This article examines coalition-building within Madrid's pro-Palestine movement since October 2023, shifting attention from cross-movement alliances to the endogenous dynamics that shape cooperation among solidarity actors. Drawing on 10 semi-structured interviews with key activists and organizers, we identify four intertwined obstacles to alliance formation: (1) path-dependent histories and social ties that reproduce long-standing factional boundaries; (2) ideological cleavages, especially around support for armed resistance; (3) strategic ambivalence towards engagement with parties and institutions; and (4) asymmetric repression and stigmatization that differentially target organizations and reconfigure incentives to collaborate. We also show how diaspora activists have acted as symbolic and relational brokers, creating 'spaces of pragmatic convergence' that enabled limited-purpose coordination (mass protests, cultural/pedagogical events) without forcing programmatic homogenization. We discuss implications for the durability and scope of coalitions in peace-movement settings and outline avenues for comparative research.
Political polarization about Muslim presence in Europe is fostering a discursive atmosphere that, when combined with social inequality and urban segmentation, places hybrid identities among the descendants of migrants under strain. This article engages with scholarship on Muslims in European cities to argue that identity hybridization constitutes the norm rather than an exception. It further identifies key strategies of religious reinterpretation through which such hybrid identities are articulated. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in two Spanish cities, the analysis examines how local configurations of symbolic and material polarization shape the expression of Muslim subjectivities. The comparison reveals that, while polarization in Ceuta gives rise to more constrained and distressed forms of identification, the comparatively less polarized context of Madrid allows for more confident and stable expressions of hybridity.
This article examines the marginalization, liminality, and reconfiguration of identity through embodied intersectionality, to grasp the complexities of the lived situated experience. Focusing on intersections of race, gender, and culture, it further develops the concept of transmigratory nostalgia by examining how nostalgia is shaped by liminality and shifting racialized positionalities. Using autoethnography grounded in contemporaneous and retrospectively revisited diary entries, this study examines how Western privilege and Filipina racialization coexisted in a semi-rural Japanese context. This dual positionality complicated perceptions of belonging and foreignness, revealing experiences of marginalization, acceptance, and identity slippage. The account offers an embodied, reflexive exploration of how cultural narratives of Japaneseness intersect with global racial hierarchies, colonial legacies, and personal subjectivity. By foregrounding a non-white Western perspective, the article contributes to intersectional and transnational understandings of identity, cultural negotiation, and nostalgia in intercultural settings shaped by power and historical structures.
East Bengali immigrants entered the US in the early twentieth century at a critical juncture in the transformation of American racial ideology. This paper traces the unexplored history of these pioneer immigrants, from what is now Bangladesh, in Los Angeles (1910-1965). It examines how, in the period after the 1923 Bhagat Thind Singh case, their ambiguous racial positioning was contested and negotiated within the local Asian-Mexican demographic. Drawing on interviews with early Bangladeshi immigrants and their kin, alongside the legislative history of racial classification, it shows how state designations and everyday racial contestations shaped a distinct racialized subjectivity. It offers a counterpoint to the discourse of a Black-White binary, proximity to and distancing from each, to examine instead the specifics of a Black-White interstice which reveals a 'grammar' of discursive engagement that is capable of both reproducing and disrupting hegemonic racial narratives.
British Bangladeshis are the most economically deprived ethnic group in the UK, with the latest statistics suggesting that over 50% live in poverty. They have overwhelmingly been victims of the capitalist relations of production and imbalances in class power. Tower Hamlets, where one-sixth of Britain's Bengalis live, has become a key battleground as local activists and residents resist attempts to gentrify the historical Brick Lane area of the East End. This paper highlights the centrality of Islam in the activism of Nijjor Manush, a grassroots group of Bangladeshi activists, that has led the Save Brick Lane campaign. Using interviews and focus groups, it outlines the foundations of a theology of class struggle that has been developed through their resistance to the gentrification policies of landowners, real estate developers and local government.
