Mapping Bangla Town and Bondukdwip: A Study of Spatio-Psychological Dynamics in Brick Lane and Gun Island

Résumé

Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) and Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019) centre on the theme of migration, particularly Bengalis from South Bengal, India, and Bangladeshis seeking a better life. In Gun Island, the migration is driven by climate change and economic precarity. The climateinduced uninhabitability of the Sundarbans and dire poverty encourage Bangladeshis to migrate to Venice either legally or illegally. While in Brick Lane, it is a legal migration from Bangladesh. The deterritorialised migrants from two locations form an unpredictable environment of global labour. Both Bangla Town at Brick Lane in East London and the ghetto of Venice (depicted as Bondukdwip) serve as comfort spaces for the migrants. Both texts examine the phenomena of displacement, ghettoisation, and (re)territorialisation and their associated risks and opportunities. Migration also intersects with geopolitical conflicts. Interestingly, here, the ghetto of Venice and Brick Lane constitute the landscape of desire, opening to myriad self-actualisations from the perspectives of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, thereby transforming the place into space. These two spaces function as territorial assemblages in which language, food, kinship, and shared memories rebuild a sense of belonging. These enclaves are not merely zones of confinement; they are productive spaces of meaning, community, and survival. Ghettoised neighbourhoods become minor territories (in D&G’s sense), shaped by migrants’ collective practices rather than by dominant state or capitalist power structures alone. Thus, these contested spaces augment the matrix of spatio-psychological dynamics. Considering all the dimensions, I, in the present paper, will employ Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space, along with concepts of assemblage, territoralisation and geopolitics to initiate a discussion on how scholars might address this widespread global phenomenon of territoralisation of urban spaces and overcome the dynamics of spatial fixity/unfixity, which can envision human unity in a globalised world beyond all the separatist forces