By Irene Saha

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Mr. Raihan Rahman is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. After completing a BSc in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), he pursued an MA in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB). His areas of research include Marxian theory, environmental humanities, postcolonial and decolonial studies, global Anglophone fiction, and Bengali literature. His current research focuses on politics in the Anthropocene. Mr. Rahman’s PhD dissertation examines how the critical interplay of capital and sovereign power conditions the re/production of bare life and complicates liberatory political possibilities in the Anthropocene. A writer and translator, he works in both Bengali and English.

1. Looking back, what part of your time at ULAB do you think quietly shaped who you are as a scholar today?

If I look back now, I think the conversations I had with my professors both inside and outside the classroom mostly shaped who I am today as a scholar. I was fortunate to get some amazing teachers at ULAB. I got to learn from figures like Kaiser Haq and Syed Manzoorul Islam. The whole DEH faculty were always very supportive and generous to me. And I tried to make the most out of their generosity. Just as classrooms were formative for me, so were the spaces outside the classroom. I used to go to professors’ offices to strike up conversations on different topics, texts, and theoretical concepts. Most of these conversations happened in the office of Hasan Al Zayed who never got tired or went short of time to address my intellectual curiosity. He treated me not just as a student but as a co-traveler on the journey of learning. When Azfar Hossain came to teach at ULAB every summer, he used to spend hours with his students before and after the class. At the tea stall just outside the Dhanmondi Campus he talked about literature, theory, and revolutionary politics over numerous cups of tea. For Azfar Sir, the classroom was not limited to the assigned room of the academic building but extended to tea-stalls, streets, lobby, and flights of stairs and I learned more in those spaces than in conventional classrooms. Shamsad Mortuza, the chair of DEH back then, despite being a very busy person, always welcomed me when I knocked on his office doors to have any conversation. Salimullah Khan, although not a direct teacher in that sense, also was always welcoming whenever I went to meet him. And each time, I came out of his office either with a print-out of an interesting article or some important book recommendations he graciously gave me.

Those hours were more generative than conventional classrooms and syllabus-texts. The classroom, for me, extended to other spaces and times and the conversations that space-time allowed me shaped my intellectual journey.

2. Before ULAB, you studied engineering at BUET. What pushed you to make such a significant shift, and how did it feel at the time?

The shift, although it looks very radical in hindsight, was not an abrupt move. I was deliberating it for some years but did not exactly know how to make the move. I did not enjoy studying engineering at all. I always loved to read and write and thought why not try making my passion my profession. If I can do a PhD in literature, I can work in academia and read and write for the rest of my life. That was the simple idea which pushed me to change my academic track. 

After completing my graduation from BUET, when I was looking for jobs and grad school opportunities to study literature at the same time, I came to know about the MA in Literature and Cultural Studies program from a senior friend of mine. His name is Azizul Rasel, and he was a lecturer at ULAB at that time. Listening to his advice, I got myself admitted to ULAB.

I immediately began to love ULAB and the program. Especially the DEH faculty. The department was full of such stellar figures, and I was in awe of them. From the very first class I began to feel a sense of belonging which I never felt at BUET. At that time Shamsad Sir was the department chair and Arifa Rahman Ma’am was the MA program coordinator. They were very welcoming and made me feel at home in DEH. Even though I was from a completely different academic discipline, they never treated me as an outsider or an aimless amateur and deeply appreciated my unusual journey and intellectual curiosity.

After some chaotic and depressing years in BUET, I finally began to feel this is the academic environment where I belong. 

3. Moving from engineering to literature can feel like crossing worlds. What did that transition teach you about knowledge, success, or risk?

Of course, it was the pursuit of knowledge that motivated me to make the crossing. There are many people who think studying literature means sitting by the window when it’s raining and reading poetry and thinking of the one you’ve fallen for. There are many such widespread romanticizing imaginations about literature. But for me, literature is a living archive to know about humans around us, the society we live in, and the planet we inhabit. Literature is saturated with historical and political dynamics that overdetermine our lives. I was always interested more in the humanistic approach to knowledge than learning about how machines work. While doing engineering I was not passionate about the pursuit of knowledge. I studied to just pass the exam and get a good job. It’s a totally different story now. Crossing worlds, moving from engineering to literature, in a way fortified my commitment to knowledge and learning.

About the idea of success or the metrics to measure it up, I think they are very subjective. People have told me that my move is a foolish one because engineering careers apparently offer you more materialistic success than making a living through reading and writing about literature. I had a very successful engineering career in Bangladesh – successful in a very conventional sense. But like my time in BUET, I was never happy doing an engineering job. I had to get out and take that risk. Following my passion meant everything to me. After working for five years in the power sector, I left my job and came to the US to pursue my PhD. 

