Diasporic Communities Research Articles

Fighting an Empire for the Good of the Empire?

Abstract This article traces Irish responses to the crisis of the Hispanic monarchy (1808–25) and the struggle for sovereignty in Spanish America, comparing reactions in Ireland to those of the Irish diasporic community in the United States. It argues that although the Irish were overwhelmingly sympathetic to the cause of the insurgents in Spanish America, their support took different forms and meanings. Whereas contemporaries in Ireland saw the benefits of Spanish American independence for the prosperity and security of the British Empire, Irish radical exiles in New York or Philadelphia viewed the struggle as an opportunity to emphasize the validity of revolutionary and republican principles across the New World. In stressing the relevance of the geopolitical context and of transnational interactions to the development of contradicting imperial and anticolonial views, the article moves beyond prevailing narratives of military involvement and highlights the richness of the Irish experience of the Age of Revolutions.

Review: Chinese Religions Going Global, edited by Nanlai Cao, Guiseppe Giordan, Fenggang Yang

The authors in this fourteen-chapter volume explore Chinese religions on a worldwide stage. They write in a globalizing context against the background of a stronger and more demanding China, substantiated, for instance, by its “aggressive business outreach and mass emigration” (viii). First published as a volume from the Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion, the book exposes the nature of mixture and hybridity of Chinese religions, centering on the geopolitical landscape in the new era and the rise of new religions as one of its markers. The contributors from four different continents aim to challenge the usual dichotomized view of the western global and the Chinese local.Eight chapters examine cases of Chinese religion and Chinese religious communities in Europe, involving Italy, France, Britain, Germany, and Austria—a good balance against much of the literature on immigrant Chinese religion that has been based on research conducted largely in North America. Despite the fact that most new Chinese immigrants seem to be closed to the outside world, the authors of chapter 3, Fabio Berti and Valentina Pedone, point out that the Chinese Buddhist Puhuasi Temple in Prato engages with Italian society by making donations nationwide, in contrast with their Christian counterparts. Chapter 10, as well highlights Yiguandao as a unique form of Asian spirituality that appeals to non-Chinese practitioners.The remaining six chapters deal with overseas Chinese Christians in southeast Asia, Chinese Canadian evangelicals’ short-term missions to China, the global spread of Yiguandao, transnational Qigong networks, transnational Confucianism, and religious groups in Dubai, especially the Muslim diasporic community there. Recent restrictions on religion in China encourage Chinese house churches to redirect their resources overseas in a process known as “reverse missions.”The volume provides an excellent analysis of globalized Chinese religions that are shaped by multiple forms of interconnectedness and by a new geopolitical landscape, leading to “multiple sinicizations” (xi). The contributors have helped us to identify new situational trends and fertile ground for practical theorization. It would have been helpful if the editors had discussed the semantic and etymological differences between “religion,” as it is understood in the West, and zongjiao (宗教), its characterization in Chinese. This has been a focus for Western writers as early Hegel. For example, one might ask, “Is Qigong a religion or a folk practice? Or is it a mixture of both?” Of course, the same question could be asked about Confucianism. As a new area of study, however, it is understandable that the volume is mainly descriptive. More theoretical and comparative exploration will stand the contributors in good stead.Nevertheless, the book is a must-read for all those, professionals and nonprofessionals alike, who are interested in China and global Sinicization, especially in religions among immigrant Chinese communities overseas.

