Bhardwaj, Maya. “New Musics of Mourning, Solidarity, and Hope from South Africa and Bangladesh to Palestine.” Global Performance Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2024, https://doi.org/10.33303/gpsv7n1a228
Representations of pain, destruction, and suffering can feel omnipresent under modern late-stage capitalism. In response to such conditions, from the genocide in Palestine to genocides and conflicts in Sudan, the Congo, Haiti, Kashmir, and beyond, protests have swept the globe that perform resistance, as well as grief, in the public sphere.[1] Such acts of mourning, today and historically, often involve music. As Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, Will Daddario, and Rajni Shah (2024) write in their reflections on performances of grief, “it is commonplace for loss and bereavement to confront people with the limits of certain modes of language: to turn to poetry, imagery, ritual, changing and song, movement, and other embodied practices in order to be with, share, and respond to the intensity and complexity of affective experience and knowledge that grieving can gift” (19). In laments by cellists and pianists amidst the rubble in Beirut and Gaza (for example, see AJ+ 2004); in Maori haka in the New Zealand parliament in response to Indigenous erasure (for example, see Associated Press 2024); and in local performances of grief towards experiences of neo-colonialism and racial capitalism, videos and live performances sonically embody the coexistence of devastation alongside fervent belief in better futures. Music can offer a space to emote mourning and resistance in ways that escape words.
I am a scholar and a community organizer who has also practiced as a violinist throughout the course of my life. My research focuses on social movements and spaces where activists come together in resistance, as well as hope for the future. These spaces often include music, both in moments of militancy, as well as in moments of grief. These performances are often emergent, unwritten, and improvised. They draw from jazz and blues, which are music forms born from Black resistance and mourning. Such improvisational music, also known as “jam(s)”, “compels us to leave our comfort zones, to forge meaningful interactions with others across identities and social categories” (Fischlin et al. 2013, xxxi). Jams, by pushing us to work with the unknown, force us to deepen our connections across groupings and also to exercise our ability to imagine the world as it could be (Bhardwaj 2024). Musical improvisations of grief hold space for the emergent, unscripted, and wordless. Jams create ephemeral performances that respond to the ephemerality of the present, giving expanded sonic meaning to mourning—and hope.
Fred Ho (1995), Chinese-American musician and scholar, writes that collaborative musical performances—especially those which were improvised in both jazz and politics—offered a way to “sound out” the pain of what has been lived, and the dreams for what can be lived differently in the future. José Muñoz (2019) traces the duality of grief and rage at the state’s imperial and queerphobic violence in the present, and hope for joyful queer futurity to come, in burlesque, theatre, dance, and other queer of color performances—some improvised, some rehearsed. By centering improvised music in activist spaces, I ask how jams and collective improvisations can sound out—echoing Ho—both grief at the present, and belief in a new way forward.
This article focuses on two specific encounters with improvised musics of mourning that emerged from my broader work with activists in South Africa and Bangladesh who respond to oppressive local structures and global violence. The reflections were informed by group participant observation and secondary research, in musical and in protest spaces, and were also assisted through ethnographic fieldwork conducted during my PhD in activist and musical spaces in South Africa. In reading these musical events, I argue that they, and improvised and jam music more broadly, make room to hear a new way forward within resistance movements, while also embodying a collective keening at the present. I argue that these performances can express political betrayal by the state, lamentations at state violence, as well as catharsis, healing, and care. They also surface tensions along lines of gender, race, and geopolitics, while outlining the sonic and political connections between two nations in transition.
Bangladesh and South Africa hold important parallel histories of resistance. Each country broke from colonial powers through liberation movements that later became decades-long ruling political parties. Both the Awami League in Bangladesh, and the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, frame their political power through their history as anti-colonial freedom fighters. At the same time, they both have exhibited expansive corruption that has fomented political elites while disempowering the majority of their people (Badruddoja 2019; Von Holdt and Naidoo 2021). Present-day realities have not matched up to their promises of liberation after “freedom” was achieved.
