Diaspora Studies Research Articles

Talent management practices for firms’ absorptive capacity in a host country: a study of the Chinese diaspora in Russia

PurposeThe paper aims to explore the role of talent management (TM) practices in shaping firm’s absorptive capacity (AC) in the host country. Based on the data from representatives of Chinese diaspora used in Russia, this study discusses the role of TM practices in developing firm’s AC through learning from diaspora.Design/methodology/approachTo explore possible connections between both TM practices and AC and TM practices and attractiveness of a company for diaspora representatives (talent mobility), this study reports an exploratory study by using a set-theoretical analytic method, fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis.FindingsThe findings state that retention and development practices significantly influence firm’s AC, which promotes attractiveness of Russia as of destination country for Chinese employees and of particular company with the corresponding TM system.Originality/valueThis study reveals the existing connection between diaspora talent attraction and knowledge assimilation and diaspora talent retention and knowledge transformation. Knowledge acquisition is influenced by talent retention and talent development with a mediation of knowledge sharing.

The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival

The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival

Digital Diasporas: Staying with the Trouble

Abstract This commentary proposes a reorientation of diaspora studies towards new configurations of participation and identification. Digital media affordances in this sense are just such new configurations that enable, sustain and multiply diasporic encounters through social media platforms, digital devices and infrastructures. The emerging digital diasporas do not oppose or replace traditional diasporas, but on the contrary further expand and transform their agency in the digital age Mihaela Nedelcu (2018). In our thinking, we are inconversation with, as well as departing from, previous notions of diaspora. In this commentary, we briefly establish the complex and non-linear genealogy of the term, as partaking in multiple disciplinary takes and discursive orientations, and then migrating to the new realm of technology and digital connectedness.

Notes on Contributors

David Arnold is Professor of History at Columbia Basin College where he teaches courses in US, Native American, and African American history. His first book, The Fishermen's Frontier: People and Salmon in Southeast Alaska (University of Washington Press, 2008) is a social and environmental history of Indian and non-Indian fishermen from precontact to present.Matthew M. Babcock is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Texas at Dallas and author of Apache Adaptation to Hispanic Rule. He received his PhD at Southern Methodist University, and he focuses on the history of North American borderlands, American Indians, and the colonial Southwest.Rosie C. Bermudez is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. Her research and teaching interests include Chicana grassroots activism, social movements, and women of color feminisms. Bermudez is currently writing a book about Chicana activist Alicia Escalante and the East Los Angeles Welfare Rights Organization.Dea H. Boster is Associate Professor of History in the Humanities Department at Columbus State Community College in Columbus, Ohio. She has published several works on the history of American medicine and disability, including African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South (Routledge, 2012).Heather D. Curtis is the Warren S. Woodbridge Professor of Religion at Tufts University, where she also holds appointments in the Department of History and the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. Curtis received her doctorate in American Religion from Harvard University. Her research explores how religion has shaped responses to racial injustice, humanitarian disasters, and bodily illness from the late nineteenth century to the present.Justene Hill Edwards is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (2021).David G. García earned his PhD in US History at UCLA and is Associate Professor in the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. He is the author of the award-winning book Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality (University of California Press, 2018).Lyrianne E. González is a History PhD student minoring in Latino Studies at Cornell University. She is a mid-twentieth-century historian with focuses in US labor history, US foreign labor relations, US–Mexico relations, and im/migration. Her research investigates the racial and generational legacies of US agricultural guestworker programs.José G. Moreno is a full-time senior lecturer in ethnic studies and sociology and the Associate Director of the Ethnic Studies Program at Northern Arizona University. He has published various peer review articles, critical essays, and book reviews in academic publications.Mark Newman is a reader in history at the University of Edinburgh. He thanks the University of Edinburgh Development Trust Research Fund, the British Academy, the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, and the Leverhulme Trust for the financial support that made this article possible.Lucy E. Salyer is Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of Under the Starry Flag (Harvard University Press, 2018), Laws Harsh as Tigers (University of North Carolina Press, 1995), and numerous articles on the history of immigration and citizenship policy.Ryan E. Santos is a lecturer in the Social and Cultural Analysis of Education program at California State University, Long Beach and in the Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies Department at California State University, Los Angeles. His research and teaching emphasize educational history with an emphasis on race, community resistance, and the law.Cameron Tardif is a PhD student who studies twentieth-century US history at Cornell University. His research focuses on how the relationship of slavery and freedom between the United States and Canada impacts the experiences of transnational black athletes. His work has been published in the Journal of Sport History.Lila Teeters is Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Political Science at Worcester State University. She received her PhD in American History from the University of New Hampshire in 2021. Her dissertation is entitled “Native Citizens: The Fight for and against Native American Citizenship, 1887–1924.”Tara J. Yosso is Professor in the Graduate School of Education at UC Riverside. Her research seeks to recover counter-narratives of race, schooling, inequality, and the law. Her extensively cited publications examine the ways people of color utilize community cultural wealth to survive and resist racism and other forms of subordination.Hao Zou is an independent scholar based in San Francisco. His research interests include Asian American history, immigration history, race and ethnicity, and the history of the American West.

