Diaspora Studies Research Articles

PRATILIPI: ADVENT OF DIGITAL LITERATURE IN GUJARATI

‘Diaspora’ refers to the dispersion of people from their homeland. It is a scattered population whose origin lies in a separate geographic scale. Diaspora Literature can be called works were written by authors who live outside native land. Diaspora writers are often preoccupied with the elements of nostalgia as they seek to locate themselves in the new culture. At the core of the concept of Diaspora lays the image of home. Home is a powerful notion in the study of Diaspora.

Armenian diaspora in Russia: contemporary approaches to studying

The purpose of the review is to characterize general theoretical approaches to the study of diasporas in contemporary science and to present a historiographic analysis of the study of the Armenian diaspora in Russia. The research is based on a complex of historiographic sources: monographs, collective works, scientific articles, theses, that are devoted to the phenomenon of diasporas in the modern world. The authors emphasize the relevance of the study of diasporas in the context of globalization, mass migration, formation of new ethnic communities and polemics around the policy of multiculturalism. At present, the study of diasporas is conducted within the frameworks of history and philosophy, sociology and political science, ethnology and cultural studies, demography and economics, which explains the variety of methodological approaches to the phenomenon of the diaspora. Representatives of different humanities distinguish such defining features of the diaspora as stable ethnic (nostalgic) identity and collective memory, the presence of self-organization and a developed network of intragroup communications, a special style of life behavior and strategies for survival in the host society. These theoretical approaches find application in the study of the Armenian diaspora in Russia, which is a part of the world Armenian diaspora and at the same time has unique socio-cultural characteristics. Currently, the Armenian diaspora in Russia is widely studied both on a national scale and at the regional level, however, most studies cover only the southern regions and the capital of the Russian Federation. The creation of a comprehensive history of the Armenian diaspora in the Middle Volga region is an urgent scientific task. In the final part of the review, the authors outline possible prospects for further study of the Armenian diaspora in Russia and individual regions; this task can be solved using an interdisciplinary approach.

Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic Quarter a Century Later: Cultural Implications of African Diaspora’s Revision of Modernity

In his seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) Paul Gilroy traces an account of the Black diaspora as a cosmopolitan, historical and cultural Atlantic phenomenon that challenges and corrects Modern construction of ‘culture,’ ‘nation,’ ‘history,’ and ultimately ‘identity.’ Although the book was conceived quarter a century ago, it still continues to influence Black Studies, Migration Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Diaspora Studies. The present paper intends to shed light and reflect on the two most influential aspects of Gilroy’s book today. One such aspect is Gilroy’s exploration of Black Atlantic histories of (criss)-crossing, migration, interconnection, travel, and exile-- together with the form, content, and performance of diasporic expressive forms-- to revisit the tradition of Modernity and Enlightenment rationality. The other aspect, following from the first, is that while interrogating “national,” “nationalistic,” and “ethnically absolutist paradigms” such as “Englishness,” “Africanism” and “tradition,” he highlights cultural hybridity, transnationality, and memory. By so doing he subverts modernity’s racialized monolithic definition of ‘culture’ and ‘nation (state)’ along with its construction and association with teleological historiography.

A Conceptual Framework of Jewish Diaspora

Man moves from one place to another in the search of comfort and prosperity. Such movement of people, voluntary or involuntary, is studied in the social sciences of literature under the head of Diaspora. The present study of Diaspora, has emerged with the multiplicity of histories, variety of culture, tradition, and a deep instinct for survival in the adapted country of the migrants. The present paper explores the conceptual framework of Jewish diaspora.

