Diaspora Experience Research Articles

Dark diaspora tourism: experiences and meanings in liminal spaces

Few tourism sites possess the combined attributes of dark tourism and diaspora tourism, and journeys to these liminal spaces can unearth complex and nuanced emotions. While previous studies have added knowledge to the experiences of diaspora tourists, little is known about the liminal experiences at dark diaspora tourism sites. While most studies attempt to explore the experiences of tourists to destinations, there is neoteric interest in understanding the hermeneutics of these experiences by offering insights into the contextual interpretation of events. To investigate these, we integrate liminality and stimulus organism theories within a framework of interpretive phenomenology methodology. Forty interviews were conducted with dark diaspora tourists. The study revealed minor and major themes including enlightenment, visceral conflicts, identity dilemmas, and renegotiation of diasporic experiences. Ultimately, it is only by probing the interpretations of dark diaspora experiences from visitors’ own narratives that deep concealed meanings to liminal experiences can be uncovered. The research indicates that experiences at dark diaspora sites vary and result in diverse effects on individuals’ experiences and subsequent interpretations.

Transmuting Trauma and ‘Alchemiz[ing] Inherited Wounds’: iele paloumpis’s disabled, diasporic choreographies of care

In the programme notes for the premiere of In place of catastrophe, a clear night sky at Danspace Project in May 2022, choreographer iele paloumpis asks, ‘What vitality allowed our ancestors to survive generations of trauma, and what wisdoms have been passed down to us?’ Moving with and through grief surrounding various connected histories of violence, paloumpis and collaborators simultaneously find modes of tuning into various connected histories of resilience. This essay explores how paloumpis and collaborators collectively tap into disability and diaspora to transform intergenerational trauma into knowledge, power and more livable forms of relationality. Through overlapping practices of textile weaving, interdisciplinary somatic practices, audio description and sculpture, the piece enacts multisensorial choreographies of care that allow for alchemical grief processes to unfold between human performers themselves, between performers and non-human materials, and between performers and audience members. Approaching choreographic practices as care practices and care practices as choreographic practices, I use the phrase ‘choreographies of care' to refer to disabled, diasporic relationalities in performance. My engagement with these relationalities takes cues from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's conceptions of ‘care webs' (2018), Édouard Glissant's theories of ‘Relation' and ‘opacity' (1997) and Alice Sheppard's discussions of care as an ‘anchor point' of disability culture in performance contexts (2021). A certified end-of-life doula and grief worker, paloumpis carves out room for shared mourning on their own terms through a process of what they call ‘alchemiz[ing] inherited wounds into collective care’ (2022b). In this article, I will attend to some of the ways in which paloumpis and collaborators move through this alchemical transmutation of trauma by weaving across differing but connected experiences of disability, chronic illness and diaspora.

Second generation diaspora: pandemic, development and connection

ABSTRACT The new millennium has seen a proliferation of scholarship and research addressing the relationship between diaspora and development. Conventionally, it is assumed that the second generation in the diaspora experiences a diminishing attachment to their countries of origin. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, diasporas have been at the forefront of supporting their communities at home and abroad. In this article, we examine the contribution of the second-generation diaspora to the country of origin in South Asia to provide comparative insights across time, countries, and types of crises. We examine the transnational framework in the context of ‘diaspora’ and ‘engagement during the pandemic,’ drawing on transnational scholarship. This provides an opportunity to examine the means, motivations, and agency of diaspora members – and their descendants – in transnational activities with a clear development objective. The study offers actionable recommendations for better-leveraging diaspora contributions in times of crisis.

Virtual mourning, the experiences of iranian diaspora during Covid-19

Virtual mourning, the experiences of iranian diaspora during Covid-19

Can the medical educator speak? The next frontier of globalisation research in medical education.

Can the medical educator speak? The next frontier of globalisation research in medical education.

The Polish American Historical Association Continues its Mission: Somethings Old, Somethings New

The Polish American Historical Association Continues its Mission: Somethings Old, Somethings New

The N-word: the Necessity of Prohibiting it

The main point of this paper is to help readers to decide whether people should allow the n-word to become prevalent in public. The behavior of speaking the n-word, consciously or unconsciously, might be treated as racial discrimination, and thus people who utilize it might be considered a racist, as the n-word could not be detached from the social context that generalized it. However, a few people began to consider its culture and historical values. By using this format, a speaker can create an identity that demonstrates knowledge of African American history as well as a practical understanding of the nature and significance of the diaspora experience. The form of the n-word has been changing over time, which means the public gradually endeavored to accept this word. Those scholars suggested that there should be less tragedy, in which case people, Caucasians in particular, could not defray the cost of mentioning the n-word (such as losing jobs, online violence), and it has proven somewhat effective in spreading a variety of attitudes related to its fundamental meaning, including solidarity, a provocative voice for equality.

