Navigating transnational realities: migration in Okey Ndibe’s Foreign Gods, Inc. (2014)

Since its advent with the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in 1958, the modern Nigerian novel has engaged itself in the essentialist paradigm of protest. With the turn of the new millennium, however, there has emerged a transnational model in which scores of novels and short stories are written by younger writers on diasporic characters in Europe and America, away from the dogma of combating colonialism and neocolonialism. In what appears to be a manifesto statement of the new direction, Charles Nnolim writes in the influential journal, New Directions in African Literature, defining the new agenda to be the task of “re-inventing Europe and developing International themes in our Literature” just in the same way, he says, “Europe invaded Africa and the world with literature civilization, religion and technology”. The literature arising from the new voluntary diaspora is therefore expected to be more purposefully equipped to retaliate the aggression of colonialism, than to romanticize “the strong-bronzed men or regal black/women” conceptualized by Conte Cullen in writings of the first black diaspora. This study is a cultural materialist interrogation of three Nigerian novels written in the second decade of the 21st century focusing on the quest for intellectual, economic and spiritual survival of Nigerian immigrants in the West. Helon Habila’s Travellers (2019) tells the story of a Nigerian intellectual along with other African immigrants caught in the complex debilitating web of multiculturalism and identify crisis. Chika Unigwe’s on Black Sisters Street (2011) is a tale of four well-endowed Nigerian ladies fleeing poverty at home into sex-slavery in Belgium where they live in the shadow of fear and death. And Okey Ndibe’s Foreign God’s Inc (2017) is an account of an unemployed Nigerian immigrant with divine ancestral connection who chooses to steal his community’s god and sell at a loss to a New York businessman. These three novels illustrate failed attempts by Nigerian immigrants to meaningfully integrate into Western Society, much less, re-inventing a commanding superior vision of a narrative at the expense of their host communities. They rather surrender their intellect, beauty and spirituality to the oppressive homogenizing influence of the divergent globalized culture in a more humiliating manner than those displaced characters in the literature of the first diaspora.

Africans in America come from different regions of the continent; they speak different languages and are from different faith traditions. Nigerian Immigrants in the United States: Race, Identity, and Acculturation attempts to generate an interest in the study of African immigrants by looking at issues of settlement and adjustment of Nigerians in the United States. The literature is scanty about this group of immigrants and little is known about their motivations for moving to the United States and the issues that they face. The book therefore seeks to contribute to the immigration literature and knowledge base as well as document the African narrative showing the flight of Nigerians to the United States. The book further seeks to shine a light on the lives of these transplants as they settle into a new society. It describes those Nigerians who decided on their own to live permanently in the United States, reviewing the social circumstances and behaviors of immigrants from Nigeria, and noting the stressors that affect successful integration and adjustment. The book explores the factors that contribute to the adaptation and integration of Nigerian immigrants living in some metropolitan areas of the United States and asks: how do the immigrants themselves interpret their experiences in a new society? In an attempt to answer this question, others are generated such as: Who are these Nigerians that have left their homeland? What has been their experience and how has this experience shaped them and their understanding of the immigration process? Lastly, it asks what we can learn from this experience. Employing the study of this population through the method of phenomenology, Nigerian Immigrants in the United States leads the reader to understand the experience of being different in America from the immigrants' perspectives and to see the experience through their eyes. Those who work with Nigerian immigrants will find this book insightful and revealing.

The importance of developing societies in the global marketplace is never in doubt as they constitute a vital consumer base for products and services from developed countries. Yet, there is a general paucity of research on consumption behavior in developing societies. This chapter draws on Nigerian immigrants' informal entrepreneurship in Ghana to explore how these entrepreneurs respond to consumer demands and needs and the specific clientele attraction strategies they deploy to sustain and expand their businesses. The chapter argues that understanding the entrepreneurs' responses to consumer needs and their customer attraction strategies contributes to a better understanding of these businesses in their current forms, scope, and their future prospects. Ultimately, the chapter sheds light on what shapes consumption practices that make the existence of these businesses in the developing world possible and their relevance for the global marketplace and the globalization discourse.