Looking Back to Move Forward: Continuing Community-centric Practices for Conservation and Collection Care of Pacific Collections in an Australian Museum

ABSTRACT The changing role of conservation necessitates the facilitation of space through which spiritual and physical interactions occur. Enabling balance between collections and communities past and present, establishes respect and acknowledgement for diverse cultural knowledge. To formalise this, a Methodology for Cultural Safety and Care was co-developed during the redevelopment of Te Pasifika exhibition at Museums Victoria (2018–2020). The framework looks to the past, to address the inequities in Pasifika representation and voice in cultural collections, then to the present, to create a robust platform for community-centric storytelling in Victoria, Australia, with respect to wider Moana (ocean) values. This centres orality, collaboration and community, drawing from cultural practice, ‘new’ guidelines for collection management, conservation and collections care, while providing a platform for collective Pasifika voices in an Australian context. Access to museum collections by members of a culturally diverse Pasifika diasporic community in Victoria, Australia, is integral to cultural maintenance and community wellbeing. Cultural knowledge continually transcends generations, moulding identities in new contexts, fluidly evolving, while adapting, changing and responding to community needs. The methodology challenges the rigidity of traditional museum ideology. Normalising Indigenous practices and values in a museum context removes distance between all involved and humanises museum practice, benefiting both those who interact with taonga (cultural treasures) and the taonga themselves. Reflecting on the implementation of this methodology, we emphasise the need to elevate cultural values as museum practice, affirming the viability of creating ongoing opportunities for community input.

Emotions in a diaspora’s interpretation of political developments in their place of origin: the case of Australian Armenians from Turkey

ABSTRACT This paper aims to investigate how emotions guide and shape diasporic communities’ interpretation/perception of socio-political developments in their place of origin. Based on our study of members of the Armenian diaspora who are originally from Turkey and who now live in Melbourne, Australia, we argue that these Armenians have formed their views on political issues under the influence of their emotional experiences, stemming from direct or indirect victimhood. The paper finds that several key emotions – fear, hate (and lack of hate), anticipation, and pessimism, inform and shape the Australian Armenian diaspora’s making sense of political developments in their place of origin, Turkey. The paper’s contribution to the relevant scholarship is twofold. First, it contributes to the studies on emotions in diasporas by examining how emotions shape individual members of a diaspora make sense of political developments in their place of origin. Second, it contributes to the literature on modern Turkey by studying Armenians from Turkey and their emotions on socio-political phenomena.

Theorising the dynamics of heritage language identity development: a narrative inquiry of the life histories of three Chinese heritage speakers

This article examines the dynamics of heritage language (HL) identity development by analysing the life history accounts of three Chinese heritage language (CHL) learners growing up in the UK. Drawing on narrative data, the study contributes to the growing body of HL identity research by capturing the individual trajectories of CHL learners engaging with different interlocutors, at multiple sites, and across the lifespan. We report the various ways our participants are positioned by the essentialist discourses of Chineseness and how they learn to (re)position themselves as competent HL learners and legitimate members of the diasporic community. The findings highlight the need to understand HL learners’ identity and agency as emergent from varied social interactions embedded within one’s personal history. In light of the findings, we propose an original model to theorise the dynamics of HL identity development from a historical, spatial, and relational lens, and conclude with practical suggestions to encourage HL learning and maintenance.

Nepali Bhutanese refugee gardeners and their seed systems: Placemaking and foodways in Vermont

As the world grapples with how to support the millions fleeing the ongoing war in Ukraine, attention must be extended to how these indivi­duals, and the many others who are forcibly dis­placed in other parts of the world, can be wel­comed to new lands. Research indicates that creating foodways through gardening can provide cultural connections for diasporic communities. However, few studies have addressed how neces­sary inputs, such as seeds, affect refugees’ abilities to reconstruct culturally significant foodways. Drawing on placemaking theory, this article ex­plores if and how access to seeds and seed systems enables refugee gardeners to grow essential crops, which might be otherwise difficult to obtain, to produce foods reminiscent of their homelands. Focusing on Nepali Bhutanese refugee gardeners in Chittenden County, Vermont, we present findings from 30 semi-structured interviews demonstrating how refugee gardeners draw upon known practices and preferences to make a new land less foreign. Seed systems offer refugee gardeners the oppor­tunity to access, plant, and save familiar crops and experiment with new planting techniques and crop varieties. This study indicates that seed systems are an important way through which people make place, both physically and symbolically.