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

Exploring ‘Temporality’ in the Short Story ‘Turquoise’ by Aamer Hussein: An Application of the Genette’s Model of Narratology

The present Study is primarily concerned with applying Genette‘s schemata developed in his famous ‘Narrative Discourse’ and theory of cultural hybridity of Homi Bhabha to the study of Aamer Hussain’s Short Story ‘Turquoise’. This study analyzes the temporal shifts in the short story. Since diaspora is prevailing as an important theme in the short story, this study is also concerned with the analysis of cultural hybridity. The research is concerned with the Genette's narratology,' in order to bring out the intricacies of the temporal patterns of the short story. Furthermore, it deals with the analysis of cultural hybridity as the ideology of a new elite a “postmodern” cosmopolitanism. This study makes the case that hybridity helps us comprehend the dynamics of the global culture. Focalized through a double perspective, ‘Turquoise’ reveals Aamer Hussain’s expertise in handling narrative temporality and providing a comprehensive study of Diaspora in terms of cultural hybridity.

Dodgy Paperwork and Theories of Citizenship on the Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan Borders

This article reflects on conversations with cross-border residents in the northwest region of Uganda about local ideas of the nature of political authority and questions of identity paperwork. It notes that there is very little that is really ‘national’ or ‘state’ about the identification paperwork and practices that have emerged on these borders from the 1990s onwards. Instead of a conversation about rights and reciprocal relationships with ‘their’ state/s, residents emphasize the significance of class systems, globalized capital, and power relations in how citizenship works in this region; dynamics that are not often centered in academic literature on claim-making and state-subject relationships. The article supports a wider move towards reframing studies of citizenship, the nation-state, diaspora, and ethnic community through local vocabularies and theory.

Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora by Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández

Reviewed by: Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora by Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández Lydia R. Cooper Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández, Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora. Durham: Duke UP, 2021. 352 pp. Paper, $28.95. Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández’s Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora examines the visual archives of Enrico Flores Magón and Leonard Nadel. Flores Magón was a journalist and, with his more famous brother Ricardo, developed the anarcho-communist political philosophy of magonismo, fleeing to the United States in political exile prior to the Mexican Revolution; Nadel was a freelance photographer who documented the bracero program in the mid-twentieth [End Page 93] century. Both archives are records of diasporic life and form material records of the affective experience of men estranged from their homes and, in various ways, legally and physically constrained; both are what Guidotti-Hernández calls “archives of intimacy.” In these intimacies she reads “the records of masculine emotional bonds” in order to find queer complexities to heteronormative presumptions of machismo (9). Building on her previous book, Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (also published by Duke University Press), this new study argues that “we need a transnational approach to affect and intimacy, one where the movement of ideas, bodies, services, emotions, and goods across and between the borders of nation-states produced new forms of gender” (5). This is a heady goal but one whose broader aims is achieved, albeit gesturally rather than definitively. This book takes as its specific focus the study of affective diaspora through visual artifacts, with most analysis dedicated to photographs. “Affective relations are forged through photographs,” she argues. “Photographs position the subjects in their most idealized or desired state and in a form of capture” (12). The first half of the book follows the gendered migrations, representations, and affective life of Flores Magón, beginning roughly around the time he fled to El Paso, Texas. Guidotti-Hernández notes the “baroque, masculinized style” of his prose in correspondence throughout his life, drawing attention to his performance of a sort of masculine virility (39). She anchors his section, though, by interrogating that “virility” through the erased records of his first marriage to Paula Carmona, a relationship whose erasure suggests the patriarchal and misogynistic strain of the masculinity he presented as essential to his identity as a free love–supporting anarchist. She examines a sketch he made of Paula, along with a cardboard cutout of two hearts, and says that they show an “intimacy counter [to] Enrique’s revisionist narratives in the biographies,” where he erases his relationship with Paula and inaccurately claims he was married to his second partner, Teresa Arteaga, during his time orchestrating the movement’s struggle from El Paso in 1908 (52). Overall, then, she concludes that Flores [End Page 94] Magón’s intimate and emotional life complexified performance of machismo, but in his own words, he asserted “normative gender order” (174). The second half of the book looks at the homoerotic tensions and possibilities in photojournalist Leonard Nadel’s visual record of the bracero program. Nadel, Guidotti-Hernández says, committed himself to his freelance photojournalistic project, traveling more than five thousand miles with his subjects from their homes in Central Mexican states through processing centers in the United States and into the labor camps (178). In his photographs she traces the tensions between two competing articulations of the braceros’ positionality—on the one hand, representing them as masculine ideals (Nadel’s photos “lionized [them] as heteronormative subjects who suffered”)—and on the other hand, revealing the intimacies of domestic life where men cohabiting with each other performed the “invisible work of domesticity” (180). One of the strengths of this section is her attention to weaving in the other histories of diasporic communities, such as Japanese American sharecroppers, German prisoners of war, and other precarious communities; pitted against each other in capitalist contexts, violence erupted—yet Nadel evades those tonal shadings in his photographic subjects. Guidotti-Hernández thus suggests the ways that feminine masculinity and homoeroticism enriched bracero life and culture underneath the dominant pressures of patriarchal, capitalist assertions of power and privilege. In the book...

States of Precarity and Pains of Utopic Pedagogy: Methodologies of Hope in Times of Crises

Drawing on personal teaching experience, this article considers the potentiality and pains of a pedagogic strategy that practises what José Esteban Muñoz calls a "methodology of hope" (2009). How can educators, particularly those located in the "enlightenment-type charade" (Moten and Harney 2013, 39) that is the university, enact a critical yet hopeful pedagogy when the "ghostly aspects" (Gordon 2008) of social life haunt both students and educators before they enter the classroom? Using Gail Lewis' (2014) defense of the reparative position within queer feminist debates on paranoid and reparative readings, I argue that Lewis' emphasis on relationality as a mode of criticality can foreground connection as a reparative mode of pedagogy. Reflecting on my own experience teaching Frantz Fanon's scholarship through a lens that confronts his homophobia and simultaneously refuses his disposal, I argue for the need for connection for both students and educator alike. The reparative stance, in this pedagogic moment, opens students to the analytical modes of Black diaspora studies, Black queer studies and queer of colour critique that thinks insurgently with and through Fanon to imagine otherwise.

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

Doran H. Ross

Doran H. Ross

Fostering Global Citizenship Education by the New American Diaspora. An approach from a critical perspective

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the diasporas’ role in fostering Global Citizenship Education (GCE) and provides a basis for understanding how diaspora organizations educate themselves to defend their rights in everyday life. I argue that diaspora organizations are potential agents that foster GCE to defend rights in a hostile environment against people in motion. From the GCE-driven critical perspective, this article offers an interdisciplinary dialogue between Diaspora Studies (International Relations), Sociology of Education, and Sociology of Collective Action to identify the practice of GCE at the New American Diaspora in Mexico City. The article is oriented to discussing the non-state actors’ agency in promoting GCE outside the walls of schools and classrooms. With a qualitative approach (case study), through an American/Mexican organization, I offer empirical evidence through the lens of GCE: The Others Dreams in Action (ODA) and its cultural space, namely the Poch@ House.