At both the state and the grassroots level, solidarity with Palestine has also been a cornerstone in both countries. Nelson Mandela famously expressed South African freedom as unfulfilled without Palestinian liberation, and this solidarity continues today through South Africa’s case in the International Court of Justice, and expansive local activism (Pontarelli 2024). Bangladesh vocally refused Israel’s recognition of their countryhood and has championed the Palestinian struggle since the 1970s (Srikanth 2009). Ruling powers in both countries have juxtaposed their liberation wars with Palestinian liberation by seeing their fight against colonial occupation as parallel (ibid.). However, neoliberalism-induced corruption by ruling parties in both countries has also provoked grassroots dissenters to see a different form of solidarity with Palestinian struggle against oppressive states in the modern-day (ibid.). Street art, activist speeches, and protest music connect Palestinian resistance against occupation to Bangladeshi and South African resistance against indigenous land theft, state corruption, and working-class precarity (Ahmad 2025).
In 2024, both countries experienced political upheavals. In Bangladesh, student and grassroots uprisings, now called “Bloody July,” overthrew the Awami League’s ruling power, and pushed the dictatorial prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, out of the country (ibid.). South Africa experienced its first-ever loss of majority government by the ANC, the country’s former leading party of resistance to apartheid, following numerous protests against the ANC government from the left and the right (Chikane 2024). As both these upheavals also took place during the genocide in Gaza, both events happened alongside protests and grief against internal conditions as well as expressions of mourning for, and solidarity with, Palestinian liberation. To trace the role of improvised music to animate grief and hope in activist spaces in both countries, this article begins with a close reading of an activist jam event in South Africa, followed by an examination of improvised musical spaces in Bangladesh. In both instances, I argue that these sonics perform grief and rage against colonial and state violence, intertwined with prefigurations of hope. As they chart ways for solidarity across borders and communities, they also contend with tensions around whose grief is deemed worthy of visibilisation.
In late November 2023, a leftist event space named the Forge hosted a jam session by South African jazz musicians in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. It took place in the neighborhood of Braamfontein, a cultural hub in Johannesburg, South Africa’s gritty financial capital. The jam was put on by musicians from leading South African jazz bands, including The Brother Moves On and Kujenga, as well as other musicians. The event was named by one of the performers “‘Post’-Apartheid”. The quotation marks around “post” implicitly questioned whether South Africa had ever truly moved beyond apartheid, and whether this was possible for Palestine and South Africa together. I was part of this gathering as a facilitator, activist, and violinist, invited into South African movement and music spaces.
The jam was inspired by earlier musical gatherings in Cape Town and transnationally, where jazz and improvisational musicians came together to wail their discontent and to express their hopes for Palestinian liberation. These spaces were built to offer catharsis and potential healing to beleaguered activists and community members.[2] Some of the jam’s musicians had participated in a “noise demo” intervention at an Israeli-allied clothing brand’s local store (see Khan 2023). Some had led marchers at a protest outside a trade summit in South Africa helmed by the US and Israel (see Mochela 2023). Several had also supported a tactical blockade of an arms warehouse in Pretoria that held ties to Israel, and to nefarious activities across the African continent (Bhardwaj 2023a). Many were part of a group called African Artists Against Apartheid, launched in 2023, which united sonic and visual artists alongside activists to show that since the South African anti-apartheid struggle until today, artists and musicians were present to enliven, sustain, and embody South African resistance against colonial powers (ibid.).
The involvement of musicians in South African freedom struggles is not new. Scholars Anne Schumann (2008) and Michaela Vershbow (2010) both trace the power of South African protest music in the anti-apartheid struggle. This music built ties between protestors that strengthened social movements, and offered a taste of what liberation might feel like in the present. Such music was often improvised in formal jam spaces and in informal performances at protests and meetings. This music was also often embodied, accompanied by dance, including the toyi-toyi (Vershbow 2010).[3] In both historical and modern performances, the intertwining of activism with collectively improvised music and dance can be seen as a “prefiguration,” what Jonathan Smucker (2014) calls embodied future-oriented politics that enact the world as we wish it to be, in the present (74). Both grief and hope sit beside each other in these performances. This is echoed in music forms across the African continent and the Black diaspora. Joseph Winters (2013), in an analysis of Black resistance music from blues to jazz to hip-hop, traces the power of collective lamentations, particularly in improvisational forms like the jazz jam and the hip hop cypher, as a way to reclaim humanity and allude to the power of the divine to chart paths to a better tomorrow.[4] These theoretical and political themes were echoed in the “post”-apartheid jam space, as I demonstrate below.
