Redclift, VM; (2012) Illimitable liminality or the return to structure: Locating displacement in Bangladesh. In: Kenedy, R and Greenfields, M and Rollins, J, (eds.) Diasporic Identities and Spaces Between. Inter-Disciplinary.Net: Freeland, UK.

Text Redclift Chapter - Ilimitable Liminality or the Return to Structure - Accepted version.pdf - Accepted Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff Download (394kB)

Abstract

Of the estimated 1.3 million Urdu-speaking Muslims who migrated to Pakistan immediately following the country’s creation in 1947 more than one million migrated to the region of East Bengal in present day Bangladesh.ii Sixty years later, a little over 300,000 are thought to remain, 160,000 of whom are still living in the ‘temporary’ camps set up by the International Committee for the Red Cross following the War of Liberation in 1971. The camps themselves represent a liminal space, ‘between and betwixt’ recognised points of cultural classification. iii Originally constructed as transitory shelters en route to an imagined home (‘Pakistan’), forty years on they represent something quite different. Through the experience of space, settlement and segregation, this paper questions the significance of a sense of ‘home’ in understandings of ‘diasporic identity’ and reveals that instead of a transition between homes, these spaces can be understood as liminal homelands in themselves. The camp has become both a collective identity, and the spatial and symbolic site for a re-constructed belonging. Does the resolution of liminality therefore, as assumed by anthropological theory,iv remain elusive?

Download activity - last month

Export as JSONCSVXML

Download activity - last 12 months

Export as CSVXMLJSON

Downloads by country - last 12 months

Export as JSONCSVXML

Archive Staff Only

View Item