Dreams Deferred

‘Dreams Deferred’ explores the transnational journeys of educated, first-generation Bangladeshi women rebuilding middle-class lives in twenty-first-century Britain. Moving beyond conventional diaspora narratives, Rifat Mahbub examines how highly qualified postcolonial women face systemic credential devaluation, career flattening, and professional misrecognition within the host country's labour market.

Grounded in Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical triad of capital, habitus, and field, this rich empirical study traces trajectories from formative girlhoods and academic ambitions in urban Bangladesh to British settlement. It illuminates women’s strategic navigation through employment barriers, intensive mothering practices, selective school choices, and social life.

Ultimately, the book reveals how higher education credentials become ‘deferred dreams’—aspirations strategically redeployed within domestic, maternal, and cultural spheres. ‘Dreams Deferred’ offers a vital, ethical intervention into postcolonial female agency, intersectional privilege, and diasporic class remaking.