The politics of the ungovernable: Bengali translocalism in London
Based on multi-sited fieldwork in Tower Hamlets and Bangladesh, Ashraf Hoque examines how British Bengalis practice what postcolonial theorists term “political society".
The politics of the ungovernable: Bengali translocalism in London
14 May 2026, 12:00 – 13:00
“Political society”: defined as a pragmatic, kinship-based arena for negotiating welfare, which emerged as the Bengali community’s reaction to widespread institutional and popular racism in the early years of settlement in the 1970s and 1980s.
This seminar presents the case of Mayor Lutfur Rahman, removed by the High Court for corrupt voting practices in 2015, yet re-elected by landslide in 2022 after a five-year ban.
Ashraf explores the ruling’s characterisation of Bengali voters as easily manipulated “men of simple faith”, exposing liberal universalism’s tendency to pathologise alternative political belonging, while also revealing the enduring legacies of colonial power relations and Orientalist stereotypes of the ‘Muslim Other’. The UK, he proposes, functions as a “partial state”, where citizenship is fractured by patronage and translocal ties, producing distinct, culturally hybrid vernacularised polities.
Critiquing the modernist ideal of homogeneous citizenship, this seminar asks: what forms does democracy take when subaltern populations remake political landscapes?
No need to book in advance, just turn up!
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He has conducted long-term multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in the UK (Luton and Tower Hamlets) and Bangladesh (Sylhet), focusing on migration, masculinities, transnational religion and politics.
He is author of Being Young, Male and Muslim in Luton (UCL Press, 2019), co-author of Mafia Raj: the Rule of Bosses in South Asia (Stanford UP, 2019), and the forthcoming 'Offers Than Cannot Be Refused'.
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