Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora ed. by Melody Yunzi Li and Robert T. Tally Jr.

"Affective geographies and narratives of Chinese diaspora." Asian Studies Review, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

Diaspora This article looks at diaspora through the transformations of an established public service broadcaster, the BBC World Service, by considering some of the findings of the AHRC-funded Tuning In: Contact Zones at the BBC World Service, which is part of the Diasporas, Migration and Identities program. Tuning In has six themes, each of which focuses upon the role of the BBC WS: The Politics of Translation, Diasporic Nationhood, Religious Transnationalism, Sport across Diasporas, Migrating Music and Drama for Development. The World Service, which was until 2011 funded by the Foreign Office, was set up to cater for the British diaspora and had the specific remit of transmitting ideas about Britishness to its audiences overseas. Tuning In demonstrates interrelationships between the global and the local in the diasporic contact zone of the BBC World Service, which has provided a mediated home for the worldwide British diaspora since its inception in 1932. The local and the global have merged, elided, and separated at different times and in different spaces in the changing story of the BBC (Briggs). The BBC WS is both local and global with activities that present Britishness both at home and abroad. The service has, however, come a long way since its early days as the Empire Service. Audiences for the World Service’s 31 foreign language services, radio, television, and Internet facilities include substantive non-British/English-speaking constituencies, rendering it a contact zone for the exploration of ideas and political opportunities on a truly transnational scale. This heterogeneous body of exilic, refugee intellectuals, writers, and artists now operates alongside an ongoing expression of Britishness in all its diverse reconfiguration. This includes the residual voice of empire and its patriarchal paternalism, the embrace of more recent expressions of neoliberalism as well as traditional values of impartiality and objectivism and, in the case of the arts, elements of bohemianism and creative innovation. The World Service might have begun as a communication system for the British ex-pat diaspora, but its role has changed along with the changing relationship between Britain and its colonial past. In the terrain of sport, for example, cricket, the “game of empire,” has shifted from Britain to the Indian subcontinent (Guha) with the rise of “Twenty 20” and the Indian Premier League (IPL); summed up in Ashis Nandy’s claim that “cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English” (Nandy viii). English county cricket dominated the airways of the World Service well into the latter half of the twentieth century, but the audiences of the service have demanded a response to social and cultural change and the service has responded. Sport can thus be seen to have offered a democratic space in which new diasporic relations can be forged as well as one in which colonial and patriarchal values are maintained. The BBC WS today is part of a network through which non-British diasporic peoples can reconnect with their home countries via the service, as well as an online forum for debate across the globe. In many regions of the world, it continues to be the single most trusted source of information at times of crisis and disaster because of its traditions of impartiality and objectivity, even though (as noted in the article on Al-Jazeera in this special issue) this view is hotly contested. The principles of objectivity and impartiality are central to the BBC WS, which may seem paradoxical since it is funded by the Commonwealth and Foreign office, and its origins lie in empire and colonial discourse. Archive material researched by our project demonstrates the specifically ideological role of what was first called the Empire Service. The language of empire was deployed in this early programming, and there is an explicit expression of an ideological purpose (Hill). For example, at the Imperial Conference in 1930, the service was supported in terms of its political powers of “strengthening ties” between parts of the empire. This view comes from a speech by John Reith, the BBC’s first Director General, which was broadcast when the service opened. In this speech, broadcasting is identified as having come to involve a “connecting and co-ordinating link between the scattered parts of the British Empire” (Reith). Local British values are transmitted across the globe. Through the service, empire and nation are reinstated through the routine broadcasting of cyclical events, the importance of which Scannell and Cardiff describe as follows: Nothing so well illustrates the noiseless manner in which the BBC became perhaps the central agent of national culture as its cyclical role; the cyclical production year in year out, of an orderly, regular progression of festivities, rituals and celebrations—major