On the day of the “Post”-Apartheid event, attendees gathered from local housing and worker movements, art and music collectives, and Palestine solidarity spaces. There were also attendees who were simply fans of the bands, and who we hoped could be activated to join local activism through the gathering. We began with a guided meditation and visualization that asked participants to identify where the grief and rage sat in their bodies, to envision it flowing through them, and to imagine what it might look like to alchemize and transform this grief and rage into hope. We explored what that could create for collective resistance and freedom. After guided collective breath work, we opened the space for a brief discussion circle. Participants spoke of the heartbreak of betrayal from a liberation movement turned party politics, their fear of being targeted as activists, their dismay at economic and liberatory prospects, and their shared feelings of resistance against apartheid in parallel to Palestinian resistance—combined with shared hopes for a truly post-apartheid world.
When the jam portion began, two musicians began with a wailing and keening sound on the saxophone and trumpet, tracing a feeling of grief between noise and music (see video at African Artists Against Apartheid 2023). As the jam grew, performers created a more determined sound, incorporating elements from South African struggle songs and anti-apartheid jazz. The performance ended with an impromptu collective song of “From the River, to the Sea,” complete with audience chanting, cheering, and toyi-toyi.[5] Music and politics scholar Elliot Powell (2020) writes of the possibility of “coalitional auralities” built through music shared between cultures, particularly between racialized and marginalized communities (188). This event performed these coalitional auralities, both between the musicians in the room, but also between performers, witnesses, and imagined wider communities of solidarity and resistance, in Palestine and beyond. It animated our grief and feelings of powerlessness in the face of abject suffering, opening a space for healing through music.
Poet and activist Aja Monet, in the foreword to Robin Kelley’s Freedom Dreams (2020), calls this sort of healing through performed cultural works a “medicinal salve” (xxvii). Performance, whether poetry or music, can offer a balm to grief through collective performances of rage and mourning, in direct actions, in spoken word, and in shared music. The event mobilized a sense of hope, and shared imaginations—and embodiments—of what freedom could feel and sound like. Robin Kelley (2020) calls this the “poetic imagination” of movements in the Black radical tradition that hinge on freedom dreams (xx). This poetic imagination both indicts the brutality of the present and grieves the suffering it causes, while also imagining the possibility of more just and beautiful futures. Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz (2013) find that this poetic imagination, particularly in improvisational music, “can keep us attentive to our responsibility to build the world we hope to inhabit” through its particular power that “compels us to leave our comfort zones, to forge meaningful interactions with others across identities and social categories, [and] deepen the democratic strata of society through cultural activities that fully resonate with the contradictions and possibilities of our times” (xxxi). Through collective imagining, these performances of mourning and dreaming can powerfully subvert the erasure of colonized cultures, sound out the despair we feel in the present, while also animating the possibilities of new worlds that are undergirded by our memories of the past and our hopes for the future.
Though these events explore the possibility of prefigurative politics, they are still bound by structural constraints that reproduce power dynamics. In the event described above, racially, both musicians and audience were largely from South Africa’s Black and Brown majority. In modern South Africa, the time and money to attend formal cultural performances in city centres is often accessible only to those with expendable income, which tends to be white audiences (Vershbow 2014). Thus, the high proportion of Black and Brown attendees in this event in the heart of the city was a notable expression of the politics of the space and the musicians present. In terms of gender, however, most of the performers in that event were men. This is the case in many professionalized musical spaces in South Africa, and beyond: working in a largely nighttime profession raises risks for women, trans, and non-binary people who face high gendered violence, poor access to public transport, and hold care duties inside and outside of the home (Gqola 2021; George 2020; Ledwaba 2019; McAndrew and Widdop 2021). Public grief is often seen as a feminized act, as women’s work and emotional labour that reproduce culture and care (Bhattacharya 2017). Despite this common view, the professional performance of mourning in South Africa—whether in music or in the role of the professional mourner that Zakes Mda explores in Ways of Dying (1995; see also Pires 2010)—is often reserved for men, holding power, legitimacy, and attention. Thus, even in mourning, men’s performances of grief can still hold primacy.
