Contemporary Diaspora Research Articles

In-Between WorldandWorlds Within: Reading Diasporic Return in Vassanji and Bissoondath

The return journey has long been recognized as a central feature of diaspora, yet contemporary diaspora studies have conventionally understood it in stubbornly mythological terms. This paper looks to foster discussion about physical diasporic return journeys by juxtaposing M. G. Vassanji’sThe In-Between World of Vikram Lall(2003) and Neil Bissoondath’sThe Worlds Within Her(1998). Although the two novels overlap in their exploration of the Indian diaspora against the backdrop of racially volatile independence movements in former British colonies, they offer starkly different renderings of diasporic return that are reflected in their engagements with diasporic history. The paper closes with a consideration of the critical assumptions that have allowed the return journey to be overlooked in diaspora literary studies to date, suggesting that its absence may reflect the methodological nationalism of the field.

What Are “Reverse Diasporas” and How Are We to Understand Them?

This article presents empirical evidence from two contemporary diasporas to support the thesis that formal return to the homeland does not necessarily “unmake” diasporas, as some scholars have previously suggested. I argue that, instead, so-called reverse diaspora formation processes take place, with important repercussions for the acculturation of co-ethnic immigrants in their nominal “homelands.” This article focuses on this latter issue, primarily on processes of identity formation and notions of belonging and home, which are particularly meaningful in the context of this diasporic “homecoming.” It draws on the structured comparison of the ethnic Greek and ethnic German diasporas from the former Soviet Union who moved to Greece and Germany after perestroika. Despite their rich and illuminating analogies and overlaps, these two diaspora groups have never been compared and contrasted before. After a brief historical contextualization, complicated processes of identity negotiation and belonging in the putative “historical homelands” are investigated comparatively, lending credence to the idea that “reverse” German and Greek diasporas have developed within (and often in conflict with) contemporary Greek and German societies. The fact that they occur simultaneously in both countries tends to suggest that the concept of reverse diaspora is an important one that needs closer attention from scholars in the future. The article concludes by outlining how we may conceptualize a reverse diaspora, based on existing definitions of diaspora. My research materials consist of in-depth qualitative data collected over the course of six years by means of eighty-one semi-structured interviews in Russian, German, and Greek with migrants and experts in Greece and Germany, embedded in ethnographic research and supplemented by statistical data.

Malaysia. The halal frontier: Muslim consumers in a globalized market. By Johan Fischer. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. 186. Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

The halal frontier: Muslim consumers in a globalized market By JOHAN FISCHER New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. 186. Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463414000198 This book is among a handful exploring the contemporary role of halal. The halal frontier: Muslim consumers in a globalized market provides fascinating insights into the consumer choices, adaptation strategies, and pragmatic decisions among members of the Malaysian-Malay diaspora in Britain, living in the interface between revivalist Islam, the sending state's efforts to institutionalise and standardise 'halal', the recipient state's difficulties in embracing notions of halal, and global market forces which have discovered Muslims as consumers. Johan Fischer traces the encounters between the very Malaysian conceptions of halal of his informants and their navigation of the sheer endless and often challenging diversity of the British capital. The author followed his informants into 'halal restaurants, butcher shops, grocery stores, supermarkets and hypermarkets' (p. 25). Even though private homes, sadly, appear to have been excluded from his list of fieldwork sites, The halal frontier is able to provide important and fresh insights into the dynamic interaction between competing halal discourses, between producers and consumers, and between Malaysian 'state' Islam and the diasporic realities of London's Muslim minority. Locating his study in the British capital, a Western metropolis that has become an integral part of the Muslim world and whose economy profits strongly from these connections, enables Fischer to explore life on the 'halal frontier', an interesting concept he develops throughout the book. Fischer's exploration of Malay-Malaysian consumers in London focuses on a field of inquiry that has until now not received much attention from either Southeast Asianists or from students of contemporary Muslim societies. Beyond its relevance in describing at great depth the negotiation of halal among a particular British Muslim community, The halal frontier adds to the overall still equally small body of works exploring contemporary Southeast Asian diasporas, complementing recent works by Tim Bunnell, Michael Laffan and Tony Milner. It is hoped that the work may help stimulate an expansion of serious academic enquiries of diasporic Southeast Asian Muslim communities in places as diverse as Bloomington, Melbourne, Stockholm and Cairo, and of their engagement with what it means to be Malay, Javanese or Patani; Indonesian, Singaporean or Malaysian outside of the region. In that it continues Fischer's path-breaking previous work on 'halalisation' in Malaysia and the Malaysian state's role in giving rise to and fostering a group of Malay-Muslim middle-class shoppers and consumers, The halal frontier makes for a fascinating and engaging read. Most of Fischer's 14 key informants are products of, or are individuals strongly influenced by the Malaysian state's hyper-capitalist modernisation project of the 1980s and 1990s. He is able to explore well their sometimes fraught negotiation of British realities and religious discourses from their youth or from 'back home'. Two notable drawbacks, however, are that The halal frontier does not seek to locate the Malays of London and their choices, pragmatic or otherwise, in the particular historical trajectory of Islam as it emerged in the Malay world. …

