Showing papers on "Diaspora published in 2012"

Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity

Abstract: Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity challenges conventional understandings of identity based on notions of nation and culture as bounded or discrete. Through careful examinations of various transnational, hybrid, border, and diasporic forces and practices, these essays push at the edge of cultural studies, postmodernism, and postcolonial theory and raise crucial questions about ethnographic methodology. This volume exemplifies a cross-disciplinary cultural studies and a concept of culture rooted in lived experience as well as textual readings. Anthropologists and scholars from related fields deploy a range of methodologies and styles of writing to blur and complicate conventional dualisms between authors and subjects of research, home and away, center and periphery, and first and third world. Essays discuss topics such as Rai, a North African pop music viewed as westernized in Algeria and as Arab music in France; the place of Sephardic and Palestinian writers within Israel’s Ashkenazic-dominated arts community; and the use and misuse of the concept “postcolonial” as it is applied in various regional contexts. In exploring histories of displacement and geographies of identity, these essays call for the reconceptualization of theoretical binarisms such as modern and postmodern, colonial and postcolonial. It will be of interest to a broad spectrum of scholars and students concerned with postmodern and postcolonial theory, ethnography, anthropology, and cultural studies. Contributors. Norma Alarcon, Edward M. Bruner, Nahum D. Chandler, Ruth Frankenberg, Joan Gross, Dorinne Kondo, Kristin Koptiuch, Smadar Lavie, Lata Mani, David McMurray, Kirin Narayan, Greg Sarris, Ted Swedenburg

Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company

Abstract: 1. Networks of empire and the imperial diaspora 2. The company's imperial legal realm and forced migration 3. Crime and punishment in mid-eighteenth century Batavia 4. The Cape cauldron: tales of a trans-oceanic past 5. Cross-circuits in the Indian Ocean: the VOC and Dar al Islam 6. Social webs at the Cape of Good Hope 7. Disintegrating imperial networks.

Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness

Abstract: Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas argue that a firm grasp of globalization requires an understanding of how race has constituted, and been constituted by, global transformations. Focusing attention on race as an analytic category, this state-of-the-art collection of essays explores the changing meanings of blackness in the context of globalization. It illuminates the connections between contemporary global processes of racialization and transnational circulations set in motion by imperialism and slavery; between popular culture and global conceptions of blackness; and between the work of anthropologists, policymakers, religious revivalists, and activists and the solidification and globalization of racial categories. A number of the essays bring to light the formative but not unproblematic influence of African American identity on other populations within the black diaspora. Among these are an examination of the impact of “black America” on racial identity and politics in mid-twentieth-century Liverpool and an inquiry into the distinctive experiences of blacks in Canada. Contributors investigate concepts of race and space in early-twenty-first century Harlem, the experiences of trafficked Nigerian sex workers in Italy, and the persistence of race in the purportedly non-racial language of the “New South Africa.” They highlight how blackness is consumed and expressed in Cuban timba music, in West Indian adolescent girls’ fascination with Buffy the Vampire Slayer , and in the incorporation of American rap music into black London culture. Connecting race to ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationality, and religion, these essays reveal how new class economies, ideologies of belonging, and constructions of social difference are emerging from ongoing global transformations. Contributors . Robert L. Adams, Lee D. Baker, Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Tina M. Campt, Kamari Maxine Clarke, Raymond Codrington, Grant Farred, Kesha Fikes, Isar Godreau, Ariana Hernandez-Reguant, Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, John L. Jackson Jr., Oneka LaBennett, Naomi Pabst, Lena Sawyer, Deborah A. Thomas

The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race

Abstract: What is the meaning of blackness in Africa? While much has been written on Africa's complex ethnic and tribal relationships, Jemima Pierre's groundbreaking "The Predicament of Blackness" is the first book to tackle the question of race in West Africa through its postcolonial manifestations. Challenging the view of the African continent as a nonracialized space - as a fixed historic source for the African diaspora - she envisions Africa, and in particular the nation of Ghana, as a place whose local relationships are deeply informed by global structures of race, economics, and politics. Against the backdrop of Ghana's history as a major port in the transatlantic slave trade and the subsequent and disruptive forces of colonialism and postcolonialism, Pierre examines key facets of contemporary Ghanaian society, from the pervasive significance of "whiteness" to the practice of chemical skin-bleaching to the government's active promotion of Pan-African "heritage tourism." Drawing these and other examples together, she shows that race and racism have not only persisted in Ghana after colonialism, but also that the beliefs and practices of this modern society all occur within a global racial hierarchy. In doing so, she provides a powerful articulation of race on the continent and a new way of understanding contemporary Africa - and the modern African diaspora.