This study explores the extent to which socio-economic factors in the U.S., and the exposure to the growing popular culture in Korea, influence Korean immigrants’ American identity. While a great number of cultural and social psychological studies have identified that socio-economic and intergroup factors have the potential to affect an immigrants’ national identity, studies have been negligent in examining the direct impact of popular culture from a sending country, as well as its conditional impact on national identity. In this study, focusing on Korean immigrants, we suggest that the increasing contact with the popular culture of one’s home country, through media, may decrease immigrants’ host identity. In addition, we suggest that it the impact of socio-economic and intergroup factors on their host identity. Although this study does not find strong evidence that Korean Americans who are more exposed to Korean popular culture through social media are less likely to endorse their American identity, empirical results provide some evidence that exposure to Korean popular culture weakens the effects of socio-economic and intergroup factors on the American national identity of Korean immigrants.

The influence of globalization toward cultural context is a transaction of cultural things through industrial process affected by modernization. Tourism industry is one of the globalizations which produces cultural things to be commercialized financially and purposefully. One of cultural things to be commercialized in the era of globalization is traditional art. The issue coming up is how to develop patterns so that the supporters of traditional art as the subject of local wisdom are maintained, but hopefully it can, on the other hand, accommodate globalization demands, for both economic and sociocultural aspects which have commodified culture? With the aim of synergizing the existence of traditional art as cultural identity of supporters in sociocultural way and the demands of tourism industry that commodify culture, through field research using qualitative method, it can be concluded that. First, commodification of culture is inevitable in the era of 4.0 which develops in modernity, which can be seen from more developed tourism industry. Second, commodification of culture toward local wisdom can actually be solved with some strategies without marginalizing the supporters of the local wisdom and culture. Third, the space of traditional art as cultural identity can be maintained and revitalized from commodification of culture as long as the conceptual pattern can synergize the perception and responses of the supporters with the demands of tourism industry. Forth, one of the most relevant concept to accommodate the demands of commodification of culture is what is known as pseudo traditional art.

Against common pessimistic readings of exile in postcolonial fiction, this article employs the notion of “self-actualization” that argues for people’s desire to accomplish everything they are capable of and their need to realize their potential. Within a comparative context and using identity theory and diaspora studies, the article illustrates how self-actualization keeps the immigrants from experiencing exile in two Arab American short stories by Pauline Kaldas: “Airport” (2009a) and “He Had Dreamed of Returning” (2009b). This article shows how the main characters of “Airport” and “He Had Dreamed of Returning,” Samir and Hani respectively, fulfill the American Dream and how Hoda, Samir’s wife, pictures America as the place where she can realize her ambitions. However, Nancy, Hani’s wife, achieves her potential in Egypt rather than America, where she feels needed as a teacher. Thus, Samir and Hani do not get dislocated in America, and Nancy has a sense of belonging in Egypt. Hence, the article utilizes the American Dream and a reverse side of it, and it shows how Samir’s, Hani’s, and Nancy’s self-actualization is a counter to feelings of exile. In other words, the three characters do not experience loss of identity and displacement in the countries they emigrate to. Rather, they fulfill their dreams there and find/create new identities which have been suppressed in their hometowns, which enhances a view of identity as fluid rather than fixed. Briefly put, this article presents the self-actualization of immigrants in new locales as a counter to different levels of dislocation and exile.Keywords: Pauline Kaldas, “He Had Dreamed of Returning,” “Airport,” Arab Americans, exile, self-actualization, identity, immigrant literature

Since 2000, the American suburb has emerged as a principal destination for new immigrants to the United States, both documented and undocumented. Whereas some suburban communities have responded to perceived undocumented immigrants with hostility in the form of exclusionary local immigration policies, others have introduced policies designed to welcome immigrants independent of federal legal status. In this article, I employ a qualitative comparative case study analysis of four local immigration policies in the Chicago and Washington DC metropolitan areas to explain how suburbs justify their policy positions. I find that these suburban communities relied on conceptions of American identity and the ‘American Dream’ in support of their policies, but leveraged these tropes in vastly different ways depending on the broader strategic purposes of the policies. These divergent suburban immigration policies both challenge traditional notions of suburban political and cultural homogeneity and reveal how such heterogeneity has produced a distinct unevenness in contemporary local policy responses to undocumented immigration within metropolitan regions.

