Transnational Childhoods

British Bangladeshis, Identities and Social Change

B. Zeitlyn

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137426437
• eBook ISBN: 9781137426444
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kultur- & Sozialanthropologie

This book follows the transnational lives of children growing up as British Bangladeshi individuals in multicultural London. Exploring the array of international events, communities and forces which influence them, Zeitlyn examines the socialisation practices among British Bangladeshi families and how this shapes their childhood and identities.

1

Introduction: Transnational Childhoods in a Global City

Getting started

On a grey July day in 1986 I stood in Heathrow Airport, aged six, looking out of the large windows at the giant planes arriving and taxiing on the runway. Tiny men waved what looked like table-tennis rackets as we waited for our plane. We were leaving London and going to Bangladesh, a country I had never heard of. I thought sometimes that it was all a dream, and perhaps I would one day wake up; maybe Bangladesh did not exist after all. I went to live in Bangladesh with my parents for eight years.

In the same year in Sylhet, a young woman called Halima¹ boarded a plane for the first time in her life. She was 16 and had spent her childhood watching her father board planes to go to London. She had seen the planes lift high up into the clouds to London. London, what manner of place was it? What kind of place could be up there in the clouds, she thought. Eventually on a grey day, just like the one on which I stared through the windows of Heathrow Airport, she landed in London. How grey it was and how strange that the houses were not painted, she thought. She was disappointed.

By 2006 after attending university and traveling and working in Bangladesh, I was back in London, getting to know the city of my birth. Bangladesh and London were now established for both Halima and me as real and meaningful, not as dreams or cities in the clouds. My doctoral research focused on a group of British Bangladeshi children, including Halima’s daughter, who attended a school in Islington in London. Halima, and a group of other mothers at the school, their families and children became participants in my research.

It was snowing the first time I went to the school, bitterly cold and icy. It was early spring. Poynder Primary School stood on a corner, a tall handsome red-brick Victorian building. Feeling out of place, cold and nervous, I locked up my bike and rang the buzzer to be let in. In the reception, I signed the visitors’ book and asked for Patricia Lowe, my contact at the school.

I sat and waited in the reception, looking nervously at the headmistress’s door in front of me, feeling as if I had been summoned for a meeting or a telling-off. Busy teachers and children passed through as I waited. Patricia appeared and took me in, through the brick corridors, painted with thick glossy cream-coloured paint and covered with the children’s artwork, and up one of the stone staircases, winding up through the brick tower to the second floor and into the large, light, high-ceilinged staff room. We arranged ourselves and our cups of tea on some institutional furniture and talked about my research ideas and plans. We drank our tea, adding to the patterns of brown rings on the plastic table. This was the beginning of my fieldwork.

A time: 2006

Thrill seekers and fortune seekers flocked to London’s decadent neoliberal playground. East London’s gritty streets were covered in a coating of graffiti and neon, from which sprouted bars and cafes, filled with hipsters, bankers, fashionistas, exiles, radicals and hobos from near and far. The boom years brought a credit-fuelled festival of excess to London. House prices soared, huge swathes of the city were gentrified, redeveloped, scrubbed and polished. Geniuses in the glass and steel temples of capitalism in the City of London devised ever more ingenious and incomprehensible ways to derive money from nothing.

It was a time defined not only by hedonistic and financial excess, but also by enthusiasm for domestic authoritarianism and foreign interventionism. Attacks by Egyptian and Saudi Arabian extremists against the USA in 2001 led to Britain involving itself in wars against countries that were not involved in the attacks or a threat to its national security. While British troops occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, Britain became a target for violent extremists. The wars provoked a simmering but largely contained resentment that had been brewing for over a decade. The idea that Islam and Western ‘liberal democracy’ were inherently incompatible, previously the preserve of a handful of neo-conservative fear-mongers, became widely held. After the London Underground was bombed in 2005, the general population in Britain, and Muslims in particular, were subject to increasing surveillance and securitisation. Among the victims of this domestic ‘war against terror’ were some of the most basic human rights, which the British government hastily abandoned in a blunt and counter-productive attempt to prevent violent extremism.

Next door to the City of London, in the fast gentrifying neighbourhoods of East London, the poverty and inequality of Britain remained. British Bangladeshis growing up in Tower Hamlets and other inner London boroughs grew up typically in poor, overcrowded, under-employed households. But things were getting better for them. There were opportunities, jobs, education and healthcare. Children in London’s schools were doing well and seemed to herald an optimistic, multicultural future. The sacrifices that many British Bangladeshis had made to come to Britain, establish their families, start businesses, buy properties and engage in British society were starting to pay off. The lives of British Bangladeshi children promised to be better than those of their parents and grandparents. The Islamophobia of the 2000s was not the same as the racism of the 1970s, partly because it was set within a booming, globally interconnected economy.