Geopolitical tensions also emerged. In a solidarity concert some weeks following the previous event, Nhlanhla Ngqaqu, the bandleader of jazz band iPhupho l’ka Biko, asked the audience to question why solidarity with Palestine was so vocal in South Africa, while little was heard about the solidarity with the Congo and Sudan. In front of flags of the Congo, Sudan, and Azania (the pan Africanist invocation of South Africa), Ngqaqu powerfully questioned the racial and geographical politics around who is deemed worthy of solidarity, even within the African continent. This echoed concerns raised by activists and scholars about subjective solidarities for Palestine but not for other struggles in South Africa and beyond (Pillay 2025; Roy and Quirk 2024). This provocation was underscored by the band’s name: iPhupho l’ka Biko translates to “Biko’s Dream”, referencing activist Steve Biko, who fought to reclaim Black power and pride in South Africa through launching a movement in the 1970s and 1980s called “Black Consciousness”. This movement resisted apartheid’s forcing of Black wretchedness, which was expressed through activism and culture work that united Black, Indian, and Coloured South Africans (Biko 1971). The band’s name thus strongly centers Black liberation.
Ngqaqu’s provocation invites us to question, not only who receives vocal solidarity, but whose pain is witnessed and performed, and whose pain is normalized and forgotten. In his seminal theorization of Afropessimism, scholar Frank Wilderson (2016) argues that Black pain is construed as natural because Blackness is relegated to the subhuman, while other pain is experienced by humans, and is therefore unacceptable and worthy of rage and mourning. In this interpretation, performances of grief, even by largely Black musicians, can reify hierarchies of anti-Blackness in explicit acts of solidarity. This analysis has important limitations, of course, drawing from the specificity of Palestinian oppression and the particular crisis of witnessing Israeli colonization and genocide in live streams, which the jam drew attention to. Additionally, Global North supremacy, and US soft power through media hegemony, can sometimes amplify the coverage of Black American pain while reducing coverage of, or creating artifiial competition with, others experiencing oppression (Olaloku-Teriba 2018). Most importantly, ideological and praxis-based interventions towards multiracial solidarity, like the “Post”-Apartheid jam space itself, show that, as Robin Kelley (2019) argues, meaningful solidarity can develop between groups that are structurally oppressed in different ways, through feeling empathy for the other, and resisting tendencies towards hierarchies of oppression, or what can be called “oppression Olympics” (Wekker 2021, 94). Olaloku-Teriba (2018) also argues that this mode of argument forms a theoretical impasse for meaningful political action that aims to dismantle oppressive systems, which I echo throughout this article and in my analyses in Interface journal of Afropessimism’s impact in multiracial activist and musical spaces (Bhardwaj 2021).
However, Ngqaqu’s provocation is still important as it represents a critique that resonates with a significant segment of Black leftist politics in South Africa. This sentiment particularly grew through the rise of Fees Must Fall, which was a student movement for free education that began in 2016 and garnered mass national and international attention. Fees Must Fall drew significantly from Afropessimist ideology, both from South Africa, and the US, and greatly shifted South African racial discourse, including in performance and activist spaces (Bhardwaj 2021; Mupotsa 2020; Rao 2020; Kilani 2024). This view is not just one musician’s—it highlights larger underlying tensions in musical and political spaces that draw from identitarian, as well as ideological and tactical tensions that run rife in South African and other multiracial and pro-Black political space (Bhardwaj 2021). The provocation also opens space to draw out other critiques and ambivalences about the jam’s politics: for example, in both performances, male, cissexual, and heterosexual performances took precedence, resurfacing the gendered nature of whose performances of grief receive witness. This close reading of the “Post”-Apartheid jam, alongside allied improvisational and activist events, proposes that the jam can invite forms of mourning that also imagine a different world—but still does not evade the constraints of the present. The following examples of improvised music in post-uprising Bangladesh evoke similar questions.