Suburban landscapes and lifestyles, globalization and exporting the american dream

Theoretical And Methodological Issues Of Latina/O Research.- Theoretical and Methodological Issues of Latina/o Research.- Immigration And Latina/O Incorporation.- New Latino Destinations.- Latino Incorporation in the United States in Local and Transnational Contexts.- The Social Demography Of Latinas/Os.- Demographic Patterns: Age Structure, Fertility, Mortality, and Population Growth.- Through Children's Eyes: Families and Households of Latino Children in the United States.- U.S. Latinos/as and the American Dream: Diverse Populations and Unique Challenges in Housing.- Latino Health Paradoxes: Empirical Evidence, Explanations, Future Research, and Implications.- Latino Crime and Delinquency in the United States.- Schooling, Work, And Income Among Latinas/Os.- The Educational Experiences of Latinos in the United States.- Latinos in the United States Labor Market.- Latino/a Entrepreneurship in the United States: A Strategy of Survival and Economic Mobility.- Income, Earnings, and Poverty: A Portrait of Inequality Among Latinos/as in the United States.- Latina/O Culture.- Mapping the Dynamic Terrain of U.S. Latina/o Media Research.- As the Latino/a World Turns: The Literary and Cultural Production of Transnational Latinidades.- Religion and Religiosity.- Redefining Borders: The Latina/O Population In The United States.- Latinos/os (in) on the Border.- Entre Nosotras/os: Theorizing, Researching, and Constructing Cross-Latina/o Relations in the United States.- Beyond Gender Dichotomies: Toward a New Century of Gendered Scholarship in the Latina/o Experience.- Adelante Mujer: Latina Activism, Feminism, and Empowerment.- Latinas and Latinos, Sexuality, and Society: A Critical Sociological Perspective.- Political Mobilization And Participation Among Latinas/Os.- Latino Partisanship, Political Activity and Vote Choice.- Political Orientations and Latino Immigrant Incorporation.- Political Mobilization and Activism Among Latinos/as in the United States.- Unions and the Unionization of Latinas/os in the United States.