Senegalese Art in U.S. Schools: Transporting Contemporary African Diaspora with Decolonized Perspectives

This article investigates the ways in which global art making and cultural practices have been conveyed in U.S. schools and considers questions about how art education can engage in decolonization. This special issue's theme of Diversity, Globalization, and Education is approached through the window of visual art by examining the work of three contemporary Senegalese artists and one U.S. artist in the sociopolitical contexts of history and current events, and asserting ways in which curriculum in U.S. schools may be considered with a decolonizing lens by integrating the artists’ perspectives.

Diaspora

Contemporary diasporas are studied from many different perspectives. One widely acknowledged aspect is their capacity to illustrate dual homeness, and their challenging national cultures’ aspiration to sociocultural unity. Insertion into new societies tends today to erode the singularity of diasporic communities, but the symbols they retain or create may still warrant cultural reproduction as transnational entities. The conceptual distinction between collective identity, identification, and identifying is helpful when considering how diasporas have become a factor in the multiculturalization of present-day societies, while themselves becoming multicultural entities through the influence of the cultures prevailing in the diverse environments of their dispersed communities. The incoherent – even chaotic – realities these contradictory tendencies generate for analysts are not necessarily perceived in these terms by the actors. Their presence in societies, their impact on non-diasporic populations, the new relations they create between original and new homelands, and above all their endeavor as interconnected cross-national spaces, represent developments that contribute to moving society towards a new era.

White Diaspora vs. Native Diaspora: A Critical Reflection on Contemporary Diaspora Discourse

White Diaspora vs. Native Diaspora: A Critical Reflection on Contemporary Diaspora Discourse

The Russian Diaspora in International Relations: ‘Compatriots’ in Britain

The article examines the harnessing of the contemporary Russian diaspora in certain domains of Russia's international relations. It looks specifically at Russian officialdom's ambivalent efforts at developing and engaging with a global network of state-backed diaspora associations, especially as instruments of cultural outreach. The focus is on the relatively recent implementation of this strategy in the West. The first half of the article discusses the ideological ambiguities of this project in general terms; the second examines how it plays itself out in practice, on the example of the United Kingdom. The article suggests that analysing the ambiguities established in the relationship between state and diasporic structures in this context is vital to understanding the current role of the Russian state in the politics of Russian diasporisation.