Questions around what is mourned, and by whome, also arose in performances of grief within collective action in Bangladesh in the summer of 2024, in the wake of uprisings against the Bangladeshi government. I start with contextualising these uprisings. Bangladesh gained national independence, first from the British Raj in 1947, and then from a brutal Pakistani rule in 1971. Power was consolidated around the ruling party, the Awami League, which started in 1949 as a freedom-fighting pro-Bangladeshi independence party. Public mourning has played a key role in enforcing public support for the Awami League as freedom fighters, even as they transitioned into an oft-corrupt ruling party that silenced political opposition and rigged elections (Schultz 2019; Badruddoja 2019).
Collective performances of mourning were centralised in the rituals that empowered the Awami League. The former leader of the party and Bangladesh’s first Prime Minister, Mujibur Rahman, was assassinated by Bangladeshi army-affiliated political opponents in 1975. This was marked annually by a “National Mourning Day” on 15 August, instated by Mujib’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina, during her years as prime minister. Mourning Day was commemorated through public performances of grief in marches, processions, and solemn gatherings, and through specially-written collective songs of mourning (Schultz 2019; Badruddoja 2019). These public rituals of mourning enforced a dogma about the pathos of the state, and the martyrdom of freedom fighters for a Bangladeshi liberation that, to many, has seemed available only to the elite few.
In July 2024, sometimes now referred to as “Bloody July”, Bangladeshi students—and then the wider Bangladeshi public—engaged in protest against what they saw as the nepotism and corruption of the Awami League. Like the ANC in South Africa, the Awami League was widely accused of playing crony politics to cater primarily to party members’ needs, while disregarding the majority of the public, leaving its liberatory roots firmly in the past. The Awami League also often wielded its freedom-fighting histories as a way to justify state impunity, rigged elections, dictatorship, violence and disappearances in response to dissent—while using public displays of mourning to enforce state and party support (Khan et al. 2022; Ahmad 2025).
During the July uprisings, protestors targeted the Awami League’s policy of reserving the majority of civil service roles for the family members of 1970s freedom fighters who were Awami League-aligned. The students and other protestors alleged that these jobs were some of the few pathways to economic stability in a precaritised growing nation, and reserving these roles for political allies was ultimately nepotism enshrined. In response, protestors were brutally attacked by the police and Awami League goons, resulting in hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries across the country, and particularly in the capital of Dhaka (Ahmad 2025). When called upon to explain these attacks, Sheikh Hasina, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, called the students and their allies “rajakars,” a word used to signify traitors who collaborated with Pakistan against Bangladesh in the 1971 Bangladeshi independence war (ibid.). These words catalyzed a broader uprising that ultimately toppled Hasina’s government and led to her ousting from the country. Hasina’s power was tied to her status as the daughter of Mujibur Rahman, whose deification as the icon of Bangladeshi pride was reinforced through National Mourning Day (Schultz 2019; Badruddoja 2019).
During “Bloody July”, students and other protestors defaced the umpteen statues, murals, mosaics, and other public works honoring Mujib, and in August 2024, they vehemently rejected the cult of a National Mourning Day for Mujib. The interim government, which took over after Hasina fled to India on 5 August 2024, struck down the National Mourning Day. Instead, protestors proposed a new day of mourning for a new segment of martyrs: students and protestors who were murdered by the Awami League’s forces during “Bloody July”. While this new Mourning Day was not officially enshrined, numerous public acts performed this new mourning in similar—and divergent—ways. Funerals, both real and symbolic, were carried out across the country for murdered protestors, where placards, art, and music invoking a new sort of freedom in Bangladesh figured widely. Several musical gatherings also performed a form of collective mourning for the slain.