Research Article| January 01 2018 The New Americans Museum in San Diego John J. Bukowczyk John J. Bukowczyk John J. Bukowczyk is Professor of History at Wayne State University in Detroit and for the last thirteen years served as editor of the Journal of American Ethnic History. His recent publications include “New Approaches in Teaching Immigration and Ethnic History,” in Handbook of American Immigration and Ethnicity, ed. Ronald H. Bayor (Oxford University Press, 2016); “California Dreamin,’ Whiteness, and the American Dream,” Journal of American Ethnic History 35, no. 2 (Winter 2016); and, as editor, Immigrant Identity and the Politics of Citizenship (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2018) 37 (2): 62–70. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.37.2.0062 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation John J. Bukowczyk; The New Americans Museum in San Diego. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2018; 37 (2): 62–70. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.37.2.0062 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Museum Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States Leda M. Cooks Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States. Edited by Nancy Foner and George M. Frederickson. New York: Russell Sage, 2004; pp 408. $45.00 cloth; $24.95 paper. Is the United States an immigrant nation or a nation of immigrants? The question raises vast differences in the roles of history and policy in the formation of the United States and notions of who is/is not a U.S. citizen. Indeed, the tensions raised by the role of immigrants and immigration in the conceptualization of the United States are intimately connected to the construction of race and ethnicity in that history. The authors featured in the edited volume Not Just Black and White explore a diverse range of historical and sociological analyses of the question and its relevance to the "color line" in the twenty-first century. Are race and/or ethnicity in the United States the most important basis for determining who is or is not included as American? Or is class or clash (cultural conflict) a more reliable indicator of how social hierarchies have formed throughout the history of the United States? The chapters in this book present a cogent argument for the relationship between immigrant identities and the structural (political, racial, economic, religious, cultural) or historical/contextual [End Page 344] factors that have determined the changing status of policy and, consequently, of polity in the United States. In their introduction to the book (1–19), editors Nancy Foner and George M. Frederickson state that Not Just Black and White is an interdisciplinary compilation of some of the best scholars on immigration and race/ethnicity in the country. While the reader might note a range of perspectives from scholars in sociology and history, it is important as well to note the perspectives on immigration and identity negotiation that are not present in the book: for our purposes we might question the absence of rhetorical, interactional, or performance-based studies of discursive and embodied American identities. For instance, in his discussion of Latino and Latina panethnic identities, Jose Itzigsohn notes of a Dominican official in his study that "the Dominican identity is important to me but my political identity is Hispanic" (201). Later, Itzigsohn explains that "my point is that the nationalist sentiments and intraethnic conflict [within the Dominican community in the United States] coexist with panethnic identification" (201). While I do not argue with the panethnic strategies posited by Itzigsohn, the contextual negotiation of Dominican identities in Providence (where he locates his study) has been elsewhere inclusive as well of strategic association with African American identities by the younger generation of Dominicans. The location and strategic negotiation of language intra- as well as inter-ethnically is as important as the contextualization of specific events of community formation or division—and yet is undertheorized or studied by the scholars in this book. The larger point for those who study interaction is that identities are negotiated in context and in relationship to conversational status, in addition to the larger frames of economic, social, and political mobility. Yet it should be noted that while the authors do not focus on the rhetorical construction of race and ethnicity in the United States, many essays do question the meaning and significance of these terms at different moments in U.S. history, and in different spaces as well. One notable study of the discourse of ethnicity and its impact on immigration and on immigration studies is found in Victoria Hattam's chapter entitled "Ethnicity: An American Genealogy" in which she charts intellectual debates over the basis of Jewish ethnic identification in the United States. The authors in this volume raise several issues that I think are important to the future of immigration, race, and ethnic studies in the United States. First, the role of whiteness as the construction against which all other configurations of immigrant identities (race, ethnicity, religion, class) are measured figures strongly in the historical and social analysis of political, social, cultural, and economic shifts among inter- and...