Host-Region: Safe Folklore and the Negotiation of Difference In Post-Socialist Diasporas in Newfoundland

Many studies of diasporas focus on (large) locales where sizable diasporic populations provide room for group formation based on a single ethnicity. Scholars often treat such regions as representative of larger units, defining hostland in broad geopolitical categories of countries and even continents. Based on ethnographic research devoted to immigrants from postSocialist Europe and Asia to the Canadian island of Newfoundland, I propose the concept of host-region to emphasize a regional perspective in diaspora studies. The overall small newcomer population and the unique socio-cultural context of the island result in regionally-specific diasporic group-building dynamics, stimulating new Newfoundlanders to expand the notion of their people beyond likeminded co-ethnics. Safe home-region folklore, namely, select cultural expressions that reinforce a sense of unity and do not cause tensions within a group, offers points of connection. However, contrary to many studies that emphasize the notion of commonality within groups, I show that difference, reinforced by continuous turbulence in the home-region, can be equally important in group-building endeavors.

Diaspora Walks: Small Lessons in Unlearning

This essay is a thought experiment that explores walking’s potential in enacting recognition of Indigenous and territorial lands with the hope of rendering pedagogies of citizenship anew. More precisely, I ask whether walking can offer everyday lessons in unlearning Canada’s settler colonial frameworks of citizenship. This essay, attempting to respond to the question, also hopes to add to conversations in diaspora studies and the ways diaspora performance studies can learn from Indigenous recognition and care of territorial lands as relations and Indigenous methodological interventions to unsettle colonialism. Using a feminist and critical Muslim studies positionality, I bring together research in performance studies, walking methodologies, and politics of diasporic subjects in order to explore how walking as an everyday and citational form might offer diaspora subjects affective ways to home in on a relational politics.

Heterogenising the Indian Hindu Diaspora in Thailand

Abstract The Indian diaspora is a diverse community of migrants who live dispersed around the globe. This includes the situation of Indian emigration to Thailand, which has been ongoing for hundreds of years. Several scholars in Indian Diaspora Studies have previously contributed to an understanding of the different social groups of the heterogenous Indian diaspora in terms of ethnicities, religions, periods of migration, and social and political consciousness. However, Indian Diaspora Studies in Thailand undertaken by Thai scholars over the past decade have only focused on the Siamese Brahmin and the Thai-Indian Sikh and Muslim diaspora in Thailand, and have tended to view Hindu immigrants to Thailand as a homogeneous group. Their contribution is constrained by considering migrants only through the lens of ethnicity, and dualistically conceptualising ethnic boundaries between Indianness and Thainess as a result. This paper, in conversation with previous scholarship, applies the notion of heterogeneity to understand the complexity of the Indian Hindu diaspora in contemporary Thai societies. This article, based on case studies in the Chiang Mai province, asserts that the Thai-Indian Hindu diaspora consists of heterogeneous groups that utilise multi-ethnic-religious identities as cultural strategies to establish their self-identification. Therefore, the Indian Hindu diaspora in Thai society is associated with the (re)formation and recombination of traditional and modern diasporic types of consciousness, reflecting the complexity of the Indian Hindu diaspora in Thailand today.

The Making of an Ethnoburb: Studying Sub-ethnicities of the China-born New Immigrants in Albany, New Zealand.