I reached Bangladesh in person in August 2024, so I had not personally witnessed Mourning Days in previous years, nor did I witness “Bloody July” first hand. However, in videos and live streams from the July uprisings, and at in-person events I attended in Dhaka from August 2024 onwards, I watched musicians channel grief—and hope—through public musical interventions that were often improvised, again and again. For example, student protestors engaged in collective song that mourned students’ feelings of betrayal by the former liberation party turned ruling powers, alongside performing their vehement hopes for a truly liberated future. Collective songs and chants drew from a known catalogue of protest music that ranged from the movement against British and Pakistani colonial powers to the modern day, but individual singers and musicians often riffed on—or improvised from—these themes in protests and in cultural spaces. A prominent young rapper, Hannan, freestyled the song “Awaaz Utha” about the protests, which lyrics encouraged protestors to “Raise Your Voice.” Hannan was arrested before the government fell, and protestors chanted his song lyrics at demonstrations, and shared his videos that went viral (Daily Star Bangladesh 2024). At a late-August hip hop event in a public square in Dhaka, rappers cyphered improvised verses commemorating the martyrs and hoping for a new Bangladesh, including verses that riffed on Hannan’s songs. Graffiti artists simultaneously freestyled a banner about youth resistance behind the MCs and accompanying b-boy breakdance troupes. Paul Watkins and Rebecca Caines (2014) explore how the cypher, or improvised verses in hip hop, offer a specific form of performance that “like jazz, draws from the long history of disenfranchised people repurposing the tools of the master to create new forms of art” (1). Drawing from the language of Black resistance, Bangladeshi hip hop heads were improvising lyrics of resistance in the moment, emblematizing a jam spirit intrinsic to hip hop culture in Bangladesh and beyond. At the same time, they were also mourning those murdered and injured, not only in the July uprisings, but in the many bloody years of the Hasina dictatorship. Throughout the performances, audience members often joined in their own improvised chants and musical additions, showing how improvisation—though not within a formal jam space—animated both grief and hope for a new Bangladesh.
Formal jam spaces also emerged that commemorated the protests, and sounded out hope for the future. In September 2024, a progressive cultural space in an upscale neighborhood in Dhaka, Jatra Biroti, convened musicians and cultural workers for a two-week long “prem andolan,” or love social movement—poetically translated as “rEVOLution”, with the “evol” stylized as love written backwards. During the gatherings of the event series that I attended, facilitators led discussion circles processing the trauma of “Bloody July” and hoping for a different future. Musicians shared songs about loves and lives lost to the state while weaving in freedom dreams. In another space, at a nearby private university campus in Dhaka in September 2024, students gathered in silence, and then in song, to commemorate the fallen. They assembled in front of a multi-story banner within the school’s courtyard that proclaimed the names of some of the most known fallen activists. Musicians offered improvised call and response instrumentation that followed the improvisational methods of South Asian classical style (Pearson 2021). Following the courtyard gathering, students marched in song around the perimeter of the university campus. While these latter musical spaces took place in more middle-class areas, the hip hop gathering was in a decidedly working-class public space, with cross-class attendance. In all these spaces, spontaneous collaboration emerged. Musicians led attendees in protest songs, chanting that the blood lost would not be in vain, while they infused new verses and chants throughout. A guitarist at an evening political jam during the weeks-long musical activist convening of the prem andolan invited a beatboxer and a dancer up from the crowd to join them in a song about memory, loss, and renewal. Smaller jam and cypher spaces often emerged at protests and gatherings, where musicians freestyled song and lyrics about freedom and possibility, while grieving those they had lost. Classical musicians traded alaps—a traditional form of South Asian improvisation—alongside cyphered rap verses and improvised additions to collective songs.
Palestine figured heavily in these performances of grief and hope in Bangladesh, as in South Africa, mirroring the long history of Bangladeshi solidarity with Palestinian liberation. Palestinian flags were frequently waved alongside Bangladeshi flags at protests throughout July and August 2024. As protest street art proliferated in July 2024, scores of images proclaimed messages of solidarity and shared struggle between Palestinian and Bangladeshi liberation. Almost every concert and public music event I attended in August and September 2024 invoked Palestinian resistance alongside the Bangladeshi uprising. At the same time, echoing the provocation from iPhupho l’ka Biko, solidarity with Sudan, the Congo, or other spaces experiencing colonial violence were few and far between. While the connection of the global Muslim ummah[6] produces some basis of Bangladeshi support for Palestine, most of the rhetoric expressed by students and in protests was about liberation from empire, suggesting that solidarity did not stem from Islam-based connections alone. However, solidarity for Palestinians was made more visible than the solidarity for Black liberation movements across the African continent and the diaspora. This recalls Wilderson’s (2016) critique that Black people globally are often considered undeserving of solidarity, or humanity, even by politically aligned and racialized, but non-Black, potential allies. Even in a politically aligned Bangladeshi freedom movement, freedom was more imagined towards Palestinians who may have been seen as stronger kin—or at least more visible kin—than parallel resistance across the African continent and the Black diaspora.