Now I finally have a sense of purpose that became possible only because I took that risk. It redefined me as a person, boosted my confidence. Taking risks and making that transition made me rediscover who I am and can become. Otherwise, I would forever feel lost.

4. Was there a moment during your graduate years when studying English started to feel more than just academic, maybe even political or personal?

It was never just academic. Always personal and even political. In fact, the three – personal, political and academic – were never separate. Remembering the feminist scholar Kate Millett here who popularized the slogan: “the personal is political”. For me also, they are always intertwined and so is my academic life with them. I consider them three entangled streams of the same process. And being an anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal, and environmental thinker myself, I could never keep the three in separate boxes. Every text I read, analyze and interpret, every argument I make while writing my papers reflects my political commitment. It is the core of who I am. And it was always like that, even in my time in ULAB. Studying English or literature was never just an academic activity in the narrow sense of academic. It was and is, always personal and deeply political.

5. Your research focuses on politics in the Anthropocene. How would you describe what that means to a ULAB student encountering the term for the first time?

The Anthropocene was originally a term coined and used in geology and climate sciences. It is the proposed (and contested) new epoch in the geological history of Earth. The significance of the Anthropocene is that for the first time in the planet’s history, human activity has triggered the beginning of a new geologic epoch. Over the past centuries, human activities have reshaped the natural environment, warmed the planet’s temperature, changed the climate on a planetary level, disrupted many geological processes that originally took millions of years to unfold. This human intervention, according to some geologists and climate scientists, marks the beginning of a new epoch. In other words, the human, as a species, has collectively become a geological agent. Although originally it was a concept of earth sciences, humanities and social science also took part in the Anthropocene discourse since it reconceptualizes humanity in a new role and looks at the question of human agency in a paradigm-shifting way. Since the advent of the term and the concept, there have been significant debates on it over the question of what the collective human agency accounts for and how we can conceptualize the abstract notion of human as a collective geological agent when human species is differentiated by unequal and uneven relations of power and wealth. 

Literary studies also have taken an interest in exploring both how the Anthropocene informs literature, and how literature’s imaginative, narrative, and affective registers help us to understand the uncharted territory of this new epoch and phenomenon. So, my research involves understanding certain dynamics of the Anthropocene, mostly the political dynamics through reading literary texts. I am examining how the geological and climatic changes in our time inform the changes in political imaginaries and institutions. My work is particularly focused on making sense of how in the new climatic and geological reality, structures and modalities of oppression are being reproduced. 

That’s in short what I mean by politics in the Anthropocene in my research.

6. You work closely with Marxian and postcolonial theory. What drew you to these frameworks instead of more conventional literary approaches?

The choice of working closely with Marxian and postcolonial theory again comes from my interest in understanding a text in its political, historical, and geographical contexts. As we know, a text never stands alone, autonomously. It is always situated in contexts. My aim is to always understand the context in which the text is produced, that’s ground zero for me to understand a text.

Our modern world has been the product of the entangled mechanism of capitalism and imperialism over the last 500 years. To know the world then, both Marxian and postcolonial theory become indispensable. I work primarily in the Marxian theoretical tradition, but I also find postcolonial theory very useful in different contexts. Considering our own geographical and historical context, of Bangladesh and South Asia, we cannot avoid the question of the long colonial history and how it shaped the national trajectories and thus culture and literature of this region. Postcolonial theory is a great resource in this context.

And the Marxian theoretical framework is crucial to understanding the political-economic context we live in, the dynamics of global capitalism. A text, if we do not forget late cultural theorist Fredric Jameson, contains often repressed social contradictions, hidden conflicts, historical tensions and political dynamics. A text unconsciously encodes the political and social struggles of its time. And the Marxian theoretical framework guides us through decoding that dynamics. It is a great tool to unmask the veils of appearances and help us to see the underlying structure on which not just the text, but the context rests. 

That’s why I work closely in these two theoretical frameworks and my research in environmental humanities is also mediated mostly by Marxian and postcolonial theories. 

7. Many people talk about the climate crisis as a shared human problem. From your work, why is it important to question that idea?

That’s a very pressing question in environmental humanities. On the one hand, it’s true – the climate crisis is one of the most severe crises that humanity collectively has encountered in recorded history. On the other, not everyone is going to bear the brunt of the crisis to a similar degree. The burden of the climate crisis is distributed unevenly. It has class, racial and gender dimensions. Uneven geography, which is the legacy of capitalism and colonialism, is very much alive in how the climate crisis plays out. 