and minor, civic and sacred—that mark the unfolding of the broadcast year. (278; italics in the original) State occasions and big moments, including those directly concerned with governance and affairs of state, and those which focused upon sport and religion, were a big part in these “noiseless” cycles, and became key elements in the making of Britishness across the globe. The BBC is “noiseless” because the timetable is assumed and taken for granted as not only what is but what should be. However, the BBC WS has been and has had to be responsive to major shifts in global and local—and, indeed, glocal—power geometries that have led to spatial transformations, notably in the reconfiguration of the service in the era of postcolonialism. Some of these massive changes have involved the large-scale movement of people and a concomitant rethinking of diaspora as a concept. Empire, like nation, operates as an “imagined community,” too big to be grasped by individuals (Anderson), as well as a material actuality. The dynamics of identification are rarely linear and there are inconsistencies and disruptions: even when the voice is officially that of empire, the practice of the World Service is much more diverse, nuanced, and dialogical. The BBC WS challenges boundaries through the connectivities of communication and through different ways of belonging and, similarly, through a problematisation of concepts like attachment and detachment; this is most notable in the way in which programming has adapted to new diasporic audiences and in the reworkings of spatiality in the shift from empire to diversity via multiculturalism. There are tensions between diaspora and multiculturalism that are apparent in a discussion of broadcasting and communication networks. Diaspora has been distinguished by mobility and hybridity (Clifford, Hall, Bhaba, Gilroy) and it has been argued that the adjectival use of diasporic offers more opportunity for fluidity and transformation (Clifford). The concept of diaspora, as it has been used to explain the fluidity and mobility of diasporic identifications, can challenge more stabilised, “classic” understandings of diaspora (Chivallon). A hybrid version of diaspora might sit uneasily with a strong sense of belonging and with the idea that the broadcast media offer a multicultural space in which each voice can be heard and a wide range of cultures are present. Tuning In engaged with ways of rethinking the BBC’s relationship to diaspora in the twenty-first century in a number of ways: for example, in the intersection of discursive regimes of representation; in the status of public service broadcasting; vis-à-vis the consequences of diverse diasporic audiences; through the role of cultural intermediaries such as journalists and writers; and via global economic and political materialities (Gillespie, Webb and Baumann). Tuning In thus provided a multi-themed and methodologically diverse exploration of how the BBC WS is itself a series of spaces which are constitutive of the transformation of diasporic identifications. Exploring the part played by the BBC WS in changing and continuing social flows and networks involves, first, reconfiguring what is understood by transnationalism, diaspora, and postcolonial relationalities: in particular, attending to how these transform as well as sometimes reinstate colonial and patriarchal discourses and practices, thus bringing together different dimensions of the local and the global. Tuning In ranges across different fields, embracing cultural, social, and political areas of experience as represented in broadcasting coverage. These fields illustrate the educative role of the BBC and the World Service that is also linked to its particular version of impartiality; just as The Archers was set up to provide information and guidance through a narrative of everyday life to rural communities and farmers after the Second World War, so the Afghan version plays an “edutainment” role (Skuse) where entertainment also serves an educational, public service information role. Indeed, the use of soap opera genre such as The Archers as a vehicle for humanitarian and health information has been very successful over the past decade, with the “edutainment” genre becoming a feature of the World Service’s broadcasting in places such as Rwanda, Somalia, Nigeria, India, Nepal, Burma, Afghanistan, and Cambodia. In a genre that has been promoted by the World Service Trust, the charitable arm of the BBC WS uses drama formats to build transnational production relationships with media professionals and to strengthen creative capacities to undertake behaviour change through communication work. Such programming, which is in the tradition of the BBC WS, draws upon the service’s expertise and exhibits both an ideological commitment to progressive social intervention and a paternalist approach drawing upon colonialist legacies. Nowadays, however, the BBC WS can be considered a diasporic contact zone, providing sites of transnational intra-diasporic contact as well as cross-cultural encounters, spaces for cross