Such arguments about who deserves or receives solidarity are also complicated by internal racial and ethnic dynamics within Bangladesh, though there is not a sizable Black population, so racial tensions follow other lines. Bangladesh hosts a large indigenous population called Adivasi, who live across the country, but particularly in ancestral lands in a southern region called the Chittagong Hill Tracts (Chakma 2010). Immediately following the 2024 uprisings in Bangladesh, increased violence and land theft was committed by settlers who were ethnically Bangali against indigenous, or Adivasi, non-Muslim communities in the hill tracts. These conflicts over land rights have been an ongoing dark side of Bangladesh’s history post-independence (ibid.). One specific musical gathering in Dhaka in January 2025 vocally showed solidarity with Adivasi resistance and sovereignty—and many of the musical performances included audience participation and musical improvisation. This gathering was initiated by Adivasi student protestors in Dhaka who were attacked while calling for better representation of Adivasi struggle in the Bangladeshi education system (Mizan and Rahaman 2025). Beyond this event, acts of solidarity with indigenous Bangladeshi movements by ethnically Bangali student protestors were piecemeal. Like in South Africa, ethnic and racial lines still impacted whose suffering is worthy of mourning, even in a revolutionary moment.
Alongside these racial and ethnic complications, other tensions emerged along gender lines, in parallel to those I noted in South Africa. While many of the protestors were women, queer, trans, and working-class people, the martyrs commemorated were largely heterosexual and cissexual male university students. Those performing the commemorations, whether students or musicians, were overwhelmingly male and from dominant community groups. In Dhaka’s music scene, instrumentalists tend to generally be heterosexual and cissexual males, while singing and dance are often associated with feminized performance, holding roots in cultural gendered distinctions from classical South Asian music (Huq 2011). While I witnessed musicians and performers who I knew to be Adivasi, queer, trans, and women from previous interactions or from their self-identification in public spaces, I found that much of their public performances raised questions about continued violence against marginalized groups in Bangladesh post-uprisings. They did not unilaterally praise the uprisings or celebrate the more recent martyrs, as some other musicians did, gesturing to more ambivalence about the country’s future.
The ousting of the Awami League also created a power vacuum where more conservative, Wahhabist political groups seized further power and notoriety, resulting in greater policing of, and violence against, queer, trans people and women in public spaces. For example, a trans activist told me in October 2024 that her friend’s long hair was cut by a stranger in public because she had not veiled and was wearing Western clothing, deemed “haram” or not in accordance with Islamic principles. A feminist activist recounted in September 2024 how she was berated by a male stranger reciting Quranic verses at her on a public bus in Dhaka after the uprisings, while other passengers watched in silence. In a private conversation in September 2024, a feminist scholar-activist described the targeting that she and her students experienced from right-wing Islamic political forces on campus earlier that month, due to her teaching of queer and feminist liberation theories. All these conditions led to conflicted assessments of the uprisings by the queer and feminist activists I met. They also often expressed similarly ambivalent desires about the unequivocal celebration and mourning of student activists who died in July and August 2024, and those who took leadership roles during the uprisings. These activists were aligned with the need for a new Bangladesh—but questioned whether their political alignment was felt on all fronts.
At the same time, alternative responses and modes of collective grief and healing emerged. Ankush Kumar (2024) argued that many trans and queer activists in Bangladesh had gone into hiding after “Bloody July” in fear of the rise of right-wing and anti-queer political parties. Rasel Ahmed and Efadul Huq (2024) contextualize this fear through an analysis of two violent murders of queer activists in Dhaka in 2016 that traumatized queer communities across Bangladesh—holding enduring impacts on queer and trans participation in the July 2024 uprisings. Queer, trans, and femme-led spaces in the aftermath of the Bangladeshi uprisings, as well as following acts of violence committed over the years, turned to questions of care and healing in the face of such trauma. In my experience, conversations at several queer parties and DJ nights in Dhaka celebrated the political upheavals, but wondered what would be different for queer people, women, and Adivasi communities under the new order. These parties were often oriented around dreaming up the present, and in doing so, they centered music and dance as a way of embodying other, queerer, and more feminist worlds in the here and now, on the dance floor. Performance, dance, and queer theory scholars Kemi Adeyemi, Kareem Khubchandani, and Ramon Rivera-Servera (2021) similarly find that queer Black and Brown nightlife spaces can “provide refuge and play” and offer spaces to embody utopia outside of the world’s heteronormativity, even in activist spaces (2). They also find that these spaces cannot depart from the “alienation and…normative modes of exclusion” (ibid.) that exist within the club, the queer movement, and the world. These fears were illustrated when, during the launch of the students’ political party following the uprisings, a queer student activist in a leadership role was outed and did not receive the full backing of the party in response (Rahman 2025). The same protestors who were being mourned had echoed in some previous cases conservative calls against the sanctity of queer life. Thus, there was an anxiety under the surface about safety in queer life that drew participants away from unequivocal performances of grief and public futurity.