Constructing Grief: Processing Tragedy through the Ritualization of Embroidery

Through an analysis of one Iranian-Canadian woman’s experiences navigating personal and global trauma, the authors seek to explore how the act of embroidery is ritualized to aid in the processing of tragedy and loss. Of particular interest is how this performance lies at an intersection of COVID, global injustice, diaspora experiences, and personal grief.

LÉ James Joyce 's Exiles

ABSTRACT: This essay draws connections between exiles in Joyce's texts, LÉ James Joyce 's rescue missions, and twenty-first-century refugees. Joyce's Ulysses , as a meditation on exile understood expansively and inclusively, foreshadows and anticipates the contemporary refugee crises in Ireland, the rest of Europe, and elsewhere. In Ulysses and other works, Joyce links mythological wanderers (Odysseus-Stephen, Telemachus-Bloom) with historical exiles (the Jewish diaspora, Irish emigrants), bringing our attention to the metaphor of contamination in xenophobic rhetoric in turn-of-the-century Ireland. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake attempt to approximate the condition of cultural and linguistic displacement. The multi-lingual, multi-form, and multivoiced narratives echo the lived experiences of displaced people for whom communication often means survival. Nevertheless, the essay calls for a careful use of language about exile and migration. To discuss Joyce's voluntary migrations East in the context of the experiences of the Jewish diaspora in the twentieth century or the refugees from Somalia, Eritrea, Syria, Afghanistan—or now Ukraine—is to diminish the humanitarian crises and suffering of true exile-refugees.

On the analysis of Imperial diaspora awareness of white South Africans in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook

As Alice Ridont and Susan Watkins remarked in their symposium Doris Lessing: Border Crossings, born in Persia, raised in Rhodesia and living in her parents’ hometown---England postwar, Doris Lessing’s experiences of space border crossings has an important influence on the thematic and cultural border crossings of her literary creations. Lessing’s experiences of border crossing both physically and spiritually are in a great degree her diaspora experiences. Influenced by her parents and sense of personal identification, Lessing had an awareness of imperial diaspora in her early years, reflected by the white South Africans in her work The Golden Notebook. This sense of imperial diaspora is embodied in idealizing the motherland, treating the culture of the resident country as the “margin”, whereas taking that of native land as the “centerpiece”, and having a partiality for the lifestyle from motherland, and meanwhile longing for a return to the motherland. This preference to the "myth of roots" is not an exception but a common feature of the imperial diasporas.

Hybridity in Jhumpa Lahiri's a Temporary Matter

This study aims to reveal hybridity and liminality in Jhumpa Lahiri's short story entitled A Temporary Matter. This research is a qualitative research with a postcolonial approach. The theory used in this research is postcolonialism theory by Homi K. Bhabha. The methods applied in this study include data collection methods and data analysis methods. The data obtained were taken from the speech of the characters and the narrator in the short story A Temporary Matter. Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994) discusses hybridity in society during the post-colonial era and is applied to diaspora literature. Hybridity is related to human culture and identity. Culture and identity are formed dynamically, they experience development, progress, and decline according to conditions and circumstances. Diaspora literature is produced from the writings of people living outside the country and/or writings that contain diaspora experiences. In the process of hybridity, there is a gap between the two cultures. The gap is called liminality in which there is repression of the (colonial) past that is not revealed. One of the writers included into the category of diaspora writers is Jhumpa Lahiri. In A Temporary Matter, she shows the hybridity experienced by the two main characters of Indian descent living in the United States. They were husband and wife; Shukumar and Shoba. They experienced cultural adaptation to cultures outside India. In their lives, cultural mixing occurs. This mixture is seen in the food, clothing, and language they use. Between these mixtures, several gaps fill the transition. This is found in the main character's utterances.

