Of Displacement and Resilience: The Emergence of Rohingya Rickshaw Art in Bangladesh

Talk on refugee visual and material culture by Mohammad Zaki Rezwan.

Rezwan's paper explores the emergence of rickshaw art and artisan practices by the Rohingya people in the refugee camp of Bangladesh. It also investigates how the encounter between Bangladeshi and Rohingya identities allows these refugees to seek resilience in the state of displacement through the reorientation of their Rohingya knowledge and skills. The mass exodus of the Rohingya people has resulted in an unprecedented reformulation of cultural identities. From the Rakhine state of Myanmar to Bangladesh, the displacement has often attracted a narrative of loss, never a story of creation. Despite the countless international efforts to preserve the cultural memory of the Rohingya community, the mushrooming of a diverse set of unrestricted and unregulated economic, mechanical, and cultural ventures through jugaad in the camps underscores their true resilience and willingness to sustain. As a case study, the paper examines the newly formed rickshaw art and artisan practice in the recently built, controversial Rohingya camp located in Bhasan Char, Bangladesh. I argue this practice is born out of the encounter between numerous Rohingya art and artisan practices and Bangladeshi rickshaw art, allowing the Rohingya people to incorporate their knowledge and skills in conjunction with what they have attained from the rickshaw art of Bangladesh. The paper analyzes a series of newly manufactured rickshaws in the camp and the aesthetics of their decorations to demonstrate how the foundation and fabric of these endeavors reflect not only the state of displacement but also the reformulation of belongingness. These rickshaws, with their colorful decorations, function like an archive in motion for this vulnerable community, where their stories will be written and rewritten indefinitely.

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Mohammad Zaki Rezwan is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Humanities at BRAC University. He has over eight years of experience in teaching a diverse range of courses, including visual art and culture, film, media, communication, cultural studies, critical theory, postcolonial theory, and literature in English. He has previously worked as a Research Assistant for research projects at the University of Oxford and Simon Fraser University. He holds an MA in Comparative Media Arts from Simon Fraser University and an MA in Literatures in English and Cultural Studies from Jahangirnagar University. He curated the exhibition Unveiling in 2019 at Centre A, the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. He previously worked as the Assistant Editor of Crossings: A Journal of English Studies and the Editor of the Comparative Media Arts (CMA) Journal. In 2020, he founded Rickshaw Art Archive (rickshawartarchive.org), a non-commercial, crowdsourced digital archive of rickshaw art in Bangladesh. He has published and presented his research at a wide range of peer-reviewed journals and international conferences around the world. His research interests lie in the areas of South Asian arts, aesthetics, film, media, and visual culture.

For more information, e-mail [email protected].

Time: 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1

Location: W15 Cafe

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