Impossible Citizens: Dubai's Indian Diaspora

Abstract: Acknowledgments ix Introduction Exceptions and Exceptionality in Dubai 3 1 A Tale of Two Creeks: Cosmopolitan Productions and Cosmopolitan Erasures in Contemporary Dubai 36 2 An Indian City? Diasporic Subjectivity and Urban Citizenship in Old Dubai 65 3 Between Global City and Golden Frontier: Indian Businessmen, Unofficial Citizenship, and Shifting Forms of Belonging 91 4 Exceeding the Economic: New Modalities of Belonging among Middle-class Dubai Indians 117 5 Becoming Indian in Dubai: Parochialisms and Globalisms in Privatized Education 144 Conclusion Reassessing Gulf Studies: Citizenship, Democracy, and the Political 171 Notes 191 Bibliography 221 Index 235

Migration and Diaspora in the Age of Information and Communication Technologies

Abstract: ‘Migration and the Internet: Social Networking and Diasporas’ is an interdisciplinary collection that explores new emerging media and technological networks—developed by individual and family migrants—which help to construct transnational and diasporic communities. Despite the fact that there is an increasing interest in ‘migration’ and in ‘information and communication technology’ studies, this Special Issue of JEMS goes beyond mere description of the use and impact of the technology on human mobility. It provides an in-depth analysis of a wide range of dispersed populations—including Albanians, Arabs, Basques, Croatians, Han, Hindus, Kurds, Romanians, Turks, Salvadorans, Serbians and Sikhs—and their interactions with globe-spanning instruments of information and communication. The issue brings together some of the leading specialists at the crossroads of migration and emerging technologies. The collection presents empirical and theoretical essays from the social, political and behavioural sciences, whil...

The N Word Its History and Use in the African American Community

Abstract: Despite the general societal ban on use of forms of nigger, a variant finds continued acceptance among some members of the African American community for intragroup self-reference. The present research employs quantitative and qualitative analysis of data from narratives by African American comedians to show that a variant of nigger that developed in the early African American community persists in the lexicon of African American English because it conveys a social meaning that is foundational in the identity of many African Americans. Use of this form allows a speaker to construct an identity representing awareness of the history of African Americans and practical knowledge of the nature and implications of the diaspora experience. The form has been productive in its capacity to convey a range of attitudinal stances related to its basic meaning, including solidarity, censure, and a proactive stance that seeks to bring about positive change.

Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora

Abstract: PREFACE INTRODUCTION 1. THE GOALS AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF THE DEPORTATION SYSTEM 2. PROBLEMS WITHIN THE DEPORTATION SYSTEM 3. THE EFFECTS OF DEPORTATION ON INDIVIDUALS, FAMILIES, AND COMMUNITIES 4. THE RULE OF LAW AND ITS BORDERS: DEPORTEES AND THE SPACE/TIME CONTINUUM 5. RECONCEPTUALIZING THE RULE OF DEPORTATION AND POST-DEPORTATION LAW

Battling with Memleket in London: The Kurdish Diaspora's Engagement with Turkey

Abstract: Since the late 1980s there has been a significant migration of Kurds from Turkey to various countries in Western Europe. Even though Kurds from Turkey make up a significant proportion of London's ethnic minority population, they constitute an ‘invisible’ diasporic community, both in terms of the current debates surrounding ethnicity and the Muslim minority in the UK, and in diaspora studies. This article examines how the Kurdish diaspora interacts with, and relates to, their country of origin. It highlights their resistance to, and struggle with, Turkey (as defined by their displacement and suppression of cultural and linguistic rights) as well as the close and, at times, intimate ties Kurds continue to maintain with Turks and Turkey. Whilst the first is conceptualised as ‘battling with Turkey’, the latter is conceptualised within the framework of ‘memleket’ (homeland) ties. The article explores how the Kurdish diaspora encodes its orientation towards, as well as its resistance to, Turkey; in so doing, it...

Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe

Abstract: In Image Matters , Tina M. Campt traces the emergence of a black European subject by examining how specific black European communities used family photography to create forms of identification and community. At the heart of Campt's study are two photographic archives, one composed primarily of snapshots of black German families taken between 1900 and 1945, and the other assembled from studio portraits of West Indian migrants to Birmingham, England, taken between 1948 and 1960. Campt shows how these photographs conveyed profound aspirations to forms of national and cultural belonging. In the process, she engages a host of contemporary issues, including the recoverability of non-stereotypical life stories of black people, especially in Europe, and their impact on our understanding of difference within diaspora; the relevance and theoretical approachability of domestic, vernacular photography; and the relationship between affect and photography. Campt places special emphasis on the tactile and sonic registers of family photographs, and she uses them to read the complexity of "race" in visual signs and to highlight the inseparability of gender and sexuality from any analysis of race and class. Image Matters is an extraordinary reflection on what vernacular photography enabled black Europeans to say about themselves and their communities.

Structure, Audience and Soft Power in East Asian Pop Culture

Abstract: East Asian pop culture can be seen as an integrated cultural economy emerging from the rise of Japanese and Korean pop culture as an influential force in the distribution and reception networks of Chinese language pop culture embedded in the ethnic Chinese diaspora. Taking Singapore as a locus of pan-Asian Chineseness, Chua Beng Huat provides detailed analysis of the fragmented reception process of transcultural audiences and the processes of audiences' formation and exercise of consumer power and engagement with national politics. In an era where exercise of military power is increasingly restrained, pop culture has become an important component of soft power diplomacy and transcultural collaborations in a region that is still haunted by colonization and violence. The author notes that the aspirations behind national governments' efforts to use popular culture is limited by the fragmented nature of audiences who respond differently to the same products; by the danger of backlash from other members of the importing country's population that do not consume the popular culture products in question; and by the efforts of the primary consuming country, the People's Republic of China to shape products through co-production strategies and other indirect modes of intervention.

The growth of Diaspora - A decentralized online social network in the wild

Abstract: The Diaspora network [1] is a recently launched decentralized online social network with over 216; 000 users as of November 16; 2011. It is a network of independent, federated Diaspora servers that are administrated by individual users who allow Diaspora users' profiles to be hosted on their servers. In this paper we take a first look at the Diaspora network's overall growth in terms of number of users, the topology of its interconnected servers, and the reliability of those servers. We also present a simple analysis to explain the growth of the Diaspora network. Our timely measurement study of a real-world decentralized online social network sheds light on the evolution of such a network in practice, and provides valuable observations and insights that can help the future design and implementation of decentralized online social networking.

Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances

Abstract: A major historical phenomenon of our century, exile has been a focal point for reflections about individual and cultural identity and problems of nationalism, racism, and war. Whether emigres, exiles, expatriates, refugees, or nomads, these people all experience a distance from their homes and often their native languages. Exile and Creativity brings together the widely varied perspectives of nineteen distinguished European and American scholars and cultural critics to ask: Is exile a falling away from a source of creativity associated with the wholeness of home and one’s own language, or is it a spur to creativity? In essays that range chronologically from the Renaissance to the 1990s, geographically from the Danube to the Andes, and historically from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, the complexities and tensions of exile and the diversity of its experiences are examined. Recognizing exile as an interior experience as much as a physical displacement, this collection discusses such varied topics as intellectual exile and seventeenth-century French literature; different versions of home and of the novel in the writings of Bakhtin and Lukacs; the displacement of James Joyce and Clarice Lispector; a young journalist’s meeting with James Baldwin in the south of France; Jean Renoir’s Hollywood years; and reflections by the descendents of European emigres. Strikingly, many of the essays are themselves the work of exiles, bearing out once more the power of the personal voice in scholarship. With the exception of the contribution by Henry Louis Gates Jr., these essays were originally published in a special double issue of Poetics Today in 1996. Exile and Creativity will engage a range of readers from those whose specific interests include the problems of displacement and diaspora and the European Holocaust to those whose broad interests include art, literary and cultural studies, history, film, and the nature of human creativity. Contributors. Zygmunt Bauman, Janet Bergstrom, Christine Brooke-Rose, Helene Cixous, Tibor Dessewffy, Marianne Hirsch, Denis Hollier, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Linda Nochlin, Leo Spitzer, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Thomas Pavel, Doris Sommer, Nancy Huston, John Neubauer, Ernst van Alphen, Alicia Borinsky, Svetlana Boym, Jacqueline Chenieux-Gendron

