In Search of Bengali Harlem (2022)

In Search of Bengali Harlem follows Ullah from the streets of New York City to the villages of Bangladesh to uncover the pasts of his father Habib and mother Mohima Alaudin discovers that Habib was part of a rich lost history of mid20th century Harlem in which Bengali Muslim men dodging racist Asian Exclusion laws married into New Yorks African American and Puerto Rican communities and in which the likes of Malcolm X and Miles Davis shared space and broke bread with immigrants from the subcontinent He also unearths the hardships and trauma that his mother overcame to become one of the first women to immigrate to the US from rural Bangladesh In Search of Bengali Harlem is a transformative journey not just for Alaudin Ullah but for our understanding of the complex histories of South Asians and Muslims in the United States