Everyone knows the story of the big brick house with the white picket fence and the quiet subdivisions of identical houses and families. Regardless of race, class, religion, or gender, the lure of the ideal home appeals to the masses. Told with a fairytale quality, the American Dream possesses a magic that transcends space and time. For some groups, however, white fences are not the obvious boundaries. Instead, boundaries exist in the pigments of these people’s skin, the block they live on, or how many letters fill up their last name. In Sandra Cisneros’ novella The House on Mango Street (1984), the American Dream appears again, this time on a poverty-stricken, Hispanic street in Chicago, narrated by an adolescent, Mexican-American girl named Esperanza Cordero. Through the ecofeminist and ecocritical lenses, Cisneros utilizes Esperanza’s readings of houses and homes to comment on the commodity culture of dwellings, revealing how Esperanza’s perception of identity and selfhood is directly connected to the house of the American Dream, and further explores the function of “place,” the boundaries of space, and the power of penning new boundaries.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Working with W. E. B. DuBois's classic dialectic of double-consciousness--being black, being American (The Souls of Black Folk in Three Negro Classics [New York: Avon Books, 1965], 215)--Rita Roberts explores important role evangelicalism played in the development of American identity for a prominent northern black minority during the antebellum era (12). Her eight-decade study in intellectual history draws upon nearly seventy public intellectuals, mostly male, about a third of whom were clergy and the rest laity, in African American Protestantism. She highlights the interplay of religion and politics, race and class, and to a lesser extent gender in the evolution of a distinct gestalt of black evangelicalism. It emerged interactively within the larger complex of Anglo-American evangelical theology by sharing the central tenets of biblical authority, conversionism (8), Christ-centered redemption, and active responsibility for family and society. That definition Roberts reiterates throughout the six chapters. Within the diversity of African-American discourse her approach allows black evangelicalism to harmonize Christian republicanism with social reform to counter the expansion of slavery, with its conflicting strategies for citizenship and for confronting scientific racism and with varied responses to the colonization, emigration movements, and antislavery politics. Separating her thesis from the construct of black nationalism, Roberts, nonetheless, imposes the template of evangelicalism over virtually the same thematic subjects but with assimilationist assumptions.Her work demonstrates considerable skill in mastering the debates and exchanges of the representative characters; in showing differing nuances of thought between generations; in allowing for shifts in perspectives over time with some individuals; and in featuring illuminating passages by the writers. Roberts contends that there was a parallel assimilative process to that of Europeans into white American identity--articulated by De Crevecoeur--in the ways West and Central African slaves intermixed customs, languages, survival strategies, and the appropriation and reshaping of evangelical Christianity to become Africans and eventually colored Americans (106, 123-24). While repeatedly insisting on how crucial the evangelical mode of theology and experience was for northern black people, the author works hard not to obscure the diversity of thought among her central players. Her fourth chapter is entitled We Do Not All of Us Think Alike. One way she was able to show differences between the varying figures was to extend the conversation beyond the better known spokesmen like David Walker, Richard Allen, Frederick Douglass, James Forten, Sr., Absalom Jones, Henry Highland Garnet, and Martin Delany to a dozen important but less familiar figures. Congregationalist and Presbyterian ministers like Samuel Cornish, James W. C. Pennington, Lemuel Haynes, Theodore Wright, and Charles B. Ray and AME Zion preacher Hosea Easton join Maria Stewart, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper who voiced women's perspectives. Laymen Charles Remond, William Whipper and, foremost of all, medical doctor James McCune Smith likewise demonstrated how evangelical assumptions interacted with their social and political views. …

The current paper explores the salience and impact of ethnic and national identities for immigrants that are negotiating more than two cultures. Specifically, we were interested in the ways in which Jewish immigrant adolescents from the former Soviet Union integrate their Russian, Jewish, and American identities, and to what extent identification with these three cultures predicts adaptation to varied life domains. In order to examine whether being Jewish has an impact on salience and predictive value of Russian and American identities, a sample of Jewish adolescents (n = 100) was compared with a sample of non-Jewish (n = 113) adolescent immigrants from the former Soviet Union. The study suggests that Jewish and non-Jewish adolescent immigrants differ in levels of Russian and American identity. Further, using structural equation modeling a bicultural model for Jewish and non-Jewish adolescents was tested. The results suggest that these two groups do not differ with respect to how Russian and American identities impact on adjustment. However, adding Jewish identity to the model for the Jewish sample significantly improved model fit, and rendered some of the impact of Russian identity non-significant. Thus a multicultural model that included all three identities had better explanatory power for this sample than a bicultural one. Implications for the study of ethnic identity of immigrants, particularly those whose lives involve multiple cultural affiliations, are drawn.

The concept of immigrant identity involves both acts of resistance and adaptation to an unfamiliar environment. According to scholarly reports, the first waves of Indian immigrants are known to show a deep attachment to their native cultures, their ancestors, their languages, and their interpersonal relationships. On the other hand, their second-generation constantly face the challenge of moving between two different cultural contexts and finding a harmonious balance between these two divergent identities. The hyphenated identity of people in diaspora communities has a significant impact on their closest interpersonal relationships, leading to various issues such as longing for the past, feelings of isolation, mourning and melancholy, and to name a few. These issues are effectively explored by renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jhumpa Lahiri in her third book, Unaccustomed Earth (2008), and are, therefore, the focus of this paper. The short stories included in this collection exhibit a poignant and intricate connection to the prevailing social landscape of contemporary society. This paper explores the impact of hyphenated identity on interpersonal relationships in the context of the ‘American Dream’ as manifest in the chosen text. Furthermore, this research paper examines the tactics employed by the characters in Lahiri’s short stories to overcome the obstacles in their diasporic encounters.