Kinship construction variability among Nigerian international migrants: The context of contemporary Diaspora

Abstract Understanding the selves, situations and actions of Africans can never be comprehended outside kinship. Local and foreign worldviews are first pigeonholed into culture and defined within kinship realities in Nigeria and Africa. There have been studies on kinship in Africa. However, the findings from such studies portrayed the immutability of African kinship. Thus, as an important contribution to the on-going engagement of kinship in the twenty-first century as an interface between the contemporary Diaspora, this article engaged kinship within international migration. This is a major behavioural and socio-economic force in Nigeria. Methodological triangulation was adopted as part of the research design and primary data were collected through in-depth interviews (IDIs), and life histories of international migrants were documented and focus group discussions (FGDs) were held with kin of returnees. The article found and concluded that while returnees continued to appreciate local kinship infrastructures, the infrastructures were liable to reconstruction primarily determined by dominant support situations in the traditional African kinship networks.

MIGRATION AND DEVELOPMENT IN MALAYSIA

Malaysia is one of the countries most influenced by international migration, not only in Asia, but globally. Most attention is focused on its role as a major immigration country, but it also experiences significant emigration, having an estimated diaspora of 1.5 million people. This paper demonstrates the scale and composition of the contemporary Malaysian diaspora, and discusses its potential impacts on economic development. In undertaking this task, it is necessary to rely mostly on data from destinations of emigrants from Malaysia because of an inherent bias in migration data collection towards immigrants and destinations. In order to gain deeper insights into the composition of the diaspora and the linkages which it maintains with Malaysia, there is a focus on a single destination country—Australia, which has the second largest community of Malaysian expatriates after Singapore. The potential role that the diaspora could play in Malaysian development is discussed.

‘It ain't where you're from, it's where you're born’: re-theorizing diaspora and homeland in postcolonial Malaysia

The concept of diaspora enjoys a significant currency in contemporary cultural theory. Its descriptive paradigm associates it with the shared experience of displacement, a sense of common origins, and a material or symbolic attachment to the ‘original’ homeland. This traditional framework overlooks diaspora as a narrative of national desire that enables contestation and disruption of dominant hierarchies and ideologies of nation from within the territorial, political, and cultural boundaries of the nation. It is this neglected aspect of diaspora as a narrative of national identification that is addressed in this paper, which examines the significance of contemporary diaspora cultural politics and formations vis-à-vis the exclusionary hegemonies and workings of the nation-state. In this sense, it seeks to re-orientate diaspora as a conceptual process that brings to the fore the ‘routed’ dimensions in the national affiliations and longings of marginalized minority communities. Focusing on the postcolonial nation-state of Malaysia and its literary productions, the paper's point of anchorage and discussion, to paraphrase Paul Gilroy, is ‘where you're born’, rather than ‘where you're from’. This shift from a descriptive to a processual approach to diaspora enables more inclusive and emancipatory ways of reading both diaspora and homeland.

Polarising cultures, politics and communities and fracturing economies in Zimbabwean literature

Traditional postcolonial approaches have tended to read, imagine and construct Africa through an essentialising Manichaeism. Critical of what he describes as ‘nativism’ and ‘Afro-radicalism’ and the dangers they pose to a reinvention of Africa, Achille Mbembe (2002) suggests new ways of seeing the continent. Drawing on the search for this new grammar of reimagining the continent and the nations that constitute it, this article, with reference to selected texts in the Zimbabwean literary canon, historicises literature’s changing relationship with a traditional postcolonial imagining of the nation that produces discourses of autochthony, otherness and violence. Referencing texts by authors including Chikwava, Chinodya, Gappah, Hove, Lessing, Mungoshi, Mutswairo, Saidi, Tagwira and Vera, the article charts the connection between literature and the cultural aspect of nationalism; literature’s complicity in the production of polarising discourses through an early but unproblematised embrace of the Chimurenga discourse conceptualised as the ‘narrative of ordeal’ (Primorac 2007); the moment of celebration and recovery followed by moments of division, death and mourning and erasure and reinscription. It is the last moment that points to literature’s capacity to free itself of the stranglehold of Manichaeism in a search of reimagining the nation, especially in the context of Zimbabwe’s ever-expanding contemporary diaspora shaped by forces of polarisation.