The spatial imagination, critics have long contended, is fundamental to literary practice and readerly experience. This topic has been invigorated by the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, propelled in part by the climate emergency, the dazzling explosion of ecocritical approaches, and the development of technologies such as GIS. These two books demonstrate the fruitfulness of the spatial turn for US literary studies.Soto would have much to say about the census’s prominence in contemporary political discourse, given the Trump administration’s efforts to place a citizenship question on the census as evident strategy of racial disenfranchisement. Soto’s book examines the historical power of census data to put African Americans on the map, literally and culturally. In skillfully crafted chapters, he argues that “African American identity as we today understand it solidified” a century ago in response to the US census, which enabled the “conceptual linkage of abstract geopolitical space and racialized social identity” (2). The book establishes the role of the census in engendering the “the ‘Negro’” as both “an enfranchised US citizen and an object of social-scientific concern” (4); Soto highlights W. E. B. Du Bois’s reliance on census data as he aimed to systematize the empirical study of African Americans, incorporating the census prominently into groundwork for “what we now call African American studies” (31). Soto argues further that Harlem Renaissance literature was at once shaped by and complicated the Census Bureau’s “shifting taxonomy of racial difference” (2). Soto foregrounds an argument about place; especially with the introduction of the census tract in 1910, the census anchored racial identity in specific geographic locations, “down to the [ . . . ] city block,” so that “Harlem” became a “metonym” for urban American blackness (2–3).Chapter 1 surveys the racial history of the US Census, starting with slavery, since the founders devised the decennial census partly to adjudicate the Three-Fifths Compromise. Chapter 2 considers census tract data from the 1920s and 1930s documenting a significantly unequal sex ratio in Harlem; arguing that this data illuminates sexual plots in a range of Harlem Renaissance fictions, Soto offers a geostatistical (rather than, say, psychoanalytic) reading of black female desire. Chapter 3 links Harlem Renaissance authors’ robust vocabulary for skin color—and the popularity of “interracial literature” and passing narratives—with the “Census Bureau’s obsession with blood fraction racial identities” (76) at the turn of the century. This kaleidoscope of skin color was enhanced by Harlem’s internationalization, both registered and hidden by census data, which did not separate out Afro-diaspora immigrants from native-born blacks until 1930. Chapter 4 demonstrates that Harlem’s robust internationalization, in tension with the rise of a singular “New Negro” identity, was rendered invisible by the emerging framework of a Great Migration from the South as defining black identity and culture; “the institutionalization of great migration discourse” (101) forged “regionally distinct environments and customs into a singular racial experience” (114). Chapter 5 turns to space, rather than time, to specify the Harlem Renaissance’s modernity. Just as the urban grid epitomized the modernity of New York and made it a reproducible “template for future urban development” (132) elsewhere, it consolidated Harlem’s racial meaning as locus of the “New Negro,” evidencing the black community’s “forward-looking potential” (146) and constituting a portable signifier for modern blackness (144–6). Harlem’s identity as “symbolic center for African American culture” is epitomized by sociologist E. Franklin Frazier’s map of Harlem as series of concentric circles (151), promoting Harlem’s “representative” status while obscuring other coordinates of black life (149).Tracking relays between the census and the literary, Soto devises the term the “geostatistical imagination” to designate “fictive” qualities of the census; for example, until 1965 racial identity was determined by the census enumerator, not self-reported, giving free play to the racial gaze. Soto’s overarching argument is that the census makes black life visible (154) but inflicts “one-dimensional status” on its subjects by “tabulat[ing] and objectify[ing]” racial identity (160–61). In assessing this reification of identity, Soto briefly references Benedict Anderson’s classic work on the census, though the import of what Anderson calls the “demographic topography” imposed by the (colonial) census is not elaborated. Given the focus on population, I was surprised by the absence of a biopolitical framework for assessing the census’s political and cultural efficacy. Situating the project in that conversation (for example, the vital existing scholarship on the nineteenth-century census as a biopolitical project) would sharpen the stakes of Soto’s argument and illuminate the significance of the census’s “linkage of abstract geopolitical space and racialized social identity” (2) beyond the problem of delimiting identity (e.g., its role in visualizing Harlem as what Kenneth Clark called a “dark ghetto” and mapping racialized zones of life and death).Greyser’s very different book draws on new materialism and affect theory to specify spatial, material dimensions of sympathy as “grounds for the production of the self”: “sentimentalists evoked sympathy to express a desire for a place that was both territorial and emotional—what I call an affective