A Transnational History of Forced Migrants in Europe: Unwilling Nomads in the Age of Two World Wars ed. by Bastiaan Willems and Michal Adam Palacz (review)

Reviewed by: A Transnational History of Forced Migrants in Europe: Unwilling Nomads in the Age of Two World Wars ed. by Bastiaan Willems and Michal Adam Palacz E. A. Hatto Willems, Bastiaan and Palacz, Michal Adam (eds). A Transnational History of Forced Migrants in Europe: Unwilling Nomads in the Age of Two World Wars. Bloomsbury Academic, London, New York and Dublin, 2022. xv + 279 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Index. £85.00; £76.50 (e-book). Bastiaan Willems and Michal Adam Palacz's edited volume, A Transnational History of Forced Migrants in Europe, constitutes a profound, synthesized study of mass population displacement in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Each chapter contributes the examination of a particular refugee movement to this collaborative volume, with a heavy focus on those caused, directly or indirectly, by the World Wars and their ramifications — most notably, the remapping of Europe as these conflicts resulted in the creation of new states following World War One and the shifting of state borders after World War Two. Additional chapters focus on mass displacement resulting from 1930s fascism, in the form of the Spanish Civil War and Nazi Germany's persecution of its Jewish population. The result is a series of snapshots of the European refugee experience in this period. In the volume's introduction, Willems and Palacz identify four key components of diasporic interactions which can be observed within European population displacements in the first half of the twentieth century: those with the host society, homeland, other members of the diaspora and other diasporas within the host society. The first three are well-established within the existing historiography, while the fourth is a new element proposed by Willems and Palacz. They argue that considering the influence of diaspora interactions upon one another, in addition to understanding all four of these components as a spectrum varying on account of factors such as socio-economic circumstances, ethnicity, religion, age and gender, allows for a more complete, multifaceted understanding of European forced migration in this period. The subsequent chapters, however, do not respond rigidly to this theoretical framework in its entirety. Rather, their respective authors focus on those components which they perceive as most noteworthy in terms of their focal [End Page 179] diaspora's experiences. Serhiy Choliy's chapter on the Habsburg Empire's World War One internments of those among its Galician population it perceived as potential enemies — mostly Ruthenians and Jews — places the strongest emphasis upon the volume's proposed four-dimensional model of diaspora interactions. This, along with Egor Lykov's contribution arguing that these Habsburg internment camps exposed all internees, regardless of ethnicity and political affiliation, to the same poor conditions on account of their shared socio-economic background, and Diego Han's work on the Croatian population evacuated inland from strategic port cities on the Istrian coast, illustrate how the artificial and temporary environments of such camps isolated these diasporas from typical host society interactions. These chapters argue that temporary diasporas often did not produce lasting identities; this is particularly evident in the case of the Ruthenian internees, who lacked a recognized Ruthenian region to return to altogether. The snapshot structure allows subsequent chapters to illustrate how this aspect of the internment camp experience was not, however, universal in the first half of the twentieth century. Lennart Onken argues that in the immediate aftermath of World War Two, Jewish survivors at Bergen-Belsen built their own diaspora identity through self-organization, in order to address the issue of their post-war statelessness. Onken's contibution can also be viewed as a case of inter-diaspora interaction, in that the establishment of purely Jewish displaced persons camps at Bergen-Belson created one Jewish community from those previously divided between separate European states. A Transnational History of Forced Migrants in Europe's format also allows for the exploration of forced migrant interactions with host societies which would become places of permanent settlement, as well as a variety of thematic approaches and focuses. A particular highlight is Jill Meißner-Wolfbeisser's contribution on the career of New York librarian Stefi Kielser, and the pivotal role she played in both introducing German and...

Rift in Marriages: A study of Family Dynamics in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies

Jhumpa Lahiri is a writer of South Asian origin who was born and brought up in the United States. She debuted with her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies. The stories in this collection glance at the Indo-American diaspora. All the nine stories in this collection are aligned with the recurring patterns. The institution of marriage, romantic relationship and Indian family system vs American family pattern has been focused at length. The subtitle of the novel goes perfectly with the themes of the stories. Geetha Ganapathy- Dore’ notes that “Indian people, films, novels, beauty-queens, food and spirituality cross borders easily.” She adds that Lahiri’s collection was originally sub-titled ‘Bengal, Boston and Beyond’ (58) The three stories chosen for study reflect a modern world that witnesses the assimilation of different cultures and problem of immigrants while living in an ethnic group. “Temporary Matter”, “Sexy” and “Interpreter of Maladies” have been chosen to make the study specific. All of these emphasize on the life and circumstances leading to the rift in marriage and relationships deficit of love. This work also reflects the diaspora experiences of the Indian immigrants belonging to the first and second generation. The lucidity of language and expression are quite commendable.