Diasporic placemaking: the internationalisation of a migrant hometown in post-socialist China

ABSTRACT International migration profoundly reshapes the urban landscape in sending and receiving countries. Compared to ethnic enclaves in migrant-receiving metropolises and remittance houses in sending communities, we know little about systematic urban changes led by emigration states. In this article, based on three months of fieldwork in a migrant hometown in China, I argue that the dispersion of emigrants per se does not make its urban space inherently ‘diasporic’. Rather, a ‘diasporic place’ can be strategically constructed by local sociopolitical actors, a process I conceptualise as ‘diasporic placemaking’. To create an international city branding and boost the consumption-based urban economy, the local state promotes Western architectural forms and imagines globalisation as a new way of life. To understand how migrants and local residents make sense of diasporic placemaking, I analyse deep-running tensions between their diverse self-perceptions and state construction. Instead of an innocent project, diasporic placemaking is replete with ambitions, achievements, and anxieties in post-socialist China’s march towards modernity, progress, and prosperity. To advance the constructivist momentum in diaspora studies, I explore how diaspora construction is realized and contested in urban transformations while shedding light on how migrant spaces are valorised and performed by local actors for economic and symbolic purposes.

Introduction

This discussion offers a reflection on some of the shifts and developments in the field of queer studies in Canada since the turn of the century. It situates these developments against, and in relation to, a longer history of queer politics in Canada while also emphasizing key moments and critical turns. Also examined here are the ways in which Indigenous studies, decolonial critiques, diaspora studies, and critical race studies have offered key interventions and heralded new horizons within the field. In thinking about these interventions and intersections, we frame our account through an emphasis on returns and revisions rather than a discourse of progress, which is what typically defines Canadian state narratives.

Skin as Ecstatic Surface: Listening to Queer Diaspora in the work of Patrick Cruz

Patrick Cruz is a Toronto-based painter whose artistic practice is informed by his experience of migrating from the Philippines to Canada. The Filipinx diaspora in Canada is large but often not given adequate attention in queer theories of nationhood. This article makes the argument that the textures or “skin” of Patrick Cruz’s canvases are an extension of his interior world and insist on the complex psychic, corporeal, and sonic contours of Filipinx migration and diasporic subjectivity in Canada. It proposes a queer theory of listening to suggest that Cruz’s paintings are important for their expression of Filipinx diaspora. Bringing sound studies to bear on notions of skin, surface, and queer affect, this article makes the case that when one listens closely to a painting a new intimacy with the work and the Filipinx artist is forged. Central to arguments made is scholarship produced in the fields of queer diaspora studies and Filipinx studies.

Cross-Cultural Migration and the Academic Boundaries of Comparative Literature

Abstract The increase in global population movements and migration has transformed comparative literature and generated new fields of inquiry, such as the study of diaspora, immigrant, and Chinese literatures. Although both the French and American schools of analysis have historically made important contributions to the discipline of comparative literature, the aforementioned transformations have led some scholars to critique these schools as Eurocentric, Orientalist, or Western-centric. By reviewing and comparing the development of the discipline of comparative literature, this article argues that Chinese scholars' proposals for cross-civilization and variation study of comparative literature have brought new vitality to the discipline, further expanding its academic boundaries, and making it truly open and inclusive.

Complicating ‘Victimhood’ In Diaspora Studies: The Saga of Tamils In Exile

As an interdisciplinary field, Diaspora Studies has drawn from many disciplines, including sociology, especially from its debates on migration, structure and agency. This lecture draws on my ethnographic fieldwork on the Sri Lankan Tamils in Germany. It analyses their transition following the civil war in Sri Lanka, from being refugee immigrants to becoming a successful diaspora, well integrated economically, yet holding a powerful identity as Tamil nationalists. Fuelled by political commitment and digital connectivity, their innovative strategies as a diaspora have contributed to the propagation of the Tamil cause. Their example extends and complicates the classic notion of ‘victim diaspora’, demonstrating the simultaneity of victimhood and agency.

