Dina Siddiqi

New York University | NYU · Faculty of Liberal Studies

The effects of Covid-19 dramatized yet again the fragilities and asymmetries built into global supply chains and the marginal structural location of Bangladesh-the world's second largest clothing manufacturer-within the apparel supply chain. It was a reminder that the distribution of risk is highly asymmetric and falls disproportionately on gendere...

From Himal Southasian Special series 'Rethinking Bangladesh'

At decolonization, mobility narratives framed though a nation-centric lens -- in conjunction with other contingencies -- undermined Rohingya claims to national belonging. Further, even as possession of the ‘right’ documentation is today fundamental to claiming citizenship, the post-colonial Burmese state has systematically stripped Rohingya of the...

I draw on the Tuba hunger strike of 2014, which took place in the shadow of the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the preceding year, to think through questions of collective action in relation to shifting figurations of labour in moments of crisis. I ask how state, capital and (I)NGO priorities shape or re-signify dominant...

Newspaper article on the Garment Industry

Daily Star Op Ed on the Rohingya "crisis"

This essay complicates received understandings of violence against queer (and other) bodies in Muslim South Asia by re-visiting the 2016 killing of two Dhaka-based gay-rights activists. It challenges underlying assumptions of the relationship between violence and the secular through an examination of the different meanings assigned to secular/state...

How do we understand the 15th amendment of the Bangladeshi Constitution that restored the principle of secularism and simultaneously (re)inscribed certain populations as outside the cultural nation? I approach this question through a close reading of the Constituent Assembly debates of 1972. The precarious state of minorities, I contend, is not a s...

On Hefazot, garment workes and feminists

My argument revolves around two distinct but entangled lines of inquiry. The first considers the spectacle of Muslim female injury/vulnerability in relation to projects of global solidarity and sisterhood. In light of the entrenched, recursive nature of prevailing associations between Islam and spectacularized cultural violence, I ask what counts a...

This review was published in International Feminist Journal of Politics [© 2015 Taylor & Francis] and the definite version is available at: https://www.google.com/search?q=10.1080%2F14616742.2015.1088226&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b The article website is at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14616742.2015.1088226?needAccess=true

Boundaries Undermined: The Ruins of Progress on the Bangladesh-India Border. By Delwar Hussain. London: Hurst and Company, 2013. xviii, 187 pp. ₤20.00 (cloth). - Volume 74 Issue 2 - Dina Siddiqi

On the afternoon of August 2, 2014, I walked into Hossain Market, one of the many nondescript multistoried buildings lining the commercial thoroughfare in Uttor Badda, Dhaka. I had gone to show solidarity with hunger-striking garment workers of the Toba Group, three of whose units were housed in the building. Since July 28, several hundred workers...

Solidarity is a fundamental—even constitutive—concern of feminist theory and politics. Like a specter it haunts feminist imaginations periodically. Yet it is a slippery term. Certain expressions of feminist solidarity, we know, often gloss over divisions in the name of unity. The pursuit of solidarity along these registers, I suggest, expresses a l...

Interview in ICE TODAY magazine, July 2013.

This article discusses what happens when normative 'global' discourses of rights and individuated sexual identity confront the messiness of 'local' realities. It considers the tensions that emerge when the relationship between sexual and social identities is not obvious and the implications of such tensions for public health and sexual rights activ...

This essay explores the tensions and disjunctures between transnational principles of gender justice and the highly contextualized desires of women who seek the services of legal aid organizations in rural Bangladesh. More specifically, it looks at the shalish, or local village tribunal in the context of efforts to restructure the shalish to make i...

This article revisits the figure of the `third world sweatshop worker', long iconic of the excesses of the global expansion of flexible accumulation in late twentieth-century capitalism. I am interested in how feminist activists concerned with the uneven impact of neo-liberal policies can engage in progressive political interventions without partic...

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On debates over the national anthem

Bangladesh's successful entry into the world apparel market has been predicated on the deployment of a predominantly female industrial labour force. Bangladesh can be seen as a quintessentially global site - where the language of public discourse is dominated by a developmentalist vocabulary of civil society - human rights, women's development, cit...

This paper considers the uses of television in the June 1996 elections of Bangladesh. It is predicated on the assumption that the reach of television in a poor country like Bangladesh is much greater than statistics on access and ownership suggest. Historically, state‐owned television has been perceived as a tool for state‐sponsored propaganda. Yet...