Within the expansive lifeworlds undergoing forced migration, the displacement of the Rohingya community in and outside Burma, marked by a continuum of genocide, expulsion, and statelessness, emerges on the geographic peripheries. Despite being described as “one of the world’s worst humanitarian and human rights crises” by the UN Refugee Agency in 2018, the last three decades of mass violence, looting, burning and destruction of villages experienced by this predominantly Muslim ethnic minority has somehow managed to evade much attention, outrage and action. As a consequence, the Rohingya have been vigorously and continually displaced, “sent ricocheting between rural and urban desperation” as described by South African author Rob Nixon (2010). In response, my research and project explores the ways in which the Rohingya – as a community that continues to navigate and negotiate complex landscapes shaped by displacement – remember, reconstitute, and reimagine home across their trajectories.
Within the past decade, spatial discourse in academia and policy has retired traditional conceptions of the rural refugee camp as an emblematic and archetypal spatial solution to displacement, instead recognizing refuge as an increasingly pervasive urban circumstance. While indeed a productive spatial shift, greater strides have yet to be taken. Contemporary architectural solutions to urban refuge seem to oscillate between two diametrically opposed extremes. On one end sits an oversimplification and overextension of entangled notions of hospitality, suspending the role of the refugee as perpetual “guest” and “receiver.” At the other end sit instances of more flagrant hostility, such as the recent suggestion by the UK Home Office to house asylum seekers on what are deemed engineless prison barges on its coasts, an act of outsourcing the role of “host” or “giver” to the architectural edifice.
In studying the ways in which displaced communities remember, reconstitute, and reimagine home, inhabitation has become a hypervisible, unavoidable, and inextricable subject. In response, this research challenges notions of space that have become divorced from the spatial experiences of those it shelters. In doing so, it follows two specific aims: (1) to resist the erasure of the Rohingya people and their material cultures by mapping erased ways of inhabiting space, building upon an ongoing material archive, and (2) to formalize a space within and through which the Rohingya can continue their material resistance against erasure–a space to reconstitute their memory of homeland in resettled contexts and reclaim traditions of hospitality.
Unimagining Homelands: The Erasure of the Rohingya in Rakhine State, Burma ///
The recounting of Rohingya history exists under a veil of political dispute, perpetuated by the authoritarian regime of Burma which ‘unimagines’ the very identity of the Rohingya altogether. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” (1983), Rob Nixon envisages an antithetical notion of “unimagined communities,” resulting from the “spatial amnesia” of a nation-state, in which communities are “physically unsettled and imaginatively displaced, evacuated from place and time and thus uncoupled from the idea of a national future and a national memory.” The Rohingya are one such community whose identity has been historically overdetermined by the hegemonic gaze within which it finds itself. As the perpetuation of Burma’s decolonial nation-rebuilding project rested upon the exclusive nature of the re-imagining of the ethnic communities that lay within it, some were actively re-imagined while others were violently unimagined. In such a manner, the Rohingya were unimagined from the space of Burma’s redemptive identity.
From its very conception, the identity of the Rohingya has grappled with a prolonged state of exclusion. Though not formally recognized by the Burmese government, the Rohingya claim Rakhine State as their ancestral homeland. Thus the discursive and political belonging (and lack thereof) of the Rohingya is deeply entangled within the agendas of external powers and acts of border delineation. More precisely, this exclusionary impetus was largely driven by the creation of modern Burma, which aimed to remove colonial remnants but instead led to the political over-determinacy of Burma’s perceived demographic makeup. Unimagined from the political and geographical dimensions of the nation-state, the Muslims of Arakan were thrown out of the indolent perimeters delineated by both the colonial British regime and later postcolonial Burma. The British Empire, therefore, played a dual role: at once kindling the flame by establishing a colonial hierarchy which marginalized the Burmese, and subsequently fueling the fire through the provision of highly essentialized and inaccurate surveys, leaving behind destructive colonial debris in the Empire’s place. This quickly became a crucial mechanism by which the physical destruction exacted upon the Rohingya was ideologically and legally rationalized.
Following the military coup in 1962, the political ascension of General Ne Win marked the resumption of the political unimagining of the Rohingya from the time of the British colonial rule. To redefine the unity of Burma and embed an anti-colonial reformation of the nation-state, the government passed the new Burma Citizenship law in 1982, predicated on the recognition and enshrinement of 135 ethnic groups, which deliberately excluded minority ethnic groups such as the Rohingya, rendering them stateless, guests, and unimagined. A new wave of discourse around hospitality and hostility emerged during Ne Win’s era of reign, in which notions of belonging and non-belonging were spatially determined by birth and residence within certain geographic territories. As a result, the Rohingya were stripped of their national identity cards, and designated as “foreigners,” “illegal immigrants,” and “Bangladeshi infiltrators.”
Initially excluded from the discursive landscape, the Rohingya's marginalization was later sedimented physically through a series of large-scale and violent military operations – attacks aimed at forcibly erasing the Rohingya presence from their homeland. The first, Operation “Naga Min” (translated as Dragon King), was launched in 1978, leading to the flight of more than 200,000 Rohingya towards the border and into Bangladesh. These large waves of violence led to the political invisibilization and ghettoization of the remaining Rohingya within Rakhine state. Spatially materialized through camp-like conditions, these “sites for protracted displacement and permanent segregation” were marked by disproportionate rates of poverty, discriminatory policies, and human rights abuses, as described by Maung Zarni and Alice Cowley (2014).