Over more than three decades New Zealand (NZ) has abolished its racially-biased immigration policy and changed to select immigrants based on personal merits, since 1997 new Chinese immigrants from China have become the second-largest immigrant group in NZ. Reflecting the rapid changes in Mainland Chinese society, different waves of Chinese immigrants have arrived in NZ during the past three decades, each carrying distinctive characteristics. Despite the magnitude of this immigrant population both globally and in NZ, the subethnicities of these immigrants have never been conceptualised theoretically. Based on the digitally- enhanced research techniques together with ethnographically-based study, the paper aims to remedy this research gap in Chinese diaspora studies. Two theoretical concepts are used in this research. The first is the concept of sub-ethnicity which refers to finer boundaries drawn within an ethnic group by nationality, language, region of origin, class, or other distinctions. The second is the concept of ethnoburb - a model of ethnic settlement where the suburban ethnic communities and clusters of associated residential areas and business districts in large metropolitan cities are highly concentrated. This research considers these two concepts are correlated to each other since certain ethnoburb has particular attraction to certain sub-ethnic group; and vice versa, certain subethnic group intends to gather in same ethnoburb unintentionally or unconsciously. Applying these concepts, the research considers Albany as an example of a distinctive Chinese ethnoburb for the China-born new immigrants, especially for the most recent arrivals. The paper makes theoretical contribution to understand the complementarity between these two concepts and their methodological implementation towards studying new Chinese migration.

Immigrants on Chinese Television and Limitations of China’s Globalist Discourse

Traditionally perceived as a country of emigration, China has in recent years become an increasingly popular subject for immigration and diaspora studies, with an immigrant population that has been growing quietly and steadily since the 1990s. However, media representations of immigrants in China have not garnered much attention. This article provides a critical assessment of how immigrants and immigrant experience are portrayed on Chinese television, using the example of Foreigner in China (2013–19), the first-ever program on a national platform to tackle this topic. It argues that, while the program paints a rather insightful and entertaining picture of contemporary immigrant life in China, its representation of immigrants is restricted by not only the internal contradiction of the Xi administration’s globalist discourse, but also the exclusive, ethnocentric conception of Chinese nationhood, which remains the norm in a more heterogenous and globally conscious Chinese society.

The legacy of Sea Island Creole English: Sociolinguistic features of Gullah

This paper builds on the renewed interest in preserving the multiethnic origins of the United States and recognizing a profound impact of the Black experience on the American nation. The article centers on the Gullah language, one of the primary roots of modern African American English and the only remaining English-related Creole language in North America. The pidgin language, which originally evolved as a medium of communication between slaves from various regions of Africa and their owners, is still spoken by Black communities across coastal regions of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. While inland African American English (AAE) has received much attention in linguistic circles over past decades, relatively little research has been done on varieties of AAE spoken in the rural American South. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the origin and history of Gullah and to present a linguistic description of its most peculiar features. The Gullah language represents a combination of English and Central and West African languages. Geographical isolation, predominance of the Black population, and social and economic independence contributed to its development and survival. Also, in contrast with inland African Americans, the Gullah Geechee communities historically have had little contact with whites. Several folktales written in Gullah have been analyzed for discussing its persistent patterns. Characterizing Gullah is important for our increased understanding of the origins of AAE. Therefore, the article will be useful for scholars interested in Atlantic creoles and in African American and Diaspora Studies.

“The Scope for the English Language and Diaspora Studies in the National Education Policy -2020”

“The Scope for the English Language and Diaspora Studies in the National Education Policy -2020”

An Analytical Study of Investment Awareness Level of NRIs in Doaba Region of Punjab