geography” (1). (Greyser’s cover illustration, a colorful antebellum lithograph imaging a woman’s heart as mappable terrain, strikingly emblematizes this concept.) This “affective geography” is evident in sympathy’s “spatializing figures” (74)—of physical proximity, putting oneself in the “place” of (or being “touched” by) another—a spatial orientation she calls “intimacy across distance” (2). Greyser thus presents the sentimental as a mode of “inter-corporeality” that bridges spaces between bodies, human and otherwise; sentimentalism “blur[s] expression of grief and suffering from those who experience pain” with the feelings of “witnesses who feel for and imaginatively as them” while animating bodies and spaces not usually considered “sensible” at all (31). Geyser turns to affect theory to envision sympathy as an “intensity” that encompasses “our power to affect the world around us and our power to be affected by it” (4). She also turns to the overlapping body of new materialist theory, which complicates models of human agency and theorizes our bodily continuity with the natural and material world. For Greyser, the material world is indeed “vibrant matter,” charged with affect, and sentimental texts register that vitality. Sentimentalism’s tendency to “slide one subject’s story into another’s” (85) can hazard colonization or exploitation or engender reciprocal, mutually enlivening contact: “the positive ethical bind and the negative exploitative bind are both legible in mixed and at times incommensurate composition of affective geographies” (74).Chapter 1 examines Cherokee and Anglo discourses to consider the “trail of tears” as a lens onto how “removal policy was caught up in sentimentalism over the course of the nineteenth century” (30). The trail’s sentimental “geoaffect” derives in part from Native epistemologies, “Indigenous views of animacy” and “relational kinships” (36) between human and natural worlds. Chapter 2 examines The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850) as a collaborative text that reveals interlocutors’ affective investments in Truth and how “white rhetors and rhetors of color co-created the sentimental” (64–65). Affective geography now takes the flavor of feminist ethics; Greyser returns to a familiar scholarly understanding of the sentimental attuned to racialized power relations of female abolitionism, though she employs affect theory to frame this in fresh ways. The intersubjective space of the text becomes a key “ground” of sympathy; Greyser turns to scholarship on book culture to explore “fantasies of communion” mobilized in and by the Narrative (68). Chapter 3, on The Scarlet Letter (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne and its “Custom House” preface, examines how Hawthorne’s physical encounter with the scarlet “A,” recounted in the preface, “draws Hawthorne into Prynne’s story,” and is described in the language of sympathy; “the sentimental turns the sensation of touch into a literary and emotional sense of the touching” (94). Although desired, “sensory immediacy” with Hester threatens to “overwhelm masculine sovereignty and autonomous authorship” (94)—a dynamic that shapes the novel’s charged intersubjective spaces. Chapter 4 turns to emplotment of the “New Southwest,” focusing on the work of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins. Both leveraged sentimentalism “to contest US imperialist and settler colonial politics and practices” (126), exposing Anglo constructions of “sympathetic incorporation as heartless eradication and displacement” while figuring lasting affective ties between displaced people and the land (127). Chapter 5 joins longstanding critical debates about the sentimental aspects of Our Nig by Harriet E. Wilson (1859); Greyser does not so much present a new argument about the text’s sentimentality as reframe that analysis in new materialist terms. Wilson’s economic appeal to readers construes sympathy as “reciprocal and radically material” (164), while the novel is “deliberate in its considerations of affective flows as enlivening and deadening” (167): the Belmont home is toxic, and Wilson struggles to situate her protagonist (and her text) in environments of replenishment and care. “Dog and book, pen and page, become . . . vital sites of sympathy in an unsympathetic world” (165).Greyser’s training in the history of rhetoric is apparent in her breadth of sources, from literary texts to letters, journals, government and legal documents, newspaper articles, and maps, as well as visual cultural forms. But especially given this impressive range—and the array of theoretical discourses Greyser draws on—greater precision is needed when defining her central categories, especially sentimentalism and sympathy. Sentimentalism seems to characterize any textual passage where feeling is evident; similarly, sympathy seems equated with affect. The effects of the sentimental seem equally fluid; chapter 5, where sympathy is a vehicle of black women’s enforced carework and emotional labor, interprets sympathy biopolitically; while in chapters 1 and 4, sympathy encompasses Indigenous ideas of animism and ecokinship. The book’s larger argument, that sympathy could be put to “ethical” or “exploitative” (e.g. 25, 74) use, is not far removed from Lora Romero’s argument about sentimental biopower decades ago. Greater engagement with related studies (e.g., Kyla Schuller’s careful account of sentimentalism as a mechanism of biopower) would enhance this imaginative study, throwing into relief ways Greyser’s “affective geographies” are truly pathbreaking.