Kaygıları Bastırmak, Bellek Çatışmalarıyla Baş Etmek: Tarihsel filmler yoluyla Kırım Tatarı ve ABD’deki Litvanya Diasporalarının Kültürel Diplomasisi

This study focuses on the cultural diplomacy of Crimean Tatar and Lithuanian American diasporas, who both suffered from deportation at the hands of the Soviets and are conducting anti-Russian diplomacy today. Historical films are useful in terms of showing how the diasporic communities seek to reconstruct a collective memory on a traumatic event and tame their anxieties of death, meaninglessness, and condemnation that constitute “unknown unknowns” by turning them into the fear of a “known unknown” through securitization. Therefore, this study aims to grasp the multiplicity of anxieties reflected upon the Crimean Tatar and Lithuanian diasporas’ recent historical films that demonstrate how diasporas’ varying anxieties translate into diverse strategies of political representation and mobilisation against Russia. It thus reconciles the scholarship on diaspora’s memory politics with anxiety/fear nexus in securitization theory.

Oppression and empowerment: domestic foodwork and culinary capital among diasporic Iranian women in Aotearoa/New Zealand

This paper examines evolutions of domestic foodwork and associated status among diasporic Iranian women in contemporary Aotearoa/New Zealand. Drawing on feminist food studies, as well as on Bourdieu’s notion of cultural and symbolic capitals, we examine the two-fold, oppression-empowerment aspects of domestic foodwork, specifically its transformation from a socio-cultural obligation in the origin home to a means of agentic liberation and social empowerment in diaspora. Furthermore, we explore how this transformation is strategically negotiated by some women to successfully generate positions of enhanced respect, status, and private influence both within the domestic sphere and the wider diasporic Iranian community in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

고려인과 러시아 독일인 디아스포라와 하이데거의 ‘고향’-존재

This paper is about Koryoin and Russian German Diaspora in Russia and Heidegger’s basic concept of “homeland” (Heimat) as being. Korean diaspora to Russia began, in the late years of the Joseon Dynasty. Since the Middle Ages, Russified Germans have lived in Russia. In the latter half of the 19th century, many Koreans and Germans left their motherland, either spontaneously or compulsively, and built diasporic communities abroad in Russia. A return (or reverse diaspora) was always part of the discourse of these displaced subjects. In surveying the Koryoin and Russified Germans, this paper re-reads German philosopher Martin Heidegger, German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, and Korean poet Su-Young Kim; each is understood to share ontological affinity while exploring both philosophically and literarily the concept of “homeland.” According to Heidegger, Heimat can be conceptualized as “the most forgotten and at the same time the most remembered.” After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Wladimir Kim, a professor from Uzbekistan, returned to his homeland. He is now working as an unskilled laborer in Korea. He has published two books of poetry, including The First Snow in Kwangju, which delves thematically into his experiences as a double outsider within Korea. Eleonora Hummels is a Russian German writer: what separates her experiences from those of Wladimir Kim is that Hummels returned to Germany from Russia returned in the early 1980s; she has had more time to be accepted as a sovereign German subject. This paper reads Heimat as an implicit spectral presence within both writers’ literary productions.

Centering the Heterogeneity of Black Adolescents' Experiences: Guidance for Within-Group Designs among African Diasporic Communities.

Despite notable improvements in theory and methods that center the lived experiences of Black adolescents, White supremacy endures in developmental science. In this article, we focus on one methodological manifestation of White supremacy-sampling decisions that assume Black adolescents are a homogeneous group. We examine overlooked concerns about within-group designs with Black adolescents, such as the erasure of some African diasporic communities in the United States. We first describe the homogeneity assumption and join other scholars in advocating for within-group designs. We next describe challenges with current approaches to within-group designs. We then provide recommendations for antiracist research that makes informed within-group design sampling decisions. We conclude by describing the implications of these strategies for researchers and developmental science.

