Delwar Hussain is a writer and social anthropologist whose work explores borders, queer lives, kinship, South Asia and London’s East End. Committed to working across academic, literary and public audiences, his writing spans ethnography, essay and creative non-fiction. His new book, An Anthropology of Drowning, will be published in 2027. He is the co-founder of Brown Boyz in the Sun, a zine publisher.
Edinburgh / London / Dhaka / Field
Forthcoming · 2027
This is a stark and unflinching work of ethnographic fiction, turning the anthropologist’s gaze back upon himself, at the same time mapping the fault lines of a world in transition and the private griefs that echo within it.
London: Hurst and Co · 2013
An ethnographic study of the Bangladesh-India border and the ruins of progress in borderland life.
19 December 2025
A conversation on queer inheritance, kinship, gifts, chosen family, disinheritance and what a good death can mean beyond biological kin.
Podcast page2013
A discussion of Delwar’s ethnography of the Bangladesh-India border and the social life of progress, ruins and borderland modernity.
BBC pageBrown Boyz in the Sun is not simply a zine. It is an intervention. It began as a collaboration between Yassine Jalouali, a French-Tunisian photographer based in Paris, and me, a British-Bangladeshi anthropologist and writer.
The series responds to a contradiction: Brown-Black queer men are increasingly visible in culture, yet too often aestheticised, eroticised and monetised by institutions that do not let us hold the camera, edit the manuscript, own the archive or profit from the work.
Brown Boyz in the Sun zines exist as a site of small revolutionary acts. They refuse a script that has long been imposed upon us and reclaim authorship, insisting that Brown-Black queer men narrate ourselves in our contradictions, sensuality, shame, pleasure and politics.
+ We challenge the mainstream white-dominated queer cultural establishment that treats us as aesthetic resource while guarding institutional power for themselves.
+ We confront conservative orthodoxies within Brown-Black communities that police queer bodies, desire and self-expression. We speak honestly about eroticism, nudity, or even hair, to insist on joy as well as critique, as acts of defiance.
Brown Boyz in the Sun is not asking for inclusion. It is building autonomy. Because the point is not simply to be seen. It is to bathe in the sun.
Issue one explores nudity: how shame is inherited, desire is disciplined, and Brown-Black queer bodies learn to exist under scrutiny.
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Furry Tales turns to hair: that most political of surfaces. Hair as masculinity, race, fetish, as refusal. We reclaim it as symbol and story.
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Fieldwork gathers visual and material artifacts usually concealed or sidelined in research, bringing them together as a site for creativity and experiment.
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