Sinophone (Chinese speaking) Studies was first fully explored by Professor Shih Shu-Mei at University of California with the intention of challenging China-centrism. Professor Fang-Mei Lin, Department of Taiwan Culture, Languages and Literature, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan, is teaching and researching gender and nationalism, popular culture, post-colonial studies and Sinophone Studies. She is questioning and de-constructing the idea that a homogenous group of people who speak the Chinese language is Chinese and Sinophone Studies support this, emphasising the importance of place and location and specific social and historical backgrounds. Lin is also emphasising the importance of becoming native in the place one has settled down for decades or even centuries. The Chinese diaspora sent migrants across the globe and their descendants don't consider themselves to be Chinese, despite some of them still speaking and writing in Chinese. This concept is supported by a novella called 'Ambon Vacation,' written in Chinese by Singaporean writer Chia Joo-Ming, which Lin is exploring. She is also exploring the multidimensional history of the island Ambon and its important metaphors, with Ambon helping with reflections on the complicated history of migration, displacement and colonialism. Lin's approach to studying literature is sociological, with emphasis on the literary text in question as a symbolic construction was created, distributed and consumed in certain historical, cultural, economic and social conditions.

Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora ed. by Melody Yunzi Li and Robert T. Tally, Jr (review)

Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora

With the acceleration of globalization, studies in diaspora have increasingly absorbed geographic ideas. Research on the relationship between nature and humankind has thrown new light on discussions of diaspora. However, there are few in-depth studies addressing the construction of diasporic space in relation to the materiality of the natural world. Considering the relative absence of the natural environment as a serious subject in contemporary diaspora studies, the starting point of this article is to review the implicit understandings of the natural world in diaspora research (Clifford: Diasporas; Brah: Cartographies of diaspora; Gittins: The diggers from China; Ma and Cartier: The Chinese diaspora). This article attempts to explore the connections between diasporic experiences and the living natural environment, as presented in previous theoretical writings (James Clifford, Avtar Brah, Rod Giblett) and case studies (Anna Tsing and Cruse Beryl etc.), most notably those focusing on the relationships between space, place and people.However, in most of the existing works, diasporic-related concepts of nature, place, and space are abstractions and generalizations. In this article, I suggest that specific embodied and material engagement with the natural environment needs to be factored into notions of diasporic space. Through analyzing the cases of the matsutake mushroom in the United States and the abalone in Australia, this article argues that "diasporic space" is an ecocultural construction comprising cultural spaces and natural places, and related to a range of diasporic social practices and human experiences in different natural environments. Diasporic space is both cultural and natural, both abstract and material.

在21 世紀要檢視華文歷史小說，施叔青與平路是兩位不可忽略的重要作家。施叔青的系列小說《台灣三部曲》，涉及的年代從清領、日治、戰後、到二二八事件發生。討論的族群遍及漢族移民、日本移民、原住民與台灣特有的「灣生」，就小說之深度與廣度而言，《台灣三部曲》在台灣文學研究史上，特別是後殖民理論取徑的討論，可說是據有舉足輕重的地位。反觀平路近年的兩部長篇小說《東方之東》（2011）與《婆娑之島》（2012），把時間拉回更早的荷蘭占領台灣時期，論及航海時代的鄭氏王朝與台灣島在異族統治下的夾縫情境，同樣將筆觸深入漢族、原住民與外來統治者，是目前歷史小說中鮮少可見的視角。職是，本論文試以華語語系理論框架，比較探討施叔青《台灣三部曲》的第三部《三世人》（2010），以及平路的《婆娑之島》（2012），重點聚焦剖析女作家，特別是兩位長年跨國∕跨界、不在台灣的所謂「文化回歸」女作家，如何跨國召喚與回憶台灣歷史，運用她們特殊的書寫策略，以及呈現∕再現台灣混雜∕多元的文化情境，最後則是以華語語系的視野，書寫建構與重構台灣（新）歷史的方式，展現女性作家的力量。