Black/Queer/Diaspora at the Current Conjuncture

Abstract: This essay sketches the parameters of black/queer/diaspora ethics, aesthetics, and methodologies vis-a-vis conjunctural moments in black queer studies, women of color feminisms, queer of color critique, queer theory, and on-the-ground expressive practices. This genealogical matrix of the present moment argues that black/queer/diaspora work's love ethic, and radical roots in black and women of color feminisms, uniquely constructs it as an organic project of multivalent and multiscalar reclamation, revisioning, and futurity toward producing deeply humane and capacious analyses that both reflect "real life" on the ground and speculate on liberatory models—projecting our imaginations forward, toward possible futures.

Global South Asians: Introducing the modern Diaspora

Abstract: By the end of the twentieth century some nine million people of South Asian descent had left India, Bangladesh or Pakistan and settled in different parts of the world, forming a diverse and significant modern diaspora. In the early nineteenth century, many left reluctantly to seek economic opportunities which were lacking at home. This is the story of their often painful experiences in the diaspora, how they constructed new social communities overseas and how they maintained connections with the countries and the families they had left behind. It is a story compellingly told by one of the premier historians of modern South Asia, Judith Brown, whose particular knowledge of the diaspora in Britain and South Africa gives her insight as a commentator. This is a book which will have a broad appeal to general readers as well as to students of South Asian and colonial history, migration studies and sociology.

In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974

Abstract: In Search of Power is a history of the era of civil rights, decolonization and Black Power. In the critical period from 1956 to 1974, the emergence of newly independent states worldwide and the struggles of the civil rights movement in the United States exposed the limits of racial integration and political freedom. Dissidents, leaders and elites alike were linked in a struggle for power in a world where the rules of the game had changed. Brenda Gayle Plummer traces the detailed connections between African Americans' involvement in international affairs and how they shaped American foreign policy, integrating African American history, the history of the African Diaspora and the history of United States foreign relations. These topics, usually treated separately, not only offer a unified view of the period but also reassess controversies and events that punctuated this colorful era of upheaval and change.

Governmentality, Diaspora Assemblages and the Ongoing Challenge of “Development”

Abstract: Drawing on governmentality debates, I argue that skilled members of the Jamaican diaspora are becoming important actors in an ongoing development strategy to extend the rationality of the market into everyday social relations and institutions. Diaspora members are imagined by states and development institutions to be ideal development partners because of their access to potentially lucrative business, knowledge and capital networks, and their desire to direct them towards socially transformative ends. But, as I shall demonstrate, efforts to incorporate skilled emigres into national development plans raise important questions about the entanglements between diaspora strategies, state power and enduring local patterns of uneven development. Rather than a space of social transformation, diaspora can also function as a space of stasis that reproduces rather than transforms such patterns. By examining Jamaica's emerging diaspora strategy, I examine not only the governmental role that diaspora groups are increasingly beginning to play, but also their potential to support or disrupt the class, gender and racial asymmetries that have historically governed flows of wealth, opportunity and power across the island.

Diaspora Basques and Online Social Networks: An Analysis of Users of Basque Institutional Diaspora Groups on Facebook

Abstract: This paper presents the results of original user-based research regarding the Basque diaspora presence on social network sites (SNSs). It is the first academic investigation on the users of Basque diaspora-association groups on Facebook, the largest SNS on the Web. It focuses on the online and offline dimensions of the Basque institutional diaspora presence on the World Wide Web. By concentrating on the Basque diaspora case, I draw attention to the implications that information and communication technologies (ICTs) have on international migrant diasporas, with particular emphasis on how migrant associations and their members perform in a bid to accomplish their activities and goals. The present work opens new venues for future multi- and interdisciplinary analysis as well as comparative and longitudinal studies that could clearly be of interest to researchers, scholars and students of migration and ICTs.

Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru

Abstract: Bound Lives chronicles the lived experience of race relations in northern coastal Peru during the colonial era. Rachel Sarah O Toole examines the construction of a casta (caste) system under the Spanish government, and how this system was negotiated and employed by Andeans and Africans. Royal and viceregal authorities defined legal identities of Indian and Black to separate the two groups and commit each to specific trades and labor. Although they were legally divided, Andeans and Africans freely interacted and depended on each other in their daily lives. Thus, the caste system was defined at both the top and bottom of society. Within each caste, there were myriad subcategories that also determined one s standing. The imperial legal system also strictly delineated civil rights. Andeans were afforded greater protections as a threatened native population. Despite this, with the crown s approval during the rise of the sugar trade, Andeans were driven from their communal property and conscripted into a forced labor program. They soon rebelled, migrating away from the plantations to the highlands. Andeans worked as artisans, muleteers, and laborers for hire, and used their legal status as Indians to gain political representation. As slaves, Africans were subject to the judgments of local authorities, which nearly always sided with the slaveholder. Africans soon articulated a rhetoric of valuation, to protect themselves in disputes with their captors and in slave trading negotiations. To combat the ongoing diaspora from Africa, slaves developed strong kinship ties and offered communal support to the newly arrived. Bound Lives offers an entirely new perspective on racial identities in colonial Peru. It highlights the tenuous interactions of an imperial power, indigenous group, and enslaved population, and shows how each moved to establish its own power base and modify the existing system to its advantage, while also shaping the nature of colonialism itself."

Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong

Abstract: During the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of Chinese men and women crossed the Pacific to work, trade, and settle in California. Drawn by the gold rush, they brought with them skills and goods and a view of the world that, though still Chinese, was transformed by their long journeys back and forth. They in turn transformed Hong Kong, their main point of embarkation, from a struggling, infant colony into a prosperous, international port and the cultural center of a far-ranging Chinese diaspora. Making use of extensive research in archives around the world, Pacific Crossing charts the rise of Chinese Gold Mountain firms engaged in all kinds of trans-Pacific trade, especially the lucrative export of prepared opium and other luxury goods. Challenging the traditional view that this migration was primarily a "coolie trade," Elizabeth Sinn uncovers leadership and agency among the many Chinese who made the crossing. In presenting Hong Kong as an "in-between place" of repeated journeys and continuous movement, Sinn also offers a fresh view of the British colony and a new paradigm for migration studies.

Displaced: Life in the Katrina Diaspora

Abstract: * Foreword by Bonnie Thornton Dill* Acknowledgments 1. Documenting Displacement: An Introduction, Lynn Weber and Lori Peek 2. The Research Network, Lynn Weber* Section I. Receiving Communities and Persons Displaced by Hurricane Katrina Introduction by Lee M. Miller 3. They Call It "Katrina Fatigue": Displaced Families and Discrimination in Colorado, Lori Peek 4. The Basement of Extreme Poverty: Katrina Survivors and Poverty Programs Laura Lein, Ron Angel, Julie Beausoleil, and Holly Bell 5. Living through Displacement: Housing Insecurity among Low-Income Evacuees, Jessica W. Pardee 6. When Demand Exceeds Supply: Disaster Response and the Southern Political Economy, Lynn Weber 7. Katrina Evacuee Reception in Rural East Texas: Rethinking Disaster "Recovery", Lee M. Miller 8. Permanent Temporariness: Displaced Children in Louisiana, Alice Fothergill and Lori Peek* Section II. Social Networks among Katrina's Displaced Introduction by Jacquelyn Litt 9. Help from Family, Friends, and Strangers during Hurricane Katrina: Finding the Limits of Social Networks, Elizabeth Fussell 10. "We need to get together with each other": Women's Narratives of Help in Katrina's Displacement, Jacquelyn Litt 11. The Women of Renaissance Village: From Homes in New Orleans to a Trailer Park in Baker, Louisiana, Beverly J. Mason 12. Twice Removed: New Orleans Garifuna in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina, Cynthia Garza 13. After the Flood: Faith in the Diaspora, Pamela Jenkins* Section III. Charting a Path Forward Introduction by Lynn Weber 14. Community Organizing in the Katrina Diaspora: Race, Gender, and the Case of the People's Hurricane Relief Fund, Rachel E. Luft* Author Bios* Index

Lessons from pre-colonial multilingualism

Abstract: Multilingualism is often celebrated in the communicative context of late modernity, where languages come into contact in contexts of transnational affiliation, diaspora communities, digital communication, fluid social boundaries and the blurring of time/space distinctions (see Rampton 1997). However, this is not a new phenomenon. There is a small but growing body of scholarship on the types of multilingualism found in pre-modern and pre-colonial times. Scholars are using a different term for the type of multilingualism practised then: plurilingualism. Some believe that colonization and the influx of Western European language ideologies led to the suppression or distortion of the vibrant plurilingual practices in the pre-colonial southern hemisphere. An understanding of the pre-colonial language practices will help us to appreciate communicative practices in contemporary times.