Studying mis- and disinformation in Asian diasporic communities: The need for critical transnational research beyond Anglocentrism

Drawing on preliminary research about the spread of mis- and disinformation across Asian diasporic communities, we advocate for qualitative research methodologies that can better examine historical, transnational, multilingual, and intergenerational information networks. Using examples of case studies from Vietnam, Taiwan, China, and India, we discuss research themes and challenges including legacies of multiple imperialisms, nationalisms, and geopolitical tensions as root causes of mis- and disinformation; difficulties in data collection due to private and closed information networks, language translation and interpretation; and transnational dimensions of information infrastructures and media platforms. This commentary introduces key concepts driven by methodological approaches to better study diasporic information networks beyond the dominance of Anglocentrism in existing mis- and disinformation studies.

“I Sengsong San Diego”: The Chamoru Cultural Festival and the Formation of a Chamoru Diasporic Community

This essay addresses contemporary migrations of Chamorus tied to the history of US military presence in Micronesia and the ways Indigenous culture and identity are negotiated through the Chamorro Cultural Festival (CCF) that has been held annually in San Diego, California since 2009. The analysis explores how diasporic Chamorus maintain close transpacific connections to the Mariana Islands while also establishing Chamoru communities abroad through the CCF. The festival simultaneously enacts Chamoru identities based in both mobility and rootedness and is a large-scale expression of how Chamorus create and express collective identities.

Pandemic-Amplified Material Hardship and Community-Led Support among Marshallese Diasporic Communities in the United States

ABSTRACT This article explores the experiences of Marshallese diasporic migrants in the United States (U.S.) during the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to material hardship and community-led relief efforts. Focus groups with 53 Marshallese migrants in three states revealed that material hardship, including food and housing insecurity, inadequate healthcare, and difficulty paying bills, intensified among their communities during the pandemic. In response, Marshallese community-based groups provided relief to their fellow community members, including food, cash assistance, and personal protective equipment. The findings fit a pattern of intensified hardship and community-led relief among marginalized communities in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Diasporic convergence, sustained transience and indifferent survival: Indian traders in China

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the way in which Sindhi traders – one of the largest Indian diasporic populations in Asia – have managed to live and work in China as de facto migrants despite their inability to be granted settled immigration status by the Chinese state. Drawing on long-term fieldwork that started in 2010, the paper offers a China-centric ethnographic perspective on how Indian traders, particularly Sindhis in the Chinese county of Keqiao, have been dealing with the incongruence between immigration policies that largely preclude the possibility of their permanent residency and their long-term entrepreneurial engagement in China. I argue that this incongruence, despite the tensions and uncertainties it continues to generate, has in fact become a crucial factor in stabilizing the diasporic convergence upon Keqiao by Sindhi traders. The eventual consequence is what I call ‘indifferent survival’: that is, the Sindhi traders, a group of non-white foreigners, are managing to stay together and even expand the size of their diasporic community in China despite their vast internal differences in class, local knowledge, and wealth.

Venezuelan Evangelical Digital Diaspora, Pandemics, and the Connective Power of Contemporary Worship Music

During 2020–2021, the COVID-19 pandemics exacerbated the use of digital communication tools for the general population as well as for migrant and diasporic communities. Due to social distancing requirements, church activities had to be suspended or restricted, therefore, local congregations and denominations had to incorporate social media as part of their regular worship channels in an unprecedented way. At the same time, these new spaces opened an opportunity for diasporas to reconnect with their churches back home, and to participate in digital worship projects. In this paper, we study the case of the digital worship collective Adorando en Casa (AeC), which was started at the onset of the pandemics, producing several crowdsourced original musical compositions, uploaded in popular social media sites, and distributed via messaging apps. We focus on the reasons for participation of Venezuelan musicians and singers from different regions in the country, and from the large diaspora of Venezuelan Evangelicals. Additionally, we analyze the characteristics, structure, and theology of some of the songs recorded, to show how the concept of a digital diasporic spiritual consciousness is powerfully expressed through worship music.

Teaching Indigenous Graphic Novels: English / Indigenous Studies 360

Teaching Indigenous Graphic NovelsEnglish / Indigenous Studies 360 Sophie McCall (bio) My name is Sophie McCall. I am a Scottish-descended settler scholar teaching Indigenous and contemporary Canadian literatures at Simon Fraser University, forever learning and unlearning how to read, listen to, and engage with Indigenous stories. The focus of my teaching is how writers challenge the violent histories of settler colonialism and use forms of literary expression to imagine and bring into reality narratives of cultural and artistic reclamation. It is an honor to think through how to do the work I do at the University with a sense of accountability and responsibility to unceded, ancestral, and traditional xʷməθkʷəy ̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl ̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) lands and knowledges in Vancouver, British Columbia. This territorial acknowledgment asks me to think about what it means to be a part of the ongoing occupation of Indigenous lands, and how to become an ally in Indigenous-led initiatives of decolonizing and indigenizing the university. I am indebted to my Indigenous colleagues and students, who have helped me in my own process of learning and unlearning the histories I have been brought up with. I grew up on unceded Kanien'kehá:ka and Algonquin territories in Montréal, Québec, in the 1970s and 1980s during a heated moment in Québec politics. My father was very involved in advocating for a bilingual, multicultural Québec and against the separation of Québec from Canada. Every morning and evening, with the radio and TV blasting, he would be on the telephone, coordinating with community organizations and diasporic communities such as the Chinese Canadian community concerning minority rights in education and language. However, especially during the Oka crisis of 1990, it became clear that the liberal, multicultural politics of recognition that I grew up [End Page 92] with in my white, Anglophone family do not acknowledge or engage with Indigenous conceptions of self-determination. I became aware of the high cost of what Dene scholar Glen Coulthard later would call the "colonial politics of recognition in Canada," in which a liberal-multicultural political framework harmonizes Indigenous rights within the state's assertion of sovereignty. In all of my work, I ask whether a(n other) politics of recognition, or perhaps the language of recognition, as a shared sense of responsibility and accountability across Indigenous, settler, and racialized communities is possible, in the ongoing project of working towards social justice on unceded and Treaty lands in Canada. Introducing myself and acknowledging the territories where I grew up, as well as where I now live and work as an uninvited guest, offers an opportunity for me to reflect on my own social location and how my experiences on a daily basis shape my research questions. In Cree scholar and filmmaker Tasha Hubbard's words, "I have students who have expectations when they take my class that they're going to learn all about Indigenous people. [Instead], at the beginning of the class, I will [say] that they are in this space to basically turn their gaze towards themselves. Because so much of the time Indigenous people are the object of the gaze" (CBC Arts 01:25:05). This work of self-reflection is an important part of Indigenous studies—to articulate to whom one is accountable, to engage in a process of un-learning one's history and its relationship to other histories, and to suggest how to remain relevant in ongoing struggles of decolonization, reconciliation, or other social justice projects. What first inspired me in developing this course were the brilliant Indigenous graphic novels, comic books, and illustrated stories that have appeared over the past ten to fifteen years. To name a selection: Kwak'waka'wakw writer Gord Hill's history of Indigenous Nations' resistance in the making of the Americas in 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book (2010); Anishinaabe writer and scholar Elizabeth LaPensée's retelling of a Deer Woman story in graphic form in Deer Woman: A Vignette (2017); Cree writer David Alexander Robertson's cycle of intergenerational stories in 7 Generations: A Plains Cree Saga (2013); Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas's dynamic...

Blogging Race, Blogging Nation: Digital Diaspora as Home in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, representing Ifemelu’s blogging in Americanah (2014), shows Black immigrant communities revising public discourse on intersections of race, culture, and nationality, effectively expanding conceptions of Blackness in America. Ifemelu’s blogs, Raceteenth, or Various Observations about American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black and The Small Redemptions of Lagos are a dialogic digital literature functioning as a diasporic, communal textual space. This article focuses on Ifemelu’s blogging activity, both in the United States and upon her return to Nigeria, and explores how she creates and sustains a digital, dialogic construction of home space where “non-American Blacks” and “Nigerpolitans” can reorder their lives after transnational displacement. Americanah, a novel of migration, shows that diaspora is where constructions of identity and home are provisional and continuously constructed and Adichie represents Ifemelu’s blogs as diasporic spaces where Black migratory subjects (re)constitute identity and home. The blog platform is particularly well suited for the cultural work of the geographically dispersed diasporic community. Further, Black immigrants in dialogue with Ifemelu consider a consciousness of their racialized immigrant identities to be a prerequisite for negotiating their belonging in the United States. Ifemelu’s identity as a migratory subject and her ambivalence about her belonging in both the United States and Nigeria complicate a reading of her return to Lagos as a homegoing; her creation of a new blog, the revival of her digital diaspora, reveals her need to explore her continuously shifting identity and its relationship to the provisional nature of home.

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...

South Sudanese Refugees in Sudan: A Transition toward a Diaspora Community

South Sudanese people shifted from being disadvantaged internally displaced people (IDPs) in Khartoum before the session of South Sudan from Sudan in 2011, toward a semi-refugee status or the ambiguous category of “returnees” after returning back to Khartoum following South Sudan’s civil wars beginning in 2013. This article argues that South Sudanese communities in Khartoum are developing many characteristics of becoming a “diasporic” and “transnationalistic” community, broadly defined. The South Sudanese diasporic community developing in Khartoum is commonly characterized by their strong feelings of anger, sadness, and disappointment over what happened to their long-awaited dreams of an independent South Sudan, and also by a strong feeling of belonging to a distinctive South Sudanese identity in Khartoum, both of which are a continuation of old South Sudanese identities developed in the shantytowns of Khartoum since the 1960s. While transnational relations and networks extend strongly between Khartoum and many different areas in South Sudan, the impact of South Sudan’s post-2011 violence and political negotiations between different warring parties has strong resonance in South Sudan’s communities in Khartoum. Moreover, the experience of being displaced after independence, back to old South Sudanese diasporic homes, has fundamentally shaped a new self-identification as diaspora and a transnational community.

Translations and Literary Exchanges between Kerala and Middle-East

Kerala has historically played an important role in the wide network of Indian ocean trade. Recent archaeological excavations brought forth tangible evidence of kerala’s trade linkage with gulf region from the first century AD. These journey led to the development of diasporic communities of Arabs in various parts of kerala, especially in Malabar. Ibnu Batuta, a 14th century Arab traveller was the first writer to give detailed description of the settlements of Arab from gulf region in various parts of Kerala. The keralopatti chronicles on the history of evolution of kerala narrates a story of two brothers from muscut in Malabar. Cheraman Perumal, the king of kerala, who became first known convert to Islam and he travelled to Mecca and finally settled in Oman. In 1960, gulf states began requiring large-scaled semi skilled and unskilled labour in order to cater their fast growing oil based economies. Which resulted in illegal migrations to gulf region. This first wave migrants had numerous stories about the narrow escapes they experienced during the journey. The reason for migration from kerala were two kind. Some of them migsrated due to socio-economic reason, and others encouraged by personal ambition and aspirations. The continues contact between Kerala and Middle East brought many changes in both languages, culture and Arts. These are very significant in re-conceptualise the history of gulf and Kerala.
 Migrant narratives reveal a great deal of emotional conflict that has been associated with departure from kerala and a sense of alienation in a foreign land. It can be founded on the film and literature. Malayalam film naadodikaatu portrays old way of travelling to gulf, Pathemaary, Arabi kadha, and Gaddama deal with diasporic theme. In literature, Aadujeevitham by