This book is about a group of children living and growing up in contemporary London. It is about childhoods and identity formation in transnational and multicultural societies being transformed by globalisation. The children at the centre of this book are British Bangladeshi; they live transnational lives. In Bangladesh they are referred to as ‘Londoni’. In London, they live in a global city, connected to every part of the world through history, trade, travel, migration and media. As British Bangladeshis, their migration patterns emerged from the connections formed during the British Empire. As British Muslims, their identities are informed by an official and unofficial Islamophobia, fuelled by the disastrous ‘war on terror’ and debates over the relationships between liberal Western states and Islam. British Bangladeshis have found themselves at the centre of these debates.

Places: Islington and Sylhet

Research for this book started in a school in the London Borough of Islington, called Poynder Primary School. Most of the children in Poynder Primary School come from estates on the border of Islington and Hackney. All the Bangladeshi children from the school lived in nearby council or housing association homes. Several of these estates had recently been the subjects of major regeneration efforts. One, a pioneering work of architecture designed and built with award- winning fanfare in 1973, became a notorious crime hot-spot and no-go area for the police and had to be totally redeveloped. Large blocks contained cramped two or three bedroom flats in which families of six lived. The buildings were grim, the stairways often smelt of urine or marijuana smoke, they had broken glass and dog shit lying around, and were decorated with a depressing mixture of vandalised signs and graffiti.

Common perceptions of Islington as a wealthy part of London are misleading. The Islington of privilege exists side-by-side with a very deprived and overcrowded Islington. Islington is the sixth most deprived local authority area in the UK, one of five local authority areas in London that are in the top ten most deprived in the country (Leeser, 2011). As well as high levels of deprivation, Islington also has very high levels of prosperity by national standards, with an average (residence-based) annual income of £35,400 compared with an average of £22,623 nationally. Nationally, the borough is ranked 14th (where first has the highest income) and seventh in London. The presence of such a high average income alongside such high levels of deprivation suggests that some very high incomes have skewed the averages. However, measuring the difference between the most and least deprived super-output areas (very small administrative areas) in the borough produces a low inequality score, indicating that deprivation is spread across the borough rather than in concentrated pockets (Local Futures, 2007).

Like much of London, old and new, rich and poor co-exist side by side; spartan pubs full of red-faced old men sit alongside new cafes and delicatessens. On the north side of the New River are some of the most exclusive and desirable streets in Islington. The large, elegant Georgian houses in these streets are worth millions of pounds. Bomb damage from the Second World War, increased traffic and demand for housing in the overcrowded borough led to the construction of the large estates that replaced and are now set among the old terraces and shops of the area. This means that today sought-after roads and terraces are side-by-side with deprived estates (Baggs et al., 1985).

Comparing the 2001 census and the 2011 census shows that the proportion of people in Islington who are members of an ethnic minority has increased, with less than half (48 per cent) of the population being White British in 2011 compared with 57 per cent in 2001. This is low in national terms but slightly higher than the London average. According to the 2011 census, the borough has 4,662 residents of Bangladeshi origin (ONS, 2012b). While they are referred to as ‘British Bangladeshi’, the vast majority of British Bangladeshis are from a region in Bangladesh called Sylhet. All of the families who participated in the research that led to this book were Sylheti.

Sylhet is in the north-east of what is now Bangladesh. It is one of six divisions in the country and is also the name of the city which is the capital of the region. It is a region that is now part of Bangladesh, but came close to being part of India at partition in 1947, when in a referendum the people of Sylhet voted to become part of East Pakistan (Ali, 2010: 10). East Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971 after a savage war, and so Sylhetis became Bangladeshis.

Sylhet is the region of Bangladesh with tea gardens, because it has some of the country’s few hills. Like much of Bangladesh it is lush and green and crossed with rivers and vast haors (large inland seasonal lakes or swamps). Recently it has also become the site of a natural resources boom as reserves of natural gas were discovered there in the 1990s (Lewis, 2010: 154). It is also famous as the place where Sufi saints and warriors such as Hazrat Shah Jalal introduced Islam to the region. The shrine of Shah Jalal in Sylhet town is a major place of worship, and in the towns and villages around Sylhet smaller shrines or mazars dot the countryside. The worship of saints or pirs is seen as characteristic of the Sufi-influenced Islam in Bangladesh (Gardner, 1993b).

The society and economy of Sylhet is heavily influenced by the migration of many Sylhetis to the UK. Gardner (1992) describes the ‘migration mania’ that characterised Sylhet in the 1980s. These patterns have led to parts of Sylhet, particular families and people being described as ‘Londoni’. The signs of this connection are evident in the large houses built by Londoni families, the motifs of migration and London that exist all over Sylhet and in the flow of remittances. In 2011/12 British Bangladeshis sent almost a billion dollars’ worth of remittances to Bangladesh; this represented 8 per cent of all remittances to the country and 1 per cent of the entire GDP of Bangladesh in that year (Bangladesh Bank Data).² Sylhet has one of the lowest poverty rates of any region in Bangladesh, which is partly attributed to the fact that it has one of the highest rates of households receiving remittances from abroad (World Bank, 2008).