Speaking beyond the Discipline: Japanese Diaspora Archaeology in Dialogue

While this collection of articles provides a pathbreaking assemblage of studies of Japanese diaspora, for the progression of the field, archaeology must engage critically with other disciplines. Too often historical archaeology is conceived of as an afterthought or curiosity in conjunction with other disciplines’ approaches to history. Materials and objects as illustrative but not informative to the level of the archive of oral historical record. In this concluding forum, we discuss the contribution of archaeology to Japanese Diaspora studies, inviting a diverse group of scholars to comment on this special issue. What relevance do these studies have, and how do they articulate with other disciplinary approaches? In doing so we hope to move the conversation beyond the discipline, putting archaeology in dialogue with history, cultural anthropology, and ethnic studies.

Counter-Propaganda and Spy Fever: Germans in Washington, DC, During World War I

Abstract During the First World War, the German immigrant community in Washington, DC, came under particular pressure due to its proximity to politically and strategically sensitive institutions. Accusations of sabotage and “hyphenated” loyalty led to an atmosphere of suspicion, suppression, internment, and expulsion. Ethnic leaders produced counter-propaganda to feed both their compatriots and the American public with alternative narratives of warfare. This work argues that these bellicose pro-German utterances aggravated tensions with the host society. Within a theoretical framework of diasporic connectedness, this article shows that reverberations of war affected civilians in places far removed from the frontlines. Studying the totality of war must include the study of diasporas and “enemy minorities.”

Radical Traversals

Abstract In Radical Traversals, Sierra Edd combines work on Indigenous art practice and production, politics of aesthetics, and temporal sovereignty, to highlight the potentialities of decolonial imagining and interpretative methods of listening in an analysis of the digital music collection called the Indigenous Futurisms Mixtape. Edd examines how sonic affect and the remix form create spatial and temporal multidimensionality or hyper-presence, to disrupt Western orders of objecthood and colonial logics in music. Drawing on epistemological provocations in Native and Indigenous studies, Black diaspora studies, and Sound studies, this paper uses a theoretical framework of traveling Indigeneity to center collaboration and theorizations on decolonial imagination which describes emergent radical envisioning and world-making as a conceptual tool of troubleshooting. To foreground the engagement with Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous sound and aesthetics in music, Edd uses a method of close-listening, a heterogeneous intimacy or a whole-body encounter with sonic (meta)physics and acoustics. This paper illustrates how listening and engaging with the Mixtape’s political aesthetic form encourages decolonial imagining and employs micro-scale resurgence enacted in quotidian intellectual and emotional knowledge building.

African Diaspora Studies and the Lost Promise of Afrocentrism

African Diaspora Studies and the Lost Promise of Afrocentrism

Diaspora and Transnationalism: the Changing Contours of Ethnonational Identity of Indian Diaspora

Abstract Diasporic communities have historically maintained—either actively or passively—their ethnonational identities, be it in the case of classical diasporas such as the Jews or Armenians or the case of more modern diasporas such as the Indians or other South Asians. However, the ethnonational identities of diasporic communities have strengthened significantly in recent times as a result of the global forces such as the Internet that created and recreated the existing and newer ways of transnationalism and ethnonationalism. The study of the Indian diaspora is inherent because of the fact that these global forces have drastically changed the ethnonational identity of Indians in the diaspora. There are a plethora of factors that played an important role in this process of transformation. This article tries to examine two of the most significant factors that strengthened the ethnonational identity, such as the dynamic changes in the Indian government policy towards diaspora and the role of the Internet that facilitates the youth to play a prominent role in this neo-diaspora.

Shifting Paradigms of Chinese Diaspora Studies and the Changing Dynamics of Transnational Chinese Communities: a Holistic Review

Abstract This article considers the pathbreaking developments that are quickly changing the field of Chinese diaspora studies. China’s rise and its ongoing integration in the world and the concomitantly changing international position of Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan launched a wave of Chinese elite students studying abroad, of nouveau riche emigrating to the West, and of returning Chinese recent emigrants. This brought forth a new discourse on the Chineseness and the Sinophone world that reshaped the meaning of how an ancestral hometown and host countries connect, and of the imagery and meaning of being Chinese, including being Chinese Overseas. Ironically, the new discourse, however sophisticated, global, and multidisciplinary, is primarily produced by non-Chinese and expatriate Chinese scholars. The challenge here is that, for many decades, political and ideological considerations worldwide have motivated the scholarship on Chinese diaspora, by both Chinese and non-Chinese scholars. A holistic approach, which frames Chinese diaspora as an integral part of world history, may help to meet this challenge.

