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Presentation :
This paper looks at the textual negotiation of Bengali visitors and migrants with/in Japan during last century to interrogate the cultural migration of Bengalis in/to Japan. It investigates the ways and means of cultural translation in between Bengal/Bangladesh and Japan through textualization of/by such ‘cultural' migrants. Bengalis have textualized Japan for more than a century. Reputed Bengalis like Rabindranath Tagore, Rashbehari Bose, and Horiprobha Basu Mallick, traveled to Japan in early twentieth century and wrote narratives on Japanese society. Contemporary authors and filmmakers have also composed texts linking Japan with Bangladesh (e.g. A Ahmed, 2015; Z Hossain, 1995; T Mokammel, 2012). Through analysing the literary and film texts as well as the ‘subjects' of these films and books, the paper explores the Bengalis' way of cultural translation which are connected to the process of cultural migration. I ask how such processes interact in a site like Japan throughout the twentieth century and beyond. I apply ‘Trans-Asia' as method of understanding —a method that has been instrumental in Asian cultural studies during last decade or so. I thus investigate how the individual memory of such migrants contributes to the social memory of the two national/regional communities of Asia during last century.