The Reconstruction of the Image of Chinese Female Immigrants in Full Moon in New York, Siao Yu, and Finding Mr. Right Kaby Wing-Sze Kung This article explores the changing cinematic images of Chinese women immigrants in the United States, focusing on three films by directors from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, respectively, in order to demonstrate ways in which contemporary transnational Chinese cinema introduces alternatives to established stereotypes. Full Moon in New York (1989) by Stanley Kwan (關錦鵬), Siao Yu (1995) by Sylvia Chang (張艾嘉), and Finding Mr. Right (2013) by Xiaolu Xue (薛曉璐) all illustrate how the social, political, and economic changes that have taken place in China since the 1980s have inspired contemporary Chinese filmmakers to construct new images of Chinese female immigrants. The new transnational Chinese cinema develops female characters who are more complex than the stereotypical images of the Lotus Blossom or the Dragon Lady (Tajima 309), and introduces elements of Chinese culture that are less known to Western viewers. To this end, the characters may represent stronger traditional views, as in Kwan's film; may adapt multicultural traits, as in Chang's film; or may be American Dreamers, as in Xue's comedy. In the early history of Chinese immigrants in the United States, Chinese women were stereotyped as "exotic curios, sexual slaves, drudges, or passive victims" (Yung 3). Based on these stereotypes, most Hollywood films portrayed Chinese women in a derogatory manner. In "Lotus Blossoms Don't Bleed: Images of Asian Women," Renee Tajima states that "Asian women in film are, for the most part, passive figures who exist to serve men, especially as love interests for white men (Lotus Blossoms) or as partners in crime with men of their own kind (Dragon Ladies)" (309). In light of this, the images of Asian women in American cinema could be confined to two types: "the Lotus Blossom (also known as China Doll, Geisha Girl, shy Polynesian beauty), and the Dragon Lady (Fu Manta's various female relations, prostitutes, devious madames)" (309). One prominent example of a Lotus Blossom is featured in the aptly [End Page 424] named film Lotus Blossom (1921), starring Lady Tsen Mei, while one famous example of a Dragon Lady is Anna May Wong's character in Thief of Baghdad (1924) (Tajima 309). Owing to deep-rooted prejudice, many influential forms of Western popular culture have marginalized Asian women (Uchida 167); in order to create new images of Chinese immigrants, the three directors discussed here use Self-Orientalism to deconstruct traditional Western stereotypes and then reconstruct images of Chinese women immigrants by focusing on depicting their female characters' personal frustrations and struggles while living in the United States. Although the three directors are from different Chinese locales and depict different types of problems that Chinese immigrants in America face in different eras, they all focus on female immigrants' struggles for survival in their new milieu. They depict Chinese female immigrants as powerless, with no choice but to stay in America. In light of this, comparison of these three films reveals different facets of the images of Chinese female immigrants. Xiaolu Xue, from China, Sylvia Chang, from Taiwan, and Stanley Kwan, from Hong Kong, each bring distinct backgrounds, idiosyncratic ideas, and particular filmic techniques to the depiction of Chinese immigrants to the United States. Each film also presents the experiences of Chinese female immigrants in a different historical period: Full Moon in New York is set in the 1980s, Siao Yu was filmed in the 1990s, and Finding Mr. Right was made in the 2010s. Stanley Kwan's Full Moon in New York tells the story of three Chinese women in New York. Zhao Hong (Siqin Gaowa) who is from mainland China, has just married Thomas, an American-born Chinese man, and is trying to adjust to her new American lifestyle. However, she is not completely content, as she longs to bring her mother to America. Li Feng Jiao (Maggie Cheung) is from Hong Kong and is burdened with managing a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, working as a real estate agent, and confronting her homosexuality. Wang Hsiung Ping (Sylvia Chang), an actress from Taiwan, attends multiple auditions for stage performances without much success. The...

Past Lives is a film that explores diasporic identity through the eyes of a second-generation immigrant, based on director Celine Song's autobiographical experiences. While previous diaspora narratives have focused on the traumas of the past and the difficulties of resettlement, this film focuses on the inner lives of immigrant individuals who have overcome these scars and are living in the present. This study examines the director's intention and desire to focus on the present and the future rather than the past is particularly evident in the way the film handles temporality, minimizing flashbacks, ellipsis and using a straightforward time progression, and upon this examination, I will look at if it is accomplished without frissures. Past Lives presents diaspora as a universal life process that can be experienced by anyone, not just immigrants. By intersecting the diaspora narrative with the universal genre of romance, we can assume that the director wanted to achieve a cinematic aesthetic that would liberate the diaspora narrative from its fixed frame. However, Nayoung's tears, which create a crack in such cinematic achievements that cannot be sealed in the end, suggest that the 24 years that she tries to deny penetrate the present.