Feeling Greek, speaking Greek? National identity and language negotiation amongst the Greek diaspora in Australia

This paper uses a qualitative case study of the Greek diaspora in Australia in order to add to debates on the geographies of diaspora and diasporic identity in relation to nation-building and nationalism through an exploration of Greek language usage. Specifically, it contributes to ongoing research in geography, diaspora studies and beyond, which stresses the need to examine and tensions and disunities within diasporic 'communities' through a focus on the materialities and emotionalities of diasporic lives and identities. The paper stresses that although more fluid and in-between diasporic identity negotiations are important, it is also necessary to examine the ways in which those in diaspora attempt to 'hold onto' times and spaces of homeland national identity in order to perform more static, bounded and inflexible notions of diasporic identity. The paper uses the example of language to demonstrate how tensions over the role and importance of homeland language in diaspora reveal different imaginations and emotions around what it means to be, feel and belong in diaspora. The paper contributes to debates over the roots and routes of diaspora, as well as the need for boundary (re)making. In doing so, it stresses the need for geographical research on diaspora, and the important role that geographers can play in critical interpretations of the lives and identities of those in diaspora, 'on the move', within and across borders. It therefore adds to ongoing geographical debates about the need to envisage diasporas in flexible and inclusive ways, but also account for the ways in which nation-building and nationalism continue to form part of diasporic identity articulations.

Thinking With Time: Reflections on Migration and Diaspora Studies Through Sri Lankan Tamil Marriage Migration

Most of the migration studies or diaspora studies predominantly focus on migration patterns, human movements and their circulation over space. Recently a shift occurred focusing on nonhumans and immobility to analyze migration and diaspora. In this article by taking one of the features of Sri Lankan Tamil transnational marriage between Sri Lankan Tamils from Sri Lanka and Sri Lankan diaspora, I argue the importance of time and temporality to rethink about migration and diaspora studies. I show how different temporalities of things and humans that get (dis)entangled at different places and different points in the marriage migration process allow us to shift our lens slightly in future studies on migration and diaspora.

Towards New Methodologies in Migration and Diaspora Studies: An Introduction

Towards New Methodologies in Migration and Diaspora Studies: An Introduction

Diasporic home: US Colombian belonging and becoming in Patricia Engel’s Vida

This article analyzes Patricia Engel’s Vida (Grove Atlantic, New York, 2010) as a groundbreaking novel that narrates the US Colombian diasporic experience. The article argues that becoming and belonging evolve across the intricacies of the transdiasporic journey of class, race, and gender presented throughout the novel. Through a close reading of Vida, the article asserts the importance of this group’s place in the US immigrant imaginary and the broader Latinx diaspora. Its analysis of Vida affirms the significance of US Colombians as a meaningful and distinctive part of Latinx diaspora studies, asserts the role of US Colombians as part of the transnational Latinx cultural imaginary, and considers how literary analysis about diasporic Colombian fiction might ultimately expand ways of theorizing transnational Latinx cultural production.

Landscaping an Ecuadorian neighborhood in Queens, NY

Diaspora studies on migration communities have shown how these transnational groups appropriate the new space in the receptive country through a process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. These processes involve a reinterpretation and reconceptualization of the linguistic relationship between the language of the diaspora group and those spoken in the new home. One of the most visible places where this contextual relation must be negotiated is in the public sphere, where language, culture and identity are inevitably interwoven (Blackwood, Lanza & Woldemariam, 2016). Using a multimodal approach and using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, this article analyzes how an Ecuadorian-American community in Queens transformed the linguistic landscape of their surroundings to make it similar to what this community had in their home country.