Showing papers on "Diaspora published in 2014"

Cultural identity and diaspora

Abstract: A new cinema of the Caribbean is emerging, joining the company of the other 'Third Cinemas' It is related to, but different from the vibrant film and other forms of visual representation of the Afro-Caribbean (and Asian) 'blacks' of the diasporas of the West – the new post-colonial subjects There are at least two different ways of thinking about 'cultural identity' The first position defines 'cultural identity' in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective 'one true self, hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed 'selves', which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common Cultural identity is a matter of 'becoming' as well as of 'being' It belongs to the future as much as to the past It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation

A Critical Look at Dual Language Immersion in the New Latin@ Diaspora

Abstract: Two-way immersion (TWI), an approach that combines language-minority students and native English speakers in dual-language classrooms, is growing in popularity in schools of newly Latinized regions of the U.S. Using North Carolina as an example, this critical review of the literature posits that as neoliberal trends increasingly shape the communities of the new Latin@ diaspora, the uncritical implementation of TWI can serve as a double-edged sword that commodifies Latin@s’ linguistic resources. The article discusses these dangers, as well as critical issues that should be considered to increase TWI’s potential for Latin@ empowerment in new gateway regions.

Diaspora Institutions and Diaspora Governance

Abstract: Why do governments form institutions devoted to emigrants and their descendants in the diaspora? Such institutions have become a regular feature of political life in many parts of the world: Over half all United Nations Member States now have one. Diaspora institutions merit research because they connect new developments in the global governance of migration with new patterns of national and transnational sovereignty and citizenship, and new ways of constructing individual identity in relation to new collectivities. But these institutions are generally overlooked. Migration policy is still understood as immigration policy, and research on diaspora institutions has been fragmented, case-study dominated, and largely descriptive. In this article, I review and extend the relevant theoretical literature and highlight empirical research priorities. I argue that existing studies focus too exclusively on national-level interests and ideas to explain how individual states tap diaspora resources and embrace these groups within the nation-state. However, these approaches cannot explain the global spread of diaspora institutions. This, I argue, requires a comparative approach and greater attention to the role of efforts to create a coherent but decentralized system of global governance in the area of international migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider

Abstract: Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider offers an original perspective on the significance of both racism and anti-racism in the making of the English working class. While racism became a powerful structuring force within this social class from as early as the mid-Victorian period, this book also traces the episodic emergence of currents of working class anti-racism. Through an insistence that race is central to the way class works, this insightful text demonstrates not only that the English working class was a multi-ethnic formation from the moment of its inception but that racialized outsiders – Irish Catholics, Jews, Asians and the African diaspora – often played a catalytic role in the collective action that helped fashion a more inclusive and democratic society.

C. L. R. James in Imperial Britain

Abstract: C. L. R. James in Imperial Britain chronicles the life and work of the Trinidadian intellectual and writer C. L. R. James during his first extended stay in Britain, from 1932 to 1938. It reveals the radicalizing effect of this critical period on James's intellectual and political trajectory. During this time, James turned from liberal humanism to revolutionary socialism. Rejecting the "imperial Britishness" he had absorbed growing up in a crown colony in the British West Indies, he became a leading anticolonial activist and Pan-Africanist thinker. Christian Hogsbjerg reconstructs the circumstances and milieus in which James wrote works including his magisterial study The Black Jacobins. First published in 1938, James's examination of the dynamics of anticolonial revolution in Haiti continues to influence scholarship on Atlantic slavery and abolition. Hogsbjerg contends that during the Depression C. L. R. James advanced public understanding of the African diaspora and emerged as one of the most significant and creative revolutionary Marxists in Britain.

Nation as Network: Diaspora, Cyberspace, and Citizenship

Abstract: How is the Internet transforming the relationships between citizens and states? What happens to politics when international migration is coupled with digital media, making it easy for people to be politically active in a nation from outside its borders? In Nation as Network, Victoria Bernal creatively combines media studies, ethnography, and African studies to explore this new political paradigm through a striking analysis of how Eritreans in diaspora have used the Internet to shape the course of Eritrean history. Bernal argues that Benedict Anderson's famous concept of nations as "imagined communities" must now be rethought because diasporas and information technologies have transformed the ways nations are sustained and challenged. She traces the development of Eritrean diaspora websites over two turbulent decades that saw the Eritrean state grow ever more tyrannical. Through Eritreans' own words in posts and debates, she reveals how new subjectivities are formed and political action is galvanized online. She suggests that "infopolitics"-struggles over the management of information-make politics in the twenty-first century distinct, and she analyzes the innovative ways Eritreans deploy the Internet to support and subvert state power. Nation as Network is a unique and compelling work that advances our understanding of the political significance of digital media.