Urban growth in the twentieth century engulfed many cultural enclaves and led to threatened histories, communities and cultural practices of places. One such spatial context within the urban space of cities is the diasporic space of the Chinese, often named Chinatown. Petaling Street has been commonly perceived as the microcosm of the Chinese diaspora in Kuala Lumpur with Yap Ah Loy the figure who catalyzed its urban growth that resulted in the fabrication of a sense of belonging and a sense of home for the Chinese diaspora. This paper argues that while discourses on the Chinese diaspora have been centred on the street as a diasporic space it is Market Square (Medan Pasar), the foci of Chinese diasporic development during the historical period of Yap Ah Loy, that offers a more critical perspective. It first examines how the Chinese diaspora constructed the street and the square in Old Kuala Lumpur, and looks at the question, ‘In what sense do they still own them?’ By focusing the discourse on the context of the square in more detail, through historical narrative and spatial analysis, it then highlights the fact that the discourse extends beyond the street. It contends that urban patterns such as the square act as a critical text for unfolding the varying issues of diasporic space within enclaves that are not only contested but record the erosion of culture.

Sinhalese Buddhist people have been living in the United Kingdom for a period spanning over three generations. They have grown in number rapidly over the last five decades and have organized themselves as a distinctive community. This community has never been subjected to a formal study with regard to their diasporic experience, identity negotiations, Buddhist orientation and homeland relations. This research is aimed at filling this gap of knowledge about the Sinhalese Buddhist diaspora in the United Kingdom and their homeland relations. Firstly, this research is underpinned by a literature review of sources on Sinhala Buddhist history and civilization in Sri Lanka and the Sinhalese presence in the United Kingdom in order to set the background for this research. The review of literature revealed a rich history of Sinhalese Buddhist civilization in Sri Lanka. The written history of the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka and the mythology provide a perspective of the importance given by the Lord Buddha to the Sinhalese nation and Sri Lanka as the guardian of his pure Theravada Buddhist doctrine. The research also includes a review of discourses on diasporic theory to identify attributes or common features of diaspora in order to fully appreciate the diasporic qualities of the Sinhalese community in the UK. This has formed the basis of the empirical research in the UK, which considered Sinhala Buddhist mythology and heritage in Sri Lanka as a variable in their diasporic identity and homeland relations whilst residing in the UK. The researcher himself is a member of the Sinhala Buddhist diasporic community in the United Kingdom. Therefore, this research has utilised ethnographically-informed qualitative research methods to provide a descriptive analysis of the lived experience, identity negotiations and homeland relations of the Sinhala Buddhist community in the United Kingdom. The findings are presented via grounded thematic analysis and represent several facets of the Sinhala Buddhist lifestyle. They support the existence of a well-established, functional first generation of Sinhala Buddhist diasporic community in the United Kingdom, whose members are dynamically involved in their identity maintenance in the host land while developing relentless relationships with their homeland.

This special issue of Anthropology in Action focuses on the intersection of two equally important, and yet unequally researched, areas of anthropological inquiry: migration and childhood. In recent years, the mediatic attention to migration has led to an increased visibility of children and youth moving through transnational contexts, often with limited access to social and economic resources. Undoubtedly, the transnational movement of young people is far from a recent phenomenon. On the contrary, historically these individuals had more chances to successfully travel long distances in search of a more fulfilled life than their older counterparts. Migration – a movement of people, associated with hopes and prospects for a better life, but also driven by fears of violence and poverty – has always had a young face.

Marked by displacement and continuity, hybridity and rupture, conflicts and tensions, and multiple belongingness diaspora gets manifested through an economic, political and social interface between homeland and host land. Dislocation–relocation, nostalgia for home, transformation of subjectivities, negotiating the unbalance of hyphenated identities are indexical to diasporic experience. Indian diaspora marred by various differences does not exist as an entity having some common essence or nature and Odia diaspora writings stand as a testimony to it. The folklores of the maritime Odia “old” diaspora and representative works of the “new” diaspora will be considered under different sections of this chapter. A key consideration will be to establish that acculturation is intrinsic to the dynamics of diaspora and diasporic identification is an upshot of what “coheres” rather than “the origin of coherence”. Conforming to Homi Bhabha’s insight that “It is the ‘inter’ – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space – that carries the burden of meaning of culture” (38), the chapter will discuss the narratives of Odia diaspora and also attempt to understand the cultural convergence of the postmodern world.

People in Motion: Introduction to Transnational Movements and Transwar Connections in the Anthropological and Genetic Study of Human Populations