Miért vagy itt? Az egyházak képviselőinek diaszpóra-tapasztalata a szekuláris egészségügyi intézményekben

First, we examine the diaspora experience of church representatives working in secular health care institutions within the context of hospital pastoral care. In the second part, we discuss the negative and positive aspects of this experience, with a special focus on the work of Catholic hospital pastoral caregiver in the Transylvanian region. The theoretical research questions were explored through primary and literature document analysis. The characteristics of the concept identified by Robin Cohen were then juxtaposed with a phenomenological analysis of the diaspora experience of hospital chaplains, and pastoral caregiver. Following Hauerwas, we can recognize the diasporic experience of churches in western secular societies. This phenomenon can be paralleled with the inadequacy of hospital pastoral care in secular health care institutions. The negatives of the diaspora experience include that the field of hospital pastoral care still searching for its place and there are many unanswered questions related to it. The phenomenon also has positive effects: stimulating inter-religious solidarity and shaping the Church's image according to Pope Francis' ecclesiological vision.

Songs that live in the bones

AbstractIn conversation with playwright and theatre journalist Rina Vergano, multidisciplinary artist and musician Roxana Vilk unpicks her own experience of diaspora and the ways in which her cultural, familial and political roots have informed her artistic practice and inspired her current project about the power of lullabies.

Shifting Identity/ies in the Literature of Arab Immigration and Exile: Hanan Al-Shaykh’s Hikayat Zahra (The Story of Zahra) as a Case Study

In this age of mass migration, refugee crises, and global mobility, it could be argued that the experience of displacement, relocation, migration, and diaspora is no longer the exception but the rule. The tension between the centre and the periphery, the ‘homeland’ and the ‘host land’ raises, time and again, familiar issues of belonging, allegiance, affinity, estrangement and alienation. It is on this perspective- following various paths among which the postcolonial theory- that the aim of this paper is to try to shed light, and more precisely on the notion of “shifting identity/ies”/concepts of identity and difference based on Hanan Al-Shaykh’s Hikayat Zahra/The Story of Zahra .This paper hopes to answer the following question raised in the novel “Does the émigré become abnormal once he has departed his own land?” Keywords : migration-global- diaspora-postcolonial theory-identity-shifting-alienation DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/92-02 Publication date: October 31 st 2022

The Digital Archive of Diaspora: Blogging (Post)Migration

Transnational diaspora groups make intensive use of community media when communicating and connecting in cyberspace. In particular, I argue that blogs constitute a new kind of (post)migrant archive that compiles shared histories and experiences of diaspora. The principal role of the digital archive has become defined, not so much by storage, as by circulation and transfer, in what media theorist Wolfgang Ernst (2002) calls the paradigm shift in the reconceptualization of the archive in the digital age.Indeed, circulation and transfer are also essential dimensions of the digital diaspora. Regarding the modes of interactions of diaspora communities on the web, I will analyse how (post)migrants’ online self-representation and their struggle to gain visibility shape new understandings of the digital archive of diaspora. My focus targets blogs as one of the most popular genres in cyberspace. The samples I analyse are written by (post)migrants and are often intended to decenter the German “Mehrheitsgesellschaft” [“mainstream society”] and diversify its artistic-intellectual scene.It has been shown that these new media settings also give rise to new forms of writing; for example, authorship is often collaborative. My thesis is that this very heterogeneous virtual collaboration often has the effect of transcending the contours of stable “Turkish”, “Arab” and/or “German” identities and of thus also contradicting dominant parameters of identity politics.This is the case with the collective blog “migrantenstadl” that is the subject of my analysis; “migriert, migriert, sonst sind wir verloren” [“migrate, migrate, otherwise we are lost”] is the motto of this often provocative project and an invitation to its readers. “Migration” is movement and mobility, whereas “Archive” is preservation, so how to construct an archive of migration on moving ground?While my primary interest is to explore and connect the concepts of digital diaspora and digital archive, I will try to give concrete form to my theoretical findings on this nexus by analysing the above-mentioned blog, which is a cultural and political initiative directed by Tunay Önder and Imad Mustafa that was founded in 2011.