Remittances relate to the money that migrants pay back to their home countries. We are sending remittances from more developed countries considerably aids the progress of less developed nations. India will receive $89 billion in remittances in 2021, making it the world's largest recipient. This study was conducted in the Doaba area of the Indian state of Punjab, which accounts for 1.7% of total remittances to India. This research attempts to assess the level of information Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) have about the various investment options available in banks in Punjab, according to their demographic profile. The researcher has endeavored to appreciate the extent to which NRIs are aware of the plethora of investment alternatives offered by banks in the state of Punjab in connection to the demographic profile. In order to collect data on the level of knowledge NRIs have about the various investment options, hypotheses and questionnaires are developed. References Reichert, J. (1981). The migrant syndrome: Seasonal U.S. wage labor and Rural Development in central Mexico. Human Organization, 40(1), 56–66. https://doi.org/10.17730 /humo. 40.1. c61 48p 57 4 3 512768. Kahali, A. (2016). Diaspora engagement: Need for paradigm shift -Indian perspective. Diaspora Studies, 10(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/09739572.2016.1239432 Khandagale, D. B. D. (2017). Multiculturalism and Indian Diaspora. Journal of Indian Research, 5(4), 14–19. atra, M. D., & Kapur, M. (2003). India’s Worker Remittances: A Users’ Lament About Balance of Payments Compilation . Sixteenth Meeting of the IMF Committee on Balance of Payments Statistics Washington D.C., 1-5. Global Commission on international migration. International Organization for Migration. (n.d.). Retrieved September 26, 2022, from https://www.iom.int/global-commission-international-migration. Mea | media centre : Publications : Annual reports. (n.d.). Retrieved September 26, 2022, from https://mea.gov.in/annual-reports.htm?57/Annual_Reports National Portal of India. (n.d.). Retrieved September 26, 2022, from https://www.india.gov.in/annual-reports-under-ministry-external-affairs Khandagale, B. D. (2017). Multiculturalism and Indian Diaspora. Journal of Indian Research, 5(4), 14-19. Qureshi, K., & Osella, F. (2015). Punjabi diaspora and educational development. In India Migration Report 2014(pp. 125-138). Routledge India. Ministry of External Affairs. (n.d.). Retrieved September 23, 2022, from https://mea.gov.in/Uploads/PublicationDocs/31719_MEA_AR18_19.pdf. Ministry of External Affairs. (n.d.). Retrieved September 23, 2022, from https://mea.gov.in/Uploads/PublicationDocs/31719_MEA_AR18_19.pdf 01 starting pages - Ministry of External Affairs. (n.d.). Retrieved September 23, 2022, from https://mea.gov.in/Uploads/PublicationDocs/29788_MEA-AR-2017-18-03-02-2018.pdf Reserve Bank of India - RBI Bulletin. (n.d.). Retrieved September 23, 2022, from https://rbi.org.in/scripts/BS_ViewBulletin.aspx/. Villanthenkodath, M. A., & Mahalik, M. K. (2020). Technological Innovation and Environmental Quality Nexus in India: Does inward remittance matter? Journal of Public Affairs, 22(1). https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2291. Jijin, P., Mishra, A. K., & Nithin, M. (2021). Macroeconomic determinants of remittances to India. Economic Change and Restructuring, 55(2), 1229–1248. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10644-021-09347-3 Dastidar, S. G., & Apergis, N. (2022). Do Remittances Promote Economic Growth? New Evidence from India. Economic Issues Journal Articles, 27(1), 11-37. Mallick, F. (2022). Recent Trends of International Migration from India . INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES, ENGINEERING, SCIENCE AND MANAGEMENT, 3(01). Retrieved from https://journal.rkdfuniversity.org/index.php/ijhesm/article/view/136. Holst, E., Schäfer, A., & Schrooten, M. (2011). Remittances and gender: Theoretical considerations and empirical evidence. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1750252. Singh, G., & Singh, S. (2007). Diaspora philanthropy in action: An evaluation of modernization in Punjab Villages. JPS, 14(2), 226. Bhat, Chandrashekhar & Narayan, Kadekar. (2010). Indian Diaspora, Globalization and Transnational Networks: The South African Context. J Soc Sci. 25. 13-23. 10.1080/09718923.2010.11892862. Patel, J. (2018). A STUDY ON CONTRIBUTION OF NRIs FOR RURAL DEVELOPMENT. PARIPEX - INDIAN JOURNAL OF RESEARCH, 7(4). Pande, A. (2018). India’s Experience with Remittances: a Critical Analysis. The Round Table, 107(1), 33-43. https://doi.org/10.1080/00358533.2018.1424078