Strategy and Tactics: Chinese Immigrants and Diasporic Spaces in Johannesburg, South Africa

Abstract: Migration studies in South Africa have partially taken the spatial turn, giving some attention to questions of territoriality and spatial relationships. Recent literature has drawn on de Certeau's distinction between the strategies of the powerful and the tactics of the subordinate, revealing for example how migrants occupy hidden spaces to evade control and social hostility. Within the broad aegis of de Certeau's work, we engage the historical and contemporary spaces of the Chinese diaspora in Johannesburg. We describe a highly differentiated grouping of migrants that has deployed, and continues to deploy, varying tactics over time and across space. There are, for example, processes of clustering and processes of dispersal. There is also the use of visibility and cultural marking as a spatial tactic, as well as of invisibility and hidden spaces. We also reveal that the spatial practices of the Chinese migrants do not only relate to the strategies of the powerful but are also a response to the competition...

Literature of the Indian Diaspora

Abstract: O.P. Dwivedi, Literature of the Indian Diaspora (PencraftInternational, 2011)Literature of the Indian Diaspora constitutes a major study of the literature and other cultural texts of the Indian diaspora. It is also an important contribution to diaspora theory in general. Applying a theoretical framework based on trauma, mourning/impossible mourning, spectres, identity, travel, translation, and recognition, this anthology uses the term 'migrant identity' to refer to any ethnic enclave in a nation-state that defines itself, consciously or unconsciously, as a group in displacement. The present anthology examines the works of key writers, many now based across the globe in Canada, Denmark, America and the UK - V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Balachandra Rajan, M.G. Vassanji, Jhumpa Lahiri, Gautam Malkani, Shiva Naipaul, Tabish Khair and Shauna Singh Baldwin, among them - to show how they exemplify both the diasporic imaginary and the respective traumas of Indian diasporas.Corelating the concept of diaspora - literally dispersal or the scattering of a people - with the historical and contemporary presence of people of Indian sub-continental origin in other areas of the world, this anthology uses this paradigm to analyse Indian expatriate writing. In Reworlding, O.P. Dwivedi has commissioned ten critical essays by as many scholars to examine major areas of the diaspora. Collectively, the essays demonstrate that the various literary traditions within the Indian diaspora share certain common resonances engendered by historical connections, spiritual affinities, and racial memories. Individually, they provide challenging insights into the particular experiences and writers. At the core of the diasporic writing is the haunting presence of India and the shared anguish of personal loss that generate the aesthetics of 'reworlding' underlying and unifying this body of literature. This collection will be of value to scholars and students of Indian writing in English, postcolonial writing in general, and the literature of exile and immigration.This collection of essays also retraces the postcolonial narratives of Indian diaspora etched by diasporic Indian writers. What mainly comes under its scrutiny is the complex experience of migrancy, encompassing both cultural hybridisation and assimilation on the one hand and lingering nostalgia and cultural alienation on the other. Its critique of the recent and not so recent diasporic texts, at once probing and insightful, foregrounds the deterritorialised, expatriate sensibility of their authors. Noticeably, the study contends that this sensibility blends seamlessly with various prominent features of this variety of diasporic writing, for instance, of individuation and self-definition in Rushdie, of conquest of rootlessness in Jhumpa Lahiri, of cultural inbetweenness in B. Rajan, and of the special charms of diasporic sensibility itself in Naipaul.This anthology, consisting of ten essays, encompasses an overarching view of the writing of the Indian diaspora. Of these, the first paper, by Silvia Albertazzi, titled 'Translation, Migration and Diaspora in Salman Rushdie's fiction', brilliantly argues how migrant narration becomes a fiction of individuation and self-definition, a kind of travel literature where departure is often forced, transit is endless and one very rarely reaches a point of arrival where present is lived by renaming the past. Migration always implies change: and change involves the risk of losing one's identity. Whilst the migrant does not recognize him/herself in his/her new image, the people around him/her do not accept his/her otherness. Therefore, s/he is compelled to face everyday life through a continuous oscillation between reality and dream. The migrant writer opposes imagination and the fantastic to western realistic mimesis. Albertazzi stresses, 'The migrant is compelled to experience the world through imagination' (34). The second paper, 'Reconfigured Identities: "Points of Departure" and Alienation of Arrival in Balachandra Rajan's The Dark Dancer', by Anna Clarke examines at length the postcolonial predicament of Rajan's protagonist, Krishnan, in the novel to 'belong' to his society and its cultural paradigms because of his long stay in the West. …

Watching soap opera in the diaspora: cultural proximity or critical proximity?

