Locating Muslim diasporas: multi-locality, multi-disciplinarity and performativity

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking Muslim Migration produces one of our most detailed anatomies of a “TranslAsian” time-space location. It juxtaposes the ways that multiple migrations and diasporas have been locally, multi-locally and trans-temporally configured, and so re-orientates attention beyond a Eurocentric focus on the West. In an ambitious move towards multi-disciplinary holism that reflexively acknowledges the “pieced-together” nature of its own representations “here and now” social relations and juxtaposed with thicker descriptions of memorialized “origins and causes”. In this regard The Bengal Diaspora can be said to map “religion”-based dimensions of Muslim diasporas in terms of three distinctive spatial scales. However, while “Muslim” identifications are rightly conceived as contextual performances by migrants with divergent social capitals in specific social settings, I suggest that the unstable reproduction of Islamic tradition as a more or less enduring part of social structure is a part of Muslim performativity too.