The Making of Greece Abroad: Continuity and Change in the Modern Diaspora Politics of a “Historical” Irredentist Homeland

This article provides a historical analysis of the relationship between a “historical” diaspora—the Greek diaspora—and its irredentist homeland. In particular, it examines the diaspora policies the modern Greek nation-state adopted since having carried out, at least in its major part, the mission of its territorial unification—namely since 1922. It situates Greece within a broader set of irredentist cases that were involved in the movements for national unity. Moreover, it argues that what makes Greece a particularly interesting case is the attachment of its contemporary diaspora politics to the 19th century's Romantic versions of nationalism.

Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic world

T hese four volumes, plus a volume consisting of the index and resources, the Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, fill a gap in the area of Judaic studies. Presenting over 2,100 articles signed by over 350 international specialists, the alphabetically arranged entries cover Jewish history, religion, culture, and language in the Islamic world and the contemporary diasporas of the Sephardic community. In entries ranging from 300 to 18,000 words, readers will learn about a wide range of disciplines related to the Jews in the Islamic world, including history, anthropology, ethnology, folklore, law and jurisprudence, linguistics, sociology, politics, philosophy, religious studies, women’s studies, art history, literature, film studies, material culture, and biographies—all presented without bias.

Historical archaeology of the Irish diaspora: a transnational approach

Anthropologist Brighton (Maryland) offers a historical archaeological investigation of the diaspora of Ireland, reflecting the migration of Irish immigrants to the US during a turbulent period in Irish history from the mid-1840s to the 1850s. Brighton's work is the first to offer a study through an archaeological lens connecting Irish communities spanning two continents and covering four sites: two in Ireland, specifically, in County Roscommon, and two in the US, the Five Points section of Manhattan, New York, as well as the historically Irish community in Paterson, New Jersey. There have been some recent diasporic studies on Irish migrations of the 19th century, such as Catherine Nash's Of Irish Descent: Origin Stories, Genealogy, and the Politics of Belonging (2008). However, Brighton's technique is inspired from transnational investigations of the African diaspora to the Atlantic This volume can serve as an excellent research tool for students of Ireland as well as diasporic archaeology. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All students of archaeology of the modern world. --B. C. Ryan, Syracuse University, Choice Between 1845 and 1852, a watershed event in Ireland's history--the Great Hunger--forced more than one million starved and dispossessed people, most of them poor tenant farmers, to leave their native country for the shores of the United States. Further weakened by the arduous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, many sought refuge in the harbor cities in which they landed. Not surprisingly, Irish immigrants counted as one quarter of New York City's population during the 1850s. In Historical Archaeology of the Irish Diaspora, Stephen A. Brighton places Irish and Irish American material culture within a broad historical context, including the waves of immigration that preceded the Famine and the development of the Irish American communities that followed it. He meticulously details the archaeological research connected with excavations at two pre-Famine sites in County Roscommon, Ireland, and with several immigrant tenements located in the Five Points, Manhattan, and the Dublin section of nearby Paterson, New Jersey. Using this transnational approach to link artifacts and ceramics found in rural Ireland with those discovered in sites in the urban, northeastern United States, Brighton also employs contemporary diaspora studies to illustrate how various factions sustained a distinct homeland connection even as the Irish were first alienated from, and then gradually incorporated into, American society. With more than forty million Americans claiming Irish ancestry, fully understanding Ireland's traumatic history and its impact on the growth of the United States remains a vital task for researchers on both sides of the Atlantic. Brighton's study of lived experience follows a fascinating historical path that will aid scholars in a variety of disciplines. Stephen A. Brighton is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland. His articles have appeared in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology and Historical Archaeology.

