The Unruly Public Sphere: Public Art and the Political Imagination in Bangladesh with Ruth Kelly (12 May)

This paper looks at two examples of public art happenings in Chattogram, Bangladesh, exploring how they create space for the political imagination; and can be used to stretch how audiences understand the political community – temporally, across lines of gender and class, and beyond wilful ignorance of heavily securitised boundaries. While literature on the public sphere tends to focus on public reasons or agonism, I argue that ambiguous and underdetermined cultural resources opens much-needed space for unruly and exploratory discourse that can stretch and re-negotiate public imaginaries. The concepts emerging from these spaces are valuable not only insofar as they are given more precise meaning in specific struggles, but also precisely in being underdetermined and therefore enabling different kinds of political thought well suited to contexts of considerable uncertainty.

Research related to Bangladesh (as opposed to Bengal more broadly) tends to focus on state formation and the development sector, to the neglect of unruly socio-political cultures. Yet strikes and protest have long been an important part of Bangladesh’s political dynamics. This has become increasingly prominent in the past decade, with growing attention to protests by garment workers and students. In August 2024, the then government was unexpectedly overthrown by country-wide protests involving a striking cross-section of society – from rickshaw pullers to students to industrialists. Against this dramatic backdrop, this paper explores how public gatherings – from protest to festival – underpin political change – both dramatic and more gradual – and enable the articulation of new political imaginaries.