Talk by Seuty Sabur

Both an Asian Development Bank (ADB) report (2016) and a World Bank report (2014) have spoken of the possibility of Bangladesh becoming an upper-middle-income country by 2021. From 1990 to 2010, the size of the middle classes expanded from 9% to 20%. Yet, despite this newfound interest in the middle class, questions about its composition, the practices, and aspirations of its constituents are hardly ever raised. The political implications of such questions are also never acknowledged, let alone debated. My longitudinal research attempts to make a section of this class tangible. In this essay, I explore the material conditions under which these gendered-class consolidations were possible during successive colonial and postcolonial periods. Through memoirs, genealogies, intergenerational family histories, and archives, I attempt to locate my interlocutors and their class position across space and time. Their intergenerational narratives reveal how their spatial mobilities (birth, marriage, work, and retirement) are entwined with the accumulations of various capitals and how that collided with Dhaka's urban formations as a metropolitan city.

Seuty Sabur is currently an associate professor of anthropology at BRAC University. She obtained her PhD in sociology from the National University of Singapore and her MA in cultural dynamics from Hiroshima University, Japan. Seuty Sabur teaches a range of undergraduate courses, including critical social theory, methodology, gender, class, kinship, and family. For the past few years, her core research interest has been the ‘Metropolitan Middle Class of Bangladesh’. As an activist and academic based in Bangladesh, she has been drawn to multiple recent social movements. She has been writing on the women’s movement, the Shahbag uprising, the gendered construction of the nation, and the culpability of left and liberal forces. Her research has been published in reputed journals such as ‘Fieldsights’ by the Society for Cultural Anthropology, ‘Journal of South Asian Development,’ ‘South Asia Chronicles’ and ‘South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.’ She has authored numerous op-eds for international and national newspapers and portals. She is currently working on her upcoming book “Marriage and Friendship: Social Networks of the Bangladeshi Affluent ‘Middle Class”.