In ‘Art, Politics and the Environment in Bangladesh’ the notion of staging guides the authors to explore how shifting social and political realities of Bangladesh unfold from historical events and cultural processes that are neither straightforward nor self-evident. The essays trace these unfoldings from varied disciplinary perspectives. The trope of staging that is investigated is multivalent. Consider, for instance, the massive enthusiasm for staging local elections for villages that have disappeared owing to the movement of rivers or the resistance to the shrimping industry in areas disastrously poldered by previous Dutch development interventions. They help visualize the impact of the continuous rewriting and remaking – and at times erasure – of the spaces and histories of a region variously known as East Bengal, East Pakistan and Bangladesh. The quandaries that colonial bureaucratic classifications pose for staging the boundaries of indigenous peoples in contemporary Bangladesh, or the politics of reception of the cinematic representations of the 1971 war, produced decades apart, are examples of such ground-making. Each essay rethinks long-standing assumptions drawing on a combination of new empirical research and theoretical perspectives within anthropology, theatre and film studies, political science and development studies.