Diaspora and cultural heritage: the case of Indians in Canada

The present paper examines the historical and contemporary context of Indian communities in Canada from a cultural heritage perspective and analyses the processes of migration, settlement and cultural identity. It also examines the challenges of developing museum exhibits which depict the Indian diaspora in Canada. Despite its colourful history and its growing size and prominence in Canadian society, the Indian diaspora has not been the subject of much interest by Canadian museums. While recognising the necessity of working with local communities and thereby reflecting local concerns, it is submitted that any museum exhibit attempting to portray the complex set of experiences of the Indian diaspora in Canada should include some portrayal of the highly marginalised position which the Indian community faced when it first established themselves in the early 1900s. In addition to this historical focus, any attempt to portray the contemporary Indian diaspora needs to portray its growing diversity and its efforts to maintain, and in many cases modify and ‘hybridise’, cultural practices. Such a display would also have to reflect the influence of transnational forces on the contemporary Indian diaspora. Ultimately, efforts by museums to develop exhibits reflecting the Indian presence in Canada will only further the aims of its widely praised state policy of multiculturalism.

Black looks/black light: Med Hondo's Lumière Noire1

While ‘the gaze’ and ‘the look’ are familiar concepts in film studies, the idea of a postcolonial Black Gaze is more unusual and potentially more problematic. In dialogue with a range of theorists from both film and postcolonial studies, this article analyzes in detail one film by the radical African film maker Med Hondo which highlights the problems of looking. Renowned as a ‘difficult’ director, Hondo's first foray into more mainstream film making presents its own array of difficulties in its representation of the hidden face of the contemporary African diaspora.

Eco-Apartheid and Global Greenwaves: African Diasporic Environmental Justice Movements

The advent of global warming portends a worsening of “eco-apartheid,” or the unequal distribution of environmental benefits and burdens among poor and minority people. This article explores how activists in the contemporary African diaspora address current and future environmental injustices, as well as the neoliberalization of their natural resources. Using case studies, including the discriminatory siting of toxic waste facilities in the United States, conservation programs in South America, and ecotourism projects in Central America, I examine how activists present their oppositional identities in complex ways. For example, some underscore their African heritage, while others downplay it and emphasize instead their aboriginal, class, or geographic identities. Whereas in some cases, the environmental struggles of African-descended people are fairly inextricable from those of indigenous populations, in other cases, long-standing ethnic, racial, and cultural divisions make such alliances impractical. In still other cases, activists strategically shift between racial, ethnic, geographic, and class-based identities. Ultimately, the examples presented in this article raise larger questions about regional and transnational social movement alliances, diasporic identities. North/South differences, and the salience of social movement actors' positioning within the global economy.

What Are “Reverse Diasporas” and How Are We to Understand Them?

This article presents empirical evidence from two contemporary diasporas to support the thesis that formal return to the homeland does not necessarily “unmake” diasporas, as some scholars have previously suggested. I argue that, instead, so-called reverse diaspora formation processes take place, with important repercussions for the acculturation of co-ethnic immigrants in their nominal “homelands.” This article focuses on this latter issue, primarily on processes of identity formation and notions of belonging and home, which are particularly meaningful in the context of this diasporic “homecoming.” It draws on the structured comparison of the ethnic Greek and ethnic German diasporas from the former Soviet Union who moved to Greece and Germany after perestroika. Despite their rich and illuminating analogies and overlaps, these two diaspora groups have never been compared and contrasted before. After a brief historical contextualization, complicated processes of identity negotiation and belonging in the putative “historical homelands” are investigated comparatively, lending credence to the idea that “reverse” German and Greek diasporas have developed within (and often in conflict with) contemporary Greek and German societies. The fact that they occur simultaneously in both countries tends to suggest that the concept of reverse diaspora is an important one that needs closer attention from scholars in the future. The article concludes by outlining how we may conceptualize a reverse diaspora, based on existing definitions of diaspora. My research materials consist of in-depth qualitative data collected over the course of six years by means of eighty-one semi-structured interviews in Russian, German, and Greek with migrants and experts in Greece and Germany, embedded in ethno-graphic research and supplemented by statistical data.