Abstract: This paper focused on an area of transnational Arabic television, which has attracted little scholarly attention: soap operas and their consumption among women in the Arab diaspora. Focus groups with Arab audiences in London revealed the significant role that soap operas play in sustaining a gendered critical and reflexive proximity to the Arab world. The paper shows that soap opera viewing provides female audiences in the diaspora with opportunities to reflect on their own gender identities as distant from hegemonic discourses of gender in their region of origin but as proximate to a moral set of values they associate with this same region. This was especially, but not exclusively, the case with young women born in the diaspora.

Diaspora and identity in the Viking Age

Abstract: This article investigates the implications of the recent application of the term ‘diaspora’ to the overseas settlements of the Viking Age and offers a speculative assessment, based on literary, historical, archaeological, sculptural and onomastic evidence, of how the concept might contribute to our understanding of the cultural dynamics of the period. This exploratory look at connectivity in the ‘viking world’ considers the respective roles of the Scandinavian homelands and overseas settlements in the interplay of cultural forces from the ninth to the eleventh century.

Transnational Marriage: New Perspectives from Europe and Beyond

Abstract: Section 1: Concepts 1: Transnational Marriage Katharine Charsley 2: Transnational Marriage Migration and Marriage Migration: An Overview Lucy Williams Section 2: Legal Contexts 3: Any Time, Any Place, Anywhere: Entry Clearance, Marriage Migration and the Border Helena Wray 4: Danish Regulations on Marriage Migration: Policy Understandings of Transnational Marriages Martin Bak Jorgensen Section 3: Marriage, Transnationalism and Belonging 5: Migration, Integration and Transnational Involvement: Muslim Family Migrants in Urban Areas in Britain Hiranthi Jayaweera 6: Marrying at Home, Marrying Away: Customary Marriages and Legal Marriages in Ngazidja and in the Diaspora Iain Walker 7: Transnational Marriage in Conflict Settings: War, Dispersal and Marriage Among Sri Lankan Tamils Maunaguru Sidharthan and Nicholas Van Hear Section 4: Gender, Power and Visibility 8: Transnational Families Breaking Up: Divorce Among Turkish Immigrants in Denmark Anika Liversage 9: Beyond the Stereotype of the 'Thai-Bride': Visibility, Invisibility and Community Jessica Mai Sims 10: Capturing and Reproducing Marriages: Transnationalism, Materiality and the Wedding Video Kanwal Mand 11. Marriage, Migration and Transnational Social Spaces: A View from the UK Katharine Charsley

In the Dragon's Den: African Traders in Guangzhou

Abstract: A growing literature studies the Chinese diasporas in Africa, involved in the import and distribution of manufactured goods across the continent, identifying their economic and social strategies and their interactions with African urban and political life. In contrast, the counter-flow of African private traders to China has been relatively little studied, yet is part of significant changes in African economies and societies, and creates new interactions in Chinese cities. The commerce in which they have engaged since the introduction of the ‘Open Door’ policy and the subsequent rapid rise in bilateral trade has been undertaken through not only a period of booming international trade, but also a fuel crisis and a world financial crisis in 2008. This article explores the African diaspora in Guangzhou, China's major export hub. Drawing on ongoing work by the authors begun in 2005, it examines how the Guangzhou–Africa trade has changed over the period, what strategies have been adopted by migrants at the Guangzhou end of the value chain, and how their perceptions of their migration, their migrant community and their host city (and its perceptions of them) have changed over time. Findings are theorised in relation to grass-roots transnationalism.

Autonomy and Positionality in Diaspora Politics

Abstract: This contribution to a forum on "Diasporas and IR" aspires to elucidate theoretical connections between International Relations as a discipline, and the under-theorized study of transnational diaspora poliics. It discusses two important concepts: "autonomy" of diaspora agents vis-a-vis original homelands, and their "positionality," or positions of power in different states and international organizations. These concepts are important yet undertheorized in the study of IR.