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In this paper, the way religious identity is constructed via languages, with a particular focus on Arabic and Bengali terms originating from Persian, will be explored. It is vital to comprehend how Bengali Muslims create this constellation of languages, recognising that religion also has its linguistic demands, as language assists with making identities (Jaspal and Coyle 2010). The two languages will provide traces of how Muslimness is managed in the East End and consider how historically, the role of these languages have shifted. For example, the Persian-origin terms analysed are crucial in understanding Persian's influence in constructing a particular South Asian Muslim/Islamic expression. I critically examine how Arabic and Bengali intermingle while asserting different socio-religio-positionings. The claims-making qua a religious identity is morphed through various political junctures, particularly while forging a religious identity with other Muslims and how Arabic has become the dominant language in Bengali Muslims' lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heidi Kaufman's book, "Strangers in the Archive: Literary Evidence and London's East End," explores the life and work of Maria Polack, an openly Jewish Englishwoman who published the first novel by a Jewish woman in 1830. Kaufman's research reveals that Polack's novel, "Fiction without Romance, or The Locket-Watch," targeted a broad Jewish readership across various communities, including readers in British colonies like Jamaica and Barbados. Kaufman expands Polack's archive by consulting the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership website, comparing subscriber data with other publications, and incorporating private papers from the Lyon family, who had connections to the West Indies. Kaufman's work highlights the interconnectedness of East and West End literary culture and challenges stereotypes of urban degeneration. [Extracted from the article]

This paper explores the performance of spoken word poetry at three venues in East London through an attention to the ways in which participants experience and conceptualize these expressive events. Drawing from observation at events and interviews with performers, this paper illuminates the most commonly reported motivations behind the uptake of this genre of performance: achieving emotional healing and providing coping tools to others. By investigating these motivations, this paper considers how spoken word performance can become a personal and collective process of care, where performers overcome individual struggle through shifting bodily orientations and attitudes, while attuning affectively with others through pedagogical caretaking relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early twentieth century, St. Pauli was not the only place in Hamburg to go to have fun. In the city's East End, a wide range of pubs, clubs, and ballrooms turned working-class quarters into a vibrant pleasurescape. Based on historical-topographic and archival research, this paper explores eastern Hamburg's forgotten pleasurescape with the aim of drawing attention to pleasure culture as a social driving force and of redressing the balance in the city's one-sided history of pleasure culture. In the course of the study, the term "pleasurescape" is more clearly nuanced and geo-spatial historical mapping further explored as a tool for urban history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the employment experience of workers at the Eastern Palace Cinema in East London, in 1934. In August 1934, a member of staff murdered the cinema's manager. The witness statements taken in the subsequent criminal investigation give a unique insight into the operations of 1930s cinemas and the working conditions of the people who were employed in them. The statements give voice to a group of service staff that had limited means of relating their lived experience. The article contrasts these statements with contemporary advice on cinema operations from guidebooks and trade papers to explore how trade advice translated into reality. It also draws on archival sources to excavate the backgrounds of cinema staff across roles. This adds to our understanding of the experience of staff employed in the most popular leisure industry of interwar Britain, an area that has not yet been extensively researched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British Yiddish writer Katie Brown wrote humorous stories and sketches for the London Yiddish newspapers Di post (The Post) in the 1930s and Di tsayt (The Times) in the 1940s. The stories, set in London’s Jewish East End, concern the day-to-day effects of immigration, poverty, and Jewish culture in Britain. After the Second World War, in a bombed-out East End where Jewish migration to the suburbs was accelerating, Brown did not write entirely new sketches, but rather edited versions of her prewar stories. Looking at the earlier and later stories together, we get a sense of the changes happening to London’s Jewish community: the decline of Jewish culture and religious practice, the changing relationship with the Eastern European homeland, and the decline of the Yiddish language. Through close reading and analysis, this article gives historical background to Brown and the social, cultural, and political context of her stories. It situates Brown as the only female journalist writing regularly for the press and identifies her unique perspective in making poignant interventions into Jewish debates of the day through stories of small incidents in family life. She raises questions around how to maintain a Jewish identity in England and visibility as a Jew in a Christian world, and traces change through two decades by describing the tension between the immigrant generation and their children. Using a range of neglected source material in Yiddish, this article throws new light on the Jewish East End in its twilight years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-contextualises applied drama practice in the wake of Covid-19, with a particular focus on cognitive diversity. From an inclusive perspective, it asks how encouraging self-expression helps to diversify the still often one-dimensional perception of people with learning disabilities in media reports. It thereby continues an on-going argument around empowered representation within disability drama and culture. The article traces arts practice that engaged a group of women with learning disabilities in reflections about the lockdown 2020. The practice section of the article documents three concrete examples from a workshop series with the members of Powerhouse, a group of women with learning disabilities from the East of London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2016 UK's vote to leave the European Union (i.e. Brexit) has evoked a sense of insecurity and non-belonging among EU citizens and other migrant and minoritised ethnic communities in British cities. Against this backdrop, little is known about how migrant and established populations produce inclusive community spaces, in particular in areas with a history of deprivation. In response, this article explores how Polish migrants and the long-settled residents 'come together' in the East End of Glasgow, a rapidly changing area with a history of poverty and multiple inequalities, to work on community food projects and create inclusive spaces of throwntogetherness. Methodologically, the article draws upon 40 interviews with the long-settled residents and more recent Polish migrants in the area, 10 interviews with representatives of community organisations and associated fieldwork (e.g. occasional participant observation). The article finds that in 'throwing together' diverse local populations, the East End food spaces are conducive to positive encounter against the backdrop of a wider hostile environment. By conceptually engaging with the Masseyan notion of throwntogetherness, the article re-thinks those spaces as continuously becoming and overcoming difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]