Redefining “Diaspora”

Current definitions of diaspora-definitions used by academy and policymakers alike-contribute to marginalization of immigrant, minority, and ethnic communities, in terms of both societal inclusion and inclusion in foreign policy process. They therefore serve to undermine stated goals of Canadian multicultural project and to skew foreign-policymaking as policymakers seek to protect it from special pleading of ethnic minorities.A new definition of diaspora is needed-one that takes into account current political environments and that encompasses all peoples who find themselves in diasporic situations. As borders have become more porous and increasing numbers of people have moved into diaspora, ways of understanding diasporic condition-including questions of who is diasporic and nature of diasporic populations' relationship to wider society-need to shift in order to take into account critical factors of globalization, new understandings of citizenship, changed international environment, and unique challenge of Canadian multicultural project.William Safran, Robin Cohen, and others have defined diaspora in ways that made sense for particular frameworks, and while they have been valuable, national and international politics have changed. Diaspora is an apt word, but its use and our understanding of it need to change to keep pace with kinds of conversations diasporic-receiving countries are having.THE CLASSIC DEFINITIONSWilliam Safraris 1991 definition of diasporic people suggests that they have been dispersed from specific 'centre' to two or more places; continue to hold collective memory, vision, or myth about original homeland; continue to believe that original homeland is their ideal, true home and dream of returning; believe that they should remain committed to maintenance or restoration of original homeland; sustain strong ethnocommunal bond based on that ongoing relationship with homeland; and maintain troubled relationship with wider society, believing that they can never be fully accepted and causing them to remain partly alienated and insulated from it.1Robin Coheris 1997 Global Diasporas distinguishes between victim, labour, imperial, and trade diasporas. He agrees with Safraris criteria, but suggests that, in addition to foregoing, may have been an expansion in search of trade or economic opportunities. Moreover, he argues, diasporic communities continue to hold a sense of empathy and solidarity with co-ethnic members in other countries of settlement and the possibility of distinctive creative, enriching life in host countries with tolerance for pluralism.2Michele Reis distinguishes between classical (Jewish and Armenian, among others), modern (slave and colonial), and contemporary diasporas. Contemporary diasporas, she argues, are product of postcolonial, globalized world, characterized by fragmentation and dislocation, ongoing transnational communication, and an implication that dispersal to overseas territories need not imply decisive break with homeland nor is uprooting of diasporic group considered permanent.3Jana Braziel Evans and Anita Mannur write that diaspora can be seen as naming of other.4 Paul Bramadat notes that, in both popular and scholarly writing, the word 'diaspora' is typically used to refer to nonChristian religious groups that have been in some sense dispersed throughout world, but which continue to maintain important and sustaining ties to foreign homeland.5In that same vein, David Carment and David Bercuson, in their recent edited The World in Canada, argue thatmembers of diaspora may include ethnic migrants, first, second, or even third-generation immigrants, as well as expatriates, students, guest workers, and refugees. The term reflects rise of truly transnational populations, people who can be thought of as almost literally living in two places, playing an active role in two communities simultaneously. …

Remapping the Boundaries of `State' and `National Identity': Incorporating Diasporas into IR Theorizing

The structural components of a state are regularly conflated with a state's national identity. In reality, however, the assumption that the boundaries of a state and its national identity are coterminous is problematic. While this has always been the case, changes in the ability of actors in the international system to use communication and transportation technologies to sustain transnational collective identities points to the need for new empirical research in this area. Contemporary diasporas are defined by a national or cultural identity, yet differ from nation-states in terms of their organizational and spatial logics. By comparing diaspora mobilization in two cases, we find that both non-state political entrepreneurs and state elites are using diasporic practices of identity formation as a means of generating economic and political support in an increasingly integrated global economy. This points to discontinuities between a territorially defined states system and deterritorialized practices of collective identity formation.