Debates

The discussion that follows sits across six debates or distinctions made in academic writing on childhoods, migration, transnationalism and multiculturalism. In each case distinctions can be made between approaches that favour structure or agency, positivist or social constructivist, modernist or postmodernist approaches. Alone each of these debates is of moderate interest, and not very ground breaking, but taken together they add up to something larger, a way of looking at a dynamic, fast-changing world.

First, it is tempting, and quantitatively compelling, to see people’s lives as determined by economic forces, structures of class, ethnicity or gender, or biological factors. These can be measured, compared and discussed using percentages, correlations and regressions to see which are most important in a given context. In contrast, once we begin to deconstruct these socially constructed ideas and ideologies, it becomes clear that not only are they often problematic discourses and inventions, but that individual context is incredibly important for the way that they are seen. The statistics can tell you something broad, but they won’t ever get near the complexity of one individual’s positionality and contradictory beliefs and behaviours. So we become stuck between rather crude pattern seeking and microanalyses of individual cases that are fascinating, but not much use for understanding the broader forces at work in the world.

Second, children were once conceptualised as the passive recipients of socialisation. Their agency has become more visible through the work of sociologists and anthropologists of childhood such as Allison James (1993, 2013). The dominance of Piagetian cognitive developmental approaches to childhoods created a universalist, positivist, structural understanding of the ‘stages’ of child development, in which all children followed a similar path. Critics of this approach emphasise the social context and socially constructed, historically and culturally specific nature of the ways that childhoods are understood and experienced. This distinction itself and the intellectual inflexibility of taking only a positivist or social constructivist approach is also, rightly, the subject of critique (Prout, 2005).

Third, the teleological way in which childhoods are understood in developmental models has parallels with the way in which migration was once understood; as one-off, unidirectional, permanent and assimilatory. Conceptualisations of migration assumed that migrants would move from one place to another, stay there and gradually become like the people who lived there. In contrast, recent research, highlighting the concept of transnationalism, illustrates that migration often involves multiple movements or returns, and is marked by ongoing engagements with the country of origin and indeed other countries. Transnationalism offers an alternative to assimilationist models of migration (Vertovec, 2009). Transnationalism expresses something fundamental about living in an intensely interconnected world and is an important manifestation of globalisation. Again, the idea that transnationalism and assimilation or integration cannot or do not co-exist is itself too simplistic (Lacroix, 2014).

Fourth, debates over transnationalism have asked whether it is a new phenomenon or one that has only recently become fashionable, but has historical precedents (Vertovec, 2009). While some have argued that transnationalism and globalisation pose a fundamental challenge to the notion of sovereign nation-states others have highlighted the enduring power and appeal of nations and nationalism (Fraser 2003; Sayyid 2000). This book argues that the transnationalism of today is fundamentally different to that of a few decades ago or earlier, because of the contemporary accessibility of travel and communications. While the enduring allure of nations as organising ideologies and structures is undeniable, transnationalism is altering sources and flows of symbolic power. The analysis of transnationalism and its increasing power does not mean that nations are not powerful, but introduces a rival to their power; they are beginning, as Fraser and Sayyid argue, to be ‘decentred’, principally by transnational forces.

Fifth, in the multicultural countries and cities that migration and transnationalism creates, conceptualising the contact between and mixing of cultures created a set of debates of its own. Different ways of analysing multiculturalism stem from changing ideas about what cultures are. If cultural groups are conceptualised as discrete groups of people sharing practices and beliefs which define their culture, then understanding multiculturalism becomes about seeing how these different groups live together and interact. Multiculturalism often refers to the ways in which these interactions are governed by the state, but this assumes that this model of cultures is accurate. The idea of a discrete cultural group, distinct from all others, with characteristics and behaviours that define its members is now widely critiqued. Studies of the ways that groups are constructed and constituted by their members or by outsiders reveal much more complex and contingent processes (Baumann, 1996). Drawing upon these critiques, and using a transnational social fields approach, this book identifies multiple, overlapping social spheres with which people engage. While this approach is particularly apt for conceptualising multicultural societies, it is in fact a feature of all our lives.

Finally, education and socialisation of children are talked of as processes through which children learn to become competent adults. This apprenticeship or training approach is rather simplistic if it does not acknowledge the multiple forms of education and socialisation that children engage with, or the power relations that drive many attempts to educate and socialise children. While school education is sometimes seen as a benign, transformative and empowering force, it is also identified as a site of control and the maintenance of unequal power relations (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990). While socialisation is seen in a thin way as being about learning competence, the ways in which adults with different views compete to impose their view of the world on children reveals power relations on local, national and global scales. Returning to the second debate in this list, children have a role to play in mediating a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Transnational Childhoods in a Global City
• 2  British Bangladeshis
• 3  Transnational Practices
• 4  Childhoods, Space and Place
• 5  British Bangladeshis in Education
• 6  Islamic Identities
• 7  Conclusions
• Notes
• References
• Index