Space to Grieve: An irreducible legacy

Space to GrieveAn irreducible legacy Latipa (bio) i was introduced to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee as an undergraduate student in the late 1990s and was immediately struck by the work's radical relationship to its audience. Cha never spoon-fed the experiences of colonialism and diaspora to a white readership. She was not trapped in the straitjacket of "multiculturalism" that reduces artists of color to an "identity" defined by the white gaze. It was the first time I had encountered an Asian woman who tried to write her life as it bled across oceans, generations, and political histories, poetically undoing the rigid categories by which the world is normally structured. It was only years later, as a graduate student at UC Berkeley, that I learned she had been raped and murdered in New York City [End Page 153] shortly after Dictee was released. Later editions of Dictee would include the fact of Cha's murder in her bio on the back cover, but I am of a generation of students who were protected from that knowledge. For those of us who love Cha's work—who have been altered forever by her capacity to dwell in the layered complexities of time, space, and memory—it is often difficult to separate her murder from her art. Dictee spills over with a death that is both premonitory and already past. When we try to engage with Cha's art on its own terms—as I was encouraged to do in college, by professors who did not acknowledge her rape or murder—we do not allow ourselves sufficient space to grieve. Just as humanities scholars continue to study and write about Cha, she continues to be discussed in another discursive realm: that of the law. There, Cha exists as a legal case that highlights the foundational patriarchy that infuses every aspect of our culture and its institutions. ________ to begin with, the investigation of Cha's rape and murder was inept. A 1986 opinion from the New York Supreme Court, where the case against her murderer had arrived on appeal, states: "The police were initially unable to ascertain where Mrs. Cha had been murdered. However, her husband and her brother searched the building where defendant worked and found a room the police evidently had overlooked"—a room full of evidence related to Cha's murder, including missing articles of clothing. Without the work of her family, key evidence against her murderer, who was a security guard in a building where Cha's husband had been working, might never have been found. Even after that evidence had been gathered and her killer convicted, Cha's posthumous existence in the juridical system did not end. The first conviction was thrown out by the New York Supreme Court, which ruled that inadmissible evidence had been used in the trial. This evidence comprised testimonies from three women who had also been raped by the same assailant; he had pleaded guilty to each of these acts, which he committed in Florida [End Page 154] years before he murdered Cha. On appeal, the court deemed the inclusion of these testimonies to be in defiance of the Molineux Rule, which states that it is inadmissible to use evidence of a defendant's prior crimes merely to establish "criminal propensity." In the end, it took three trials, and a total of five years, for Cha's murderer to finally be convicted. Cha's case continues to haunt the system; in the intervening years, it has been cited in other cases involving sexual violence, including one in early 2022. Both realms—that of the public intellectuals who write about Cha's art while eliding her murder, and that of the legal scholars for whom she is only "Mrs. Cha"—in some way need her not to be a whole person in order for the discourse to function. In the field of art, we would like Cha's vibrant and expansive practice to remain unsullied by the brutality of her death. Meanwhile, in law, Cha is not an artist, poet, or editor; she is simply a victim of sexual violence. Between these two types of discourse is an inexorable silence...

Western modernity, cities, and race: Challenges to decolonial praxis in the African diaspora in the Americas

AbstractHow do we decolonize cities? By demanding control over their land and organizing their communities according to ethnic traditions and ancestral ontologies, Afro‐descendant movements in the Americas create territories of life—self‐determined collectives in which people can experience new forms of life. Decolonial authors who have studied these communities define them as a path to decoloniality—a rupture with modern/colonial logics. However, most of the studies focus on communities in rural areas. Why are urban spaces not vital to the debates about decoloniality? Do cities pose specific challenges to the creation of territories of life? This paper explores these questions. Analyzing the urban experience of the African diaspora in the Americas, I argue that urban spaces challenge decoloniality because cities are often represented as the spatial and racial image of Western modernity, as white places of progress and development. I also argue this representation is based on Black people's evisceration. Finally, this paper seeks to contribute to decolonial urban struggles. Thus, I propose an urban decolonial praxis—an analytical lens and a praxis of research committed to decoloniality to explore cities' decolonization through the redefinition of territories of life, the redefinition of what ‘being urban’ means, and the wide range of urban resistances.

Art practices of the Chinese women diaspora: On cultural identity and gender modernity

Since the early twentieth century, Chinese women artists have emigrated to other countries. Their works are influenced and shaped by diaspora experiences, which vary across time phases. However, the world history of diasporic women is often lost in the larger historical narrative. As such, women diaspora artists also remain an under-represented segment in art realms, both within and outside of China. This is a case study of three Chinese diaspora women artists – Pan Yuliang, Shen Yuan and Pixy Liao. Their works reveal engagement in cultural identity as well as gender identity through an autobiographical approach. For cultural identity, dynamic interaction between the culture of the artist’s homeland and that of her host country play a vital role throughout their art practices. Rather than using elements of typical Chinese cultural heritage, women artists tend to engage in cultural emblems, which connect to their personal-gendered experiences. Albeit confronting the double otherness on cultural and gender identity in a foreign country, the experience of diaspora pushes women artists to pursue independence, self-awakening and broader world-views. With modern conceptions of gender, their practices, particularly the family-theme, convey reflections on the conventional ideology of the family, as well as traditional gender roles.