Why we are actually here…

So we haven’t really written anything about the reason we got the cash to live here for year- Sam’s research. Most of you know Sam’s doing her PhD in history and she focuses on South Asia and social movements. This trip is to do her research for her dissertation. She is studying student activism in Dhaka during the 1960s (to put it very shortly). The project includes both working in archives (aka digging through boxes of old crap and reading it - they estimate about 10,000 items in the archive) and oral histories (interviewing people who were student activists in the 1960s here). Sam is working with the Liberation War Museum here both in their archives and they are helping coordinate the interviews.

Today Sam went in to the museum for a visit to get some things moving and after chatting informally was able to make an appointment with one of the trustees for her first official interview with a former student activist. This is a big deal, because each interview leads to another, and getting started this early (it is scheduled for November 5th) means there will be time for lots of expansion. It is also ahead of her planned timetable, which is always good. Many of the former student leaders have gone on to pretty important posts here – the mayor of Dhaka, for example – and having the credibility of the Liberation War Museum is very helpful in getting access to these guys.

We also discussed the annual academic conference that the museum puts on and Sam will be involved in planning this as well. In addition, we’ll hopefully get to accompany museum workers on an oral history project that they’ve been doing where they collect histories of the Liberation War from small villages and record the oral testimony. So, lots of great stuff brewing.

We thought some of you might be interested in some more information on Bangladesh and the history, so here are few links. The case of Bangladesh’s genocide was never bought to trial, so there is still a great deal of politics around the issue. These sites aren’t all “neutral” (whatever that means…) but offer interesting information.

For details of the genocide:
http://www.genocidebangladesh.org/

For information about the mass rapes that occurred in 1971:
http://www.drishtipat.org/1971/

For information on how the United States (specifically Nixon and Kissinger) knowingly (and now officially, admittedly) allowed the genocide to occur: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB79/

Hopefully you will all find these issues and this history interesting. We write mostly about our play time on this blog, but we are here because of work, and the history of Bangladesh is fascinating and much more intertwined with the United States than most people know.