Since the 1990s, there have been successive waves of violence forcibly displacing Rohingya from their home in Rakhine State into Thailand, Indonesia, India, Nepal, and other countries in the region. Subsequent conflicts recurred in 2012, 2015, and 2016, the largest of which was instigated by a military coup in 2017 involving a brutal counter-offensive that led to massacres, rapes, and arson of hundreds of villages as well as the displacement of over 700,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh. International entities have labeled this operation an act of “ethnic cleansing,” and it is currently undergoing trial in the International Court of Justic (ICJ) to be legally recognized as genocide.
Through the violent unimagining of the Rohingya people in its every dimension, their basic right to inhabit, to host and be hosted, and to imagine their own future has been stripped at the hands of governing bodies. Despite their contested history, there is no doubt that the Rohingya have been pulled by the tide of the making and unmaking of ethnic boundaries in Burma. The question then remains: how do we propel those communities who were once suspended and invisibilized within spatial and sociopolitical peripheries into imaginative focus?
Reimagining Home: The Reconstitution of Memory in Resettled Contexts ///
In the shadow of displacement, material fragments of the homeland, Arakan, persist. The Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre (RCMC), based in Gundum, Bangladesh, is one such organization that has worked diligently to preserve their material cultures, documenting and producing a collection of thousands of erased moments, crafted objects, and space, embroidered into fabric or fashioned from wood. It is precisely in this material documentation that their resistance against erasure lies – for forms of Rohingya diasporic resistance in the Global North have not predominantly been expressed through verbal political protest, but rather through the tangible archiving and practice of their now erased material cultures.
Within these archives and throughout my own research, the Rohingya expressed a sense of dignity through their culture of hospitality both prior to and within displacement, sedimented by objects and spaces with and in which they host. In Arakan, this culture of hospitality is articulated in the veranda, where guests are hosted, and in the Kutupalong refugee camps, in the taleem, a women-only prayer space hosted within the 10x10 foot shelters which scar the earth. These hosting types also reach into collective spaces, taking the form of the tea house or the betel leaf hut, a small space where people gather to collectively chew on betel nut, wrapped in a leaf and topped with confections. Crucially, as the geographic displacement of the Rohingya has persisted, these very spaces of hosting have been replaced by spaces designated to host them. This spatial shift is particularly evident in contexts of resettlement, such as Bradford.
Recognised as a “City of Sanctuary,” Bradford now hosts the largest community of resettled Rohingya in Europe of approximately 700 members. The city of Bradford, marked by a history of migration and labor, is inextricable from its textile mills. The architectural proposition thus envisions a subversion of the mill’s exploitative history through a series of inhabitable shoring structures. These appendages delineate moments where the guest-host paradigm is capsized, allowing resettled Rohingya communities, those continually labeled “guests,” to host the city of Bradford.
The architectural proposition critically interrogates the roles of guest and host structures, challenging the conventional narrative of “integration” of the guest into the host culture/structure as absorption and assimilation. Drawing parallels between new “guest” structures which are attached to existing mills and the political label of the immigrant/refugee as the guest and the existing society as host, the architectural thesis argues urgently for various nuanced spatial approaches which disrupt traditional power dynamics, offering spaces that offer mutual exchange and challenge the hierarchical assimilation of the displaced into the host society. Through this lens, the architectural intervention becomes a tangible manifestation of cultural resistance against both the material erasure of their homeland, and against the homogenizing effects of integration within contexts of resettlement.
Therefore the project proposes a deviation from the traditional reception center. Retiring the design of another space which labels the Rohingya “guest,” it instead proposes a public parlor for the resettled communities to begin to host themselves and the city of Bradford. As a series of three interstitial spaces – spaces between old and new, guest and host, domesticity and collectiveness – it reconstitutes traditional spaces of hospitality and craft that may have been lost amidst displacement: the veranda, the tea house and garden, and the loom. On the ground floor, a tea house spills into a greenhouse that extends beyond the mill’s walls, typifying a non-formal expression of leisurely hospitality and welcome. The upper floor, its woven walls reorienting spaces within the mill towards the Qibla (the Islamic direction of prayer), allow the hosting of private formal functions, including gatherings of worship such as the taleem or political self-organization. These spatial logics and appropriations are nested within various collective and domestic rooms – from public steps transformed by objects which orient one towards their homeland, to a domestic bay window reimagined as a betel leaf hut to host the public from one’s home. In doing so, the project begins to reimagine home away from the homeland, sewing a series of Rohingyan spatial logics, networks of collectivity, familiarity and memory across the city, in which both the Rohingya and Bradford might recognize themselves.
Inherent in the expansive landscapes of displaced people within which the Rohingya find themselves, the rearticulation of territories, emplacements, and polarities takes place not as a passive occurrence, but a contested process. The crossing of borders, involuntarily or otherwise, questions their very conception, giving rise to widespread diasporas who sit at divisive thresholds. What emerges are spaces which straddle a sequence of polarities: invisibility vs. visibility, hostility vs. hospitality, displacement vs. emplacement, precarity vs. protection, and erasure vs. remembrance. At this spatiotemporal periphery, a series of binaries are challenged: host/guest, intimate/relational, private/public, engendering new modalities of inhabitation which challenge essentialized understandings of space that constitute meaningful efforts towards reimagining home.
What is needed urgently, then, are spaces that do not subscribe to either polarity, but instead, propel the domestic into the urban, the intimate into the relational and reimagine the guest as host. Therefore, in an effort to destabilize essentialist notions of “home,” amidst a world of increasing deterritorialization, architectural discourse, practice, and pedagogy can begin to move beyond its technocratic authority, platforming modes of inhabitation that allow the inhabitant to evade and unsettle the sociopolitical structures which encompass them.