So, when Dipesh Chakrabarty wrote, “there are no lifeboats here for the rich and the privileged” claiming that this crisis a shared human problem, I do not think he considered that there are not just lifeboats for the rich but fortified arks as the billionaires are now building doomsday bunkers. Even though the crisis seems like a shared human problem, it unfolds unevenly on humanity. Consider Bangladesh, which is one of the most climate vulnerable countries and on the frontline of catastrophe. The people living in richer neighborhoods in Dhaka are not going to suffer the repercussions of the crisis as the poor people living in the coastal region or in Sundarbans. They do not share the burden equally. 

The original Anthropocene thesis reduced and erased this question of unevenness to the abstract idea of shared and collective humanity, and it has been critiqued from the Marxist, feminist, post-colonialist and de-colonialist, and post-humanist camps. And critiquing this idea of shared human problem is also important to address the question of responsibility, reparative actions, and justice.

8. You write and translate in both Bengali and English. How does switching languages change what you notice in a text?

Even though I work in both languages, and mostly in English nowadays because of my academic work, Bengali still dominates my mental and cultural universe. It makes the language switch even more tricky and also very generative.

Writing and translating between Bengali and English makes me attentive to certain aspects of a text that might otherwise remain invisible. Each language carries its distinctive rhythms, idioms, and cultural assumptions. So, switching between them often changes what I notice in the text. In Bengali, I am generally more attuned to tonal nuances, emotional registers, and culturally embedded metaphors. When I move to English, I often focus more on structural clarity and conceptual precision. 

Translation also involves finding alternatives to direct equivalence. You know, certain words, idioms, or affective textures in one language cannot always be carried over neatly to another language. It becomes more difficult if I translate theoretical writings from English to Bengali. Because the equivalents of many theoretical jargons are not present in Bengali and it’s even more difficult to come up with one. The literal word-to-word translation often fails to capture the conceptual rigor and contextual nuance of the original term. I need to be extra-careful and thoughtful to come up with the right expression. And thinking in both languages for that specific purpose makes the meaning more transparent, which ultimately is very rewarding as a reader.

Those moments of difficulty are very revealing and enlightening. They show how meaning is shaped by linguistic and cultural contexts. Switching between two languages makes me read texts more slowly and comparatively, paying attention not only to what is said but also to what becomes visible or invisible in different linguistic and contextual frameworks.

9. Is there a Bengali writer or work you find yourself returning to again and again? What keeps pulling you back?

Yes, of course there is! I always keep returning to Akhtaruzzaman Elias’ work, especially to his novel Khwabnama. My MA dissertation was on Elias’ novels. I find his corpus truly inexhaustible, in the sense that it offers possibilities of multiple readings from different approaches. Elias’ work is rich in dialectical investigation of society that depicts life in its rich and living contradictions. He never forces any closure on the narrative, never imposes a teleological end fit to his political inclination but always depicts ceaseless struggle that is the nature of human history. His novels are set against a grand historical backdrop, and the short stories are crafted in the intimate, quotidian spaces of everyday life. But in both genres, what stands out is the story of ordinary humans navigating through the matrix of crises and struggles. Elias looks at society and history as well as life and humans in their multifaceted contradictions and diverse complexities. 

Elias’ focus always lay in precisely identifying the dialectical forces that move history forward and portraying how the mass people confront the dynamics of exploitation and oppression in their daily lives. And how, through the very crucible of that lived experience, they forge languages and modes of resistance. He wrote the stories of humans and their journey of ‘becoming’ as they navigate often antagonistic historical, social, political, and cultural contexts.

I know I will keep returning to Elias for many more years and many more times. It’s a dream project of mine to write an academic monograph on Elias.

10.  Translation involves revisiting the same text multiple times. Does that process ever change how you think about repetition, memory, or return?

That’s a very interesting question! 

Of course, returning to the same text repeatedly changes how I think about the text and the process of reading itself. And each return is different because of what you hold in your memory. Memory accumulates a lot of things on each journey back and it has an accretive impact also. Your earlier choices, hesitations, and interpretations remain in the background each time you revisit the text.  What seems straightforward in the first reading often becomes more complex in later ones. Small details like tones and cultural nuances begin to stand out. The text gradually opens itself through successive encounters, and memory becomes part of the translation process itself. Returning to the same text repeatedly makes me aware that meaning is not fixed but something that emerges gradually, it becomes more transparent with time through rereading and reconsidering the text. Repetition for translation becomes an interpretative act itself.