As in other queer activist spaces (Bhardwaj 2023b; brown 2017), solidarity and future hopes were undergirded by an ethic of care, focusing less on public performances of emotion, and more on less visible acts of mutual aid, social reproduction, and sustenance (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2020; Spade 2022; Bhattacharya 2016). Community members provided safe houses for the queer activists who were being targeted, and organized drop-offs of food and drinks for peers with less access to mobility. Activists continued to facilitate underground queer gathering spaces that centered a different mode of mourning for the ambivalence of queer life in Bangladesh, rather than mourning the fallen martyrs in Bangladesh and Palestine, alongside tentative hopes for a liberated future. Rather than performing grief and hope, queer, trans, and femme activists turned more to embodying it in quieter ways, expressing solidarity and mutual aid with each other, and with imagined comrades in Palestine and elsewhere through less visible grassroots work.
The two examples of public performances of mourning explored above create grounds for conveying grief at state betrayal, solidarity with Palestinian and other liberation movements, while expressing hope for better, freer, futures. Through collectivizing music—particularly through communal improvisation—in the public square, these performances sound out a politics that attempts prefiguration, by embodying both lamentation of the past and present alongside dreams for what the future can be. They also raise important questions about whose grief is witnessed and deemed worthy of performance, and who gets to do the performing.
These performances show the importance of creating music in the moment, music that animates grief as well as hope, for local community and for imagined global neighbours. When some grief receives more public mourning than others, these events provoke us to ask, what pain goes unseen: Black pain, women, trans, and queer pain, Adivasi grief and mourning? How can performance bring hope to grief, while also contend with, and in some cases reify, structural hierarchies? Across the cases observed in Bangladesh and South Africa, as well as in other performances of mourning shared across social media feeds, I propose that though these performances of collective lament have their limitations, they nonetheless offer powerful examples of the politics of performance that gestures towards liberation. Alongside their important gendered, queered, and power-based caveats, collective performances of politics made musical can still weave mourning, rage, and hope in ways that can translate, or at least prefigure, solidarity through improvised sounds that reach towards transformative change.
[1] A 2023 map by Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (2023) tracks over 4000 protests globally in response to the genocide in Palestine in October 2023 alone.
[2] One of these gatherings included the jam spaces convened by scholar-activist-musicians Asher Gamedze, and Zwide Ndwandwe of Kujenga Band, in Cape Town. Globally, musicians across the UK, US, Sweden, Argentina, Sudan, and elsewhere produced songs in solidarity with Palestine, many of which were performed collectively and improvised upon in protest spaces, like in Lowkey’s frequent cyphers in London protests and renditions of “Lieve Palestina” across Scandanavia.
[3] Toyi-toyi is a form of South African physical movement, often used in protest spaces, which resembles a dancing march and can be traced back to war dances by South African tribes like the Zulu, Xhosa, Pedi, and others. The toyi-toyi was popularised in the fight against apartheid and is now used across South African movements.
[4] Cyphering refers to the practice of improvisation within hip hop live performances (see Watkins and Caine 2014).
[5] This chant refers to the desire for a unified and liberated Palestine, rather than a two-state solution. The full video of this performance, which includes the chant, is available on the Youtube account of The Forge (2024). The moment in question occurs at 46:10 and also at 55:30.
[6] A word used in Islam to denote the idea of a worldwide Muslim community that is connected through faith and practice.
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