Transnational Dynamics of Civil War

Abstract: Part I. Civil War: Mobilizing across Borders: 1. Transnational dynamics of civil war Jeffrey T. Checkel Part II. Transnationalized Civil War: 2. Copying and learning from outsiders? Assessing diffusion from transnational insurgents in the Chechen wars Kristin M. Bakke 3. Mechanisms of diaspora mobilization and the transnationalization of civil war Fiona B. Adamson 4. Refugee militancy in exile and upon return in Afghanistan and Rwanda Kristian Berg Harpviken and Sarah Kenyon Lischer 5. Rebels without a cause? Transnational diffusion and the Lord's Resistance Army, 1986-2011 Hans Peter Schmitz 6. Transnational advocacy networks, rebel groups, and demobilization of child soldiers in Sudan Stephan Hamberg 7. Conflict diffusion via social identities: entrepreneurship and adaptation Martin Austvoll Nome and Nils B. Weidmann Part III. Theory, Mechanisms, and the Study of Civil War: 8. Causal mechanisms and typological theories in the study of civil conflict Andrew Bennett 9. Transnational dynamics of civil war: where do we go from here? Elisabeth Jean Wood.

Critical Reflections on »Chinese Capitalism« as Paradigm

Abstract: A culturally shaped Chinese capitalism has received much attention over the last decade, accompanied by a renewed interest in Confucianism as the marker for Chinese culture. This essay argues against culturalist explanations of the successful economic development of Chinese (and more generally, East Asian) societies. The flourishing of capitalism in these societies, it argues instead, is best understood with reference to developments within capitalism globally. Rather than a source of capitalist development, a Chinese culture conceived homogeneously provides an ideological alibi to new developments within capitalism, as well as a means to check the disruptive effects of capitalist development in Chinese societies. An insistence on Chineseness conceived culturally disguises, and seeks to contain, the social and cultural dispersal of Chinese populations, the so‐called Chinese diaspora.

Beyond Chinese groupism: Chinese Australians between assimilation, multiculturalism and diaspora

Abstract: This essay argues that the tension between ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ identity is not contingent, but structurally embedded in the workings of the contemporary nation state. Through an analysis of ‘the Chinese’ in ‘Australia’ it aims to demonstrate that seemingly unambiguous concepts such as assimilation (the ethnic is absorbed by the national), multiculturalism (the ethnic coexists with the national) and diaspora (the ethnic transcends the national) cannot capture the diverse difficulties, ambivalences and failures of identification, belonging and political agency experienced by Chinese Australians. A more satisfactory analysis requires a questioning of the groupness of ‘the Chinese’ (as well as ‘the Australians’) and overcoming conceptual groupism (Brubaker): the tendency to take discrete, sharply differentiated, internally homogeneous and externally bounded groups as basic constituents of social life. Instead a more processual and flexible understanding is proposed, where the relationship between ‘ethnic’...

Temporal and Generational Impact on Identity, Home(Land) and Politics of Belonging among the Kurdish Diaspora

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to examine the experiences of two generations among the Kurdish diaspora in Sweden: those who migrated as adults and those who were born and/or raised in Sweden. The focus will be on issues of identity, home(land) and politics of belonging with regard to generational and temporal aspects. We will argue that there are significant differences among the older and younger generations with regard to their experiences that demand different theoretical and analytical conceptualisations.

Beyond co-ethnicity: the politics of differentiating and integrating new immigrants in Singapore

Abstract: This essay joins the ongoing debates about the role of co-ethnic ties in the making of diaspora identity by examining Singaporean Chinese perceptions of new immigrants from the mainland and the state's strategies in integrating the newcomers. The public discourses on new Chinese immigrants have produced three interlinked narratives: (1) newcomers are socially and culturally different from the mainstream and earlier immigrants; (2) newcomers have intensified the competition for scarce resources; and (3) newcomers are politically attached to China, whose rise as a global power only serves to reinforce such linkages. I argue that co-ethnicity and common cultural heritage play little role in shaping local Singaporeans' view of the new diaspora; instead, political pragmatism and new identity politics that prioritize the nation above ethnicity are the key factors influencing public attitudes and policy options regarding new immigrants. Furthermore, intra-diaspora differences/conflicts have reinforced interracia...