11.  As you study global politics and ecology, do you notice patterns that feel like history repeating itself? How do you approach writing about that without losing hope?

Yes, I do notice and haplessly brood over it! And that puts me in a place of constant struggle. Struggle of keeping my research and writing going without losing hope while noticing those patterns. 

Often, they feel uncannily familiar, jumping straight out of history books. But again, history does not repeat itself in a literal or monolithic sense, but certain symptoms reappear in new forms and appearances.

Fascism is making a worldwide return but in new costumes, inventing new enemies. Resource extractions and the slow violence they inflict on people are playing out like the colonial era. The depravity and wickedness of the ruling class is at its worst after a hiatus of a few decades under the veil of liberal and welfare policies. These patterns are compounded by the new planetary conditions of ecological imbalance, taking us to a catastrophic future.

And my own research keeps bringing me back to the dystopian possibilities that the recurrence of history and the impending futurity hold. It’s not that I do not lose hope often, but I think it’s a moral imperative to keep resisting, imagining radically different and emancipatory futures, and acting to build a habitable planet for all life and non-life entities. It’s imperative not only as a scholar but also as a human. With the ongoing planetary ecological catastrophe, it has become even more pressing. No miracle will save the planet unless we collectively act and start acting now.

As I said earlier, my reading, writing, and teaching are deeply political. It’s through production of knowledge that I choose to fight my battle at this point. The immediate impacts of the acts of resistance of a small and insignificant person like me are neither visible nor recognizable. But I do believe it will add even a small grain to the tradition of radical scholarship and politics that aspires to resist oppressive dynamics and foster relations of emancipation. That optimism and commitment keep me going.

12.  What do you think literary studies can offer students in Bangladesh who are living through political and environmental uncertainty?

I am not the right person to say something about the career possibilities that literary studies can offer in this time of political and environmental uncertainties. But I can say a few things about what literary studies can offer to understand this time and navigate through the uncertainties as responsible humans.

The most important thing that literary studies offer us is the skill of critical thinking. It offers a lens of diving deeper into human conditions and understanding the ways the world works. Critical thinking can help the students understand better the lived experience they are accumulating everyday and make them question what causes these uncertainties that are making our lives increasingly precarious.

Literature does not simply reflect reality. When we read literature, through our vicarious experiences, we live in different realities and in a comparative framework, can assess our own reality. We learn to recognize how power, inequality, and environmental factors shape our everyday life. And most importantly, literary studies teach us the language that can articulate experiences that might otherwise remain invisible and unspoken. 

And of course, it expands our horizons of imagination and cultivates empathy and ethical reflection. 

Literary studies do not offer simple ready-made solutions but provide intellectual tools and imaginative resources to make sense of uncertainty and envision alternative possibilities. 

I think, in this time of political uncertainty and ecological vulnerability, literary studies can

endow students with an ethical responsibility of critical thinking, offer them language for transparent communication, teach them to approach others with empathy and care, and inspire them to do anything within their capacity to make the world a better place for humans and non-humans alike. 

13.  What is one assumption about theory or academia you had as a student that you later had to unlearn?

Looking back, I think it was the assumption that theory functioned as a stable conceptual framework that could be applied to texts to extract the “correct” interpretation and meaning. Initially, my practice was to apply theory universally without considering the specific context of the text. Over time, I had to unlearn that assumption and expectation. 

I realized that theory is not a toolkit for finding an immutable answer but a way of asking more questions, exploring possibilities that a text offers. Theory also has contextual bias and is not readily applicable universally. Theory is itself historically and geographically situated and open to reinterpretation. Like Frantz Fanon once wrote, “a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue”, it applies to any theory as well. Any theory needs to be stretched to the specific context in which the text was produced. Rather than considering a hand-on tool ready to be applied universally, theoretical engagement always needs to consider the specific historical and geographical context to which the theory is being applied.

Rather than providing closure, theory can complicate reading and expand the range of possible interpretations. My unlearning, in fact, made theory more useful and interesting to me.

14.   Right now, what question or idea keeps following you, even when you try to move on from it?

The question that keeps following me would be why we keep failing to make the best of the revolutionary possibilities that appear before us. Of course, many scholars grappled with this question and tried to answer it. But every time new contexts and contradictions complicate the question. Moreover, it’s mostly the case that the reactionary and oppressive forces come back stronger, subverting and expropriating the revolutionary waves. The revolutionary possibilities apparently fail to build something sustainable on a larger scale across time and space. I sometimes try to move on from this question because it does not offer a happy and reassuring answer, but it haunts me very often.