it equally invites any scholar interested in understanding the concept of identity and belonging.

The topic is extremely timely, and the call for papers generated great interest, which is why there are four diverse and excellent papers. The panelists will maintain time strictly so that there is a 15-minute discussion period at the end of the session.

Afrin Zeenat’s paper titled “Fractured Identity and Transnational Belonging in Bangladeshi Diasporic Literature in the US” will provide a brief overview of some of these writers. She intends to identify Bangladeshi diasporic imaginary through a transnational and interracial racial lens. Identity, as theorized in Diaspora studies, can be derived either as “being” and/or as “becoming.” This paper posits that these writers forge a fractured identity by negotiating the past, present, and future. Concomitantly, this fractured identity seems to result in a sense of transnational belonging transcending national borders and sometimes subsuming multiple ethnocultural groups.

Continuing on the transnational topic, Amit R. Baishya in “Weirding National Architecture: Corners, Portals and Rhizomes in Babu Bangladesh!” argues that Choudhury’s Babu Bangladesh!, by weirding national architecture, hints at alternative potentialities within national discourses that exist conterminously and can still be realized. Baishya borrows weirding from recent considerations of architecture in H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction. Lovecraft’s weird architecture emphasizes corners, turns, and portals, much like Choudhury does with the Jatiya Sangshad Bhaban; however, while Lovecraft’s architectures of introversion focus on how “insides” are threatened by unknown and unknowable “outsides,” Babu Bangladesh! functions on the principle of extroversion—portals open inside the Jatiya Sangshad Bhaban and lead to lines of flight towards multiple, rhizomatic outsides.

Untara Rayeesa in her paper titled “‘We Go On, Sisters’: Generational Trauma and Identity in Fariha Roisin’s How to Cure a Ghost” argues how the Bangladeshi Australian poet and artist Fariha Roisin contemplates the effects of displacement on female subjectivity through a series of confessional-style poems examining the experiences of both her parents and herself. Even though Roisin has only heard of the events of the Liberation War, the generational trauma and displacement experienced by her parents bleed into her own life and consciousness. As the multiple aspects of her diasporic identity coincide, collide, conflict, or even collapse in her verses, she demonstrates how a necessary reckoning with the past complicates the road to recognition and healing. Her paper will investigate how Roisin’s attempt to “cure the ghost” puts her on the path to consolidating a scattered diasporic identity.

When Bangladeshi-American Rukhsana Ali’s mother catches her daughter kissing a white girl, she whisks her off to Dhaka, Bangladesh, hoping to set her straight by finding her a suitable husband. In her paper titled, “Border-Crossings: Queerness, Freedom, Race in Contemporary Bangladeshi Immigrant Writings,” Debali Mookerjea-Leonard addresses contemporary literary representations of the dilemmas faced by the children of Bangladeshi immigrants who, on the one hand, reject parental expectations respecting sexuality, and at least as the parents see it family, while, on the other, are unwilling to relinquish their cultural roots (symbolized by biryani, mehndi, grandmothers, Bollywood). Using sapphic novels for young adults, this paper excavates the parents’ fear of the community’s reaction, both in the diaspora and back “home,” and traces their eventual acceptance of their children’s decision, revising, in the process, what it means to be a family.