Diasporas and Outsourcing: Evidence from oDesk and India

Abstract: We examine the role of the Indian diaspora in the outsourcing of work to India. Our data are taken from oDesk, the world's largest online platform for outsourced contracts. Despite oDesk minimizing many of the frictions that diaspora connections have traditionally overcome, diaspora connections still matter on oDesk, with ethnic Indians substantially more likely to choose a worker in India. This higher placement is the result of a greater likelihood of choosing India for the initial contract and substantial path dependence in location choices. We further examine wage and performance outcomes of outsourcing as a function of ethnic connections. Our examination of potential rationales for the greater ethnic-based placement of contracts assesses taste-based preferences and information differences. This paper was accepted by Lee Fleming, entrepreneurship and innovation.

Unpacking the Diaspora Channel in New Democracies: When Do Migrants Act Politically Back Home?

Abstract: Migrant influence on politics back home has arguably become broader and deeper in the wake of a widespread convergence between out-migration and democratization. This article seeks to identify the structural conditions under which migrants from post-1980 democracies are likely to activate the “diaspora channel” of political influence back home. Specifically, I identify, explain, and code two sets of incentives likely to induce migrants to engage in home-country politics from abroad: (1) socioeconomic incentives generated by cross-border linkages and migrant characteristics likely to predispose them toward broader forms of transnational engagement and (2) political incentives generated by diaspora politicization and formal access to the political process in the home country. I score these incentives in 40 developing countries and then generate hypotheses about the degree to which migrants from these countries are likely to activate the diaspora channel through participation in home-country elections, lobbying for policy changes by the home-country government, or transnational coproduction.

Where is Home? Re-Visioning “Kurdistan” And “Diaspora” in Kurdish Novelistic Discourse in Sweden

Abstract: Employing textual and contextual analysis of three Kurdish novels, the aim of this article is to understand the way Kurdish characters have experienced their “home-land” through tracing the themes of displacement and exile, and to explore what kind of meanings and values are attributed to Sweden as the host country. Applying a conceptual framework based on “home”, “homeland” and “diaspora”, it aims to illuminate diasporic memory in relation to individual and collective pasts, and to depict the imaginary of “home-land”. In this sense, this article will argue that Kurds in the fictional narratives neither feel at “home” in their host country nor can they return to their homeland.

Taking stock, moving forward: the Internet, social networks and civic engagement in Chinese societies

Abstract: The Internet in China reflects many contradictions and complexities of the society in which it is embedded. Despite the growing significance of digital media and technologies, research on their contingent, nonlinear, and sometimes paradoxical impact on Chinese citizens' civic engagement remains theoretically underdeveloped and empirically understudied. As importantly, many studies on the Internet implications in the Chinese societies have centered on China. This essay introduces seven articles that draw on a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to advance a balanced and context-rich understanding of the implications of digital media and technologies in China, Taiwan, and the global Chinese diaspora. It further discusses venues for future research, especially studies that take into account the evolving Chinese media landscape and the rise of the mobile Internet, civic and political participation across multiple platforms and their interactions, as well as organizational and interpersonal ne...

The diaspora of africans liberated from slave ships in the nineteenth century

Abstract: This article uses the extensive documentation of Africans liberated from slave vessels to explore issues of identity and freedom in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. It tracks the size, origin, and movement of the Liberated African diaspora, offers a preliminary analysis of the ‘disposal’ of African recaptives in societies on both sides of the Atlantic, and assesses the opportunities Liberated Africans had in shaping their post-disembarkation experiences. While nearly all Liberated Africans were pulled at least partly into the Atlantic wage economy, the article concludes that recaptive communities in Freetown and its hinterland most closely met the aspirations of the Liberated Africans themselves while the fate of recaptives settled in the Americas paralleled those who were enslaved.

People on the move in Roman Britain

Abstract: Levels of mobility in the Roman Empire have long been assumed to be relatively high, as attested by epigraphy, demography, material culture and, most recently, isotope analysis and the skeletons themselves. Building on recent data from a range of Romano-British sites (Poundbury in Dorset, York, Winchester, Gloucester, Catterick and Scorton), this article explores the significance of the presence of migrants at these sites and the impact they may have had on their host societies. The authors explore the usefulness of diaspora theory, and in particular the concept of imperial and colonial diasporas, to illustrate the complexities of identities in later Roman Britain.

Palgrave studies in cultural heritage and conflict

Abstract: This book series explores the relationship between cultural heritage and conf lict. The key themes of the series are the heritage and memory of war and conf lict, contested heritage, and competing memories. The series editors seek books that analyze the dynamics of the past from the perspective of tangible and intangible remnants, spaces, and traces as well as heritage appropriations and restitutions, significations, musealizations, and mediatizations in the present. Books in the series should address topics such as the politics of heritage and conf lict, identity and trauma, mourning and reconciliation, nationalism and ethnicity, diaspora and intergenerational memories, painful heritage and terrorscapes, as well as the mediated reenactments of conf licted pasts. Dr. Ihab Saloul is assistant professor of cultural studies, and academic coordinator of Heritage and Memory Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Saloul’s interests include cultural memory and identity politics, narrative theory and visual analysis, conf lict and trauma, diaspora and migration as well as contemporary cultural thought in the Middle East. Professor Rob van der Laarse is research director of the Amsterdam School for Heritage and Memory Studies (ASHMS) at the University of Amsterdam. Van der Laarse’s research focuses on (early) modern European elite and intellectual cultures, cultural landscape, heritage and identity politics, and the cultural roots and postwar memory of the Holocaust. Dr. Britt Baillie is affiliated lecturer of archaeology at the University of Cambridge, and a research fellow at the University of Pretoria. Baillie’s interests include the politicization of cultural heritage, heritage and the city, memory and identity, religious uses and space, theories of destruction, heritage as commons, contested heritage, and the nature of urban space. Also in the series:

Law, Land, and Territories: The Roman Diaspora and the Making of Provincial Administration

Abstract: This dissertation examines the relationship between the institutions of Roman provincial administration and the economy of the Roman imperial diaspora in the Eastern Mediterranean in the second and first centuries BC. Focusing on the landed estates that many members of the imperial diaspora acquired in the territories of Greek cities, I argue that contestation over the allocation of resources in the provinces among Roman governing classes, the members of the imperial diaspora, and the elites of Greek cities decisively shaped the contours of what we would late recognize as the institutions of provincial administration. Setting the Roman Empire within a new comparative framework, Chapter One suggests that ancient cities around the Mediterranean, including Rome, often used their imperial power to help their own citizens infringe upon the exclusionary property regimes of other cities, which insisted that--unless they decided otherwise--only their own citizens could acquire this land. Chapter Two combines semantic history with archaeological case-studies to argue that Roman ownership of agricultural resources in the territories of provincial cities was wide-spread and in fact often underpinned the movement of products for which the members of the diaspora are more commonly known. Chapter Three uses epigraphic documentation and Cicero's writings to examine how provincial governors responded to the economic concerns that Romans brought before them, maintaining that law became the most prominent response because it was able to perform a separation between the empire as state and the potentially problematic actions by members of the diaspora, while at the same time not abandoning these Romans' concerns. Chapter Four investigates the contestation over the terms on which members of the diaspora were able to acquire land in Greek cities and vindicates the contributions that Roman jurists and the elites of Greek cities made to the institutional architecture of provincial administration and the political economy it enshrined.

Indigenous networks: Mobility, connections and exchange

Abstract: Introduction: Indigenous Networks: Historical Trajectories and Contemporary Connections Jane Carey and Jane Lydon Part I: Imperial Networks from the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Colonial Governance, Humanitarianism and Indigenous Experience 1. The Slave-Owner and the Settler Catherine Hall 2. Indigenous Engagements with Humanitarian Governance: The Port Phillip Protectorate of Aborigines and "Humanitarian Space" Alan Lester 3. "The Lying Name of 'Government'": Empire, Mobility and Political Rights Ann Curthoys Part II: Mobility, Hybridity and Networks: Indigenous Lives and Legacies 4. "The Singular Transcultural Space": Networks of Ships, Mariners, Voyagers and "Native" Men at Sea, 1790-1870 Lynette Russell 5. Indigenous Interlocutors: Networks of Imperial Protest and Humanitarianism in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Zoe Laidlaw 6. Picturing Macassan-Australian Histories: Odoardo Beccari's 1873 Photographs of the "Orang-Mereghi" and Indigenous Authenticity Jane Lydon 7. "Mr. Moses Goes to England": Twentieth-Century Mobility and Networks at the Six Nations Reserve, Ontario Cecilia Morgan 8. A "Happy Blending"?: Maori Networks, Anthropology and "Native" Policy in New Zealand, the Pacific and Beyond Jane Carey Part III: Indigenous Networks, Activism and Transnational Exchanges: From the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present 9. Contesting the Empire of Paper: Cultures of Print and Anti-Colonialism in the Modern British Empire Tony Ballantyne 10. Geographies of Solidarity and the Black Political Diaspora in London Before 1914 Caroline Bressey 11. Marching to a Different Beat: The Influence of the International Black Diaspora on Aboriginal Australia John Maynard 12. 50 Years of Indigeneity: Legacies and Possibilities Ravi de Costa Epilogue: Indigenising Transnationalism? Challenges for New Imperial and Cosmopolitan Histories Jane Carey

Before and After 1983: The Impact of Theorising Sri Lankan Tamil Migration History around the 1983 Colombo Riots

Abstract: This paper discusses the material effects of the theorisation of the contemporary Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora around the 1983 Colombo riots. In the complicated aftermath of the end of the Sri Lankan civil war in 2009, it is necessary to rethink the way in which diasporic history has been constructed in order to factor in its multiple dimensions and underlying dynamics. By critically foregrounding the key literature on the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora, which is definitive to understanding the history of Sri Lankan Tamil emigration around the 1983 riots, the modern diaspora can be framed anew by longer and more diverse historical perspectives.

Why do conflict-generated diasporas pursue sovereignty-based claims through state-based or transnational channels? Armenian, Albanian and Palestinian diasporas in the UK compared:

Abstract: Over the past decade, diaspora mobilization has become of increasing interest to International Relations scholars who study terrorism, civil wars and transnational social movements and networks. Nevertheless, an important area remains under-researched: conditions, causal mechanisms and processes of diaspora mobilization vis-a-vis emerging states, especially in a comparative perspective. This article asks why diaspora entrepreneurs in liberal states pursue the sovereignty goals of their original homelands through the institutional channels of their host-states, through transnational channels or use a dual-pronged approach. Empirically, the article focuses on a comparison between the Albanian, Armenian and Palestinian diasporas in the UK and their links to the emerging states of Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh and Palestine. Two variables act together to explain differences in mobilization patterns: the host-state�s foreign policy stance towards the homeland�s sovereignty goal; and diaspora positionality, the relative power diaspora entrepreneurs perceive as deriving from their social positions in a transnational space between host-state and homeland. If a host-state�s foreign policy stance is closed towards the sovereignty goal, but diaspora entrepreneurs experience their positionality as relatively strong vis-a-vis the host-state, they are more likely to mobilize through host-state channels, as in the Armenian case. If the foreign policy stance is closed towards the sovereignty goal, but the diaspora positionality is weak, activists are more likely to pursue transnational channels, as in the Palestinian case. If the foreign policy stance is open towards the sovereignty goal, but the diaspora positionality is weak, entrepreneurs are likely to engage with both channels, as in the Albanian case.

Second-generation “return” to Greece: new dynamics of transnationalism and integration

Abstract: Based on in-depth narrative interviews with 64 second-generation Greek-Germans and Greek-Americans who have “returned” to Greece, this article explores intersections between return, transnationalism and integration. Having grown up with a strong Greek identity in the diaspora, second-generation “returnees” move to Greece mainly for idealistic, lifestyle and life-stage reasons. However, most find living in Greece long-term a challenging experience: they remark on the corruption and chaos of Greek life, and are surprised at the high level of xenophobia in Greek society, not only towards foreign immigrants but also towards themselves as “hyphenated Greeks”. The “return” to Greece provokes new “reverse” transnational links back to their birth country, where they still need to keep in touch with relatives and friends, including caring obligations towards parents who remain abroad. Some contemplate another “return”, back to the US or Germany. Policy Implications Policymakers responsible for integration should not assume that the second generation has no connections with its parents' country of origin. In the diasporic home country (in this case Greece), more effort should be made to facilitate the reintegration of the second generation returning ‘home’ and to break down discrimination towards hyphenated Greeks. Greek policymakers should pay heed to homecoming second-generation Greeks in order to benefit from their bicultural insights into how Greek society can be improved, especially as regards efficient public services, transparent employment opportunities, better environment management, gender equality, and the elimination of racism and discrimination.

Transnational Transitional Justice and Reconciliation: The Participation of Conflict-generated Diasporas in Addressing the Legacies of Mass Violence

Abstract: This paper is a preliminary exploration of the role that conflict-generated diaspora communities can play in transitional justice and processes of reconciliation. The aim is to consider what potential there is for tapping into diaspora communities and the possible benefits this could have on diasporas themselves and on peacebuilding processes in the homeland. The goal is also to explore and reflect on ways in which reconciliatory attitudes can be encouraged among diaspora communities, as well as their participation in transnational activities. The paper begins by providing a brief overview of diasporas, followed by a discussion on relationships and attitudes within conflict-generated diaspora communities in the aftermath of violence. The paper then explores the various roles that diasporas can play in transitional justice, such as providing input to strategies and participating in established mechanisms; or mobilizing on their own to push for transitional justice measures. This is followed by a brief look at diaspora involvement in other processes of reconciliation, including dialogue and media initiatives. The paper then discusses how integration policies and outcomes in the hostland can influence the views of diasporas and their involvement with the homeland. The paper concludes with challenges related to diaspora participation and some overall reflections.