An innovative, ethically grounded study of Bangladeshi diasporic communities in London and Los Angeles.

According to the International Organization for Migration, the Bangladeshi diaspora is one of the world’s largest with around 2.4 million members, and the United Kingdom and the United States are two of the primary countries of settlement. Postcolonial Citizenship examines the experiences of different generations of Muslim Bangladeshi migrants in London and Los Angeles. Although narratives of globalization suggest increasing homogeneity, this book shows how the Bangladeshi diaspora experience has been shaped by their cities of settlement. We examine how the context of reception influences experiences of citizenship. Crucial to this analysis is the concept of “racial regimes” developed by Cedric Robinson and Alana Lentin, which demonstrates how “race” and racial hierarchies are (re)produced in different historical and geographical contexts and how they evolve over time.

Since 9/11, the transnational practices of diasporic Muslims have received significant negative attention, as both security threats and impediments to citizenship. Postcolonial Citizenship unpacks the mutually constitutive relationship between citizenship and transnationalism by focusing on three transnational domains of remittances—religion and investment—in relation to Bangladesh-origin migrants in the US and the UK. It is a tale of two cities separated by the Atlantic, and by the respective, albeit interconnected, histories of colonialism and settler colonialism, but which remain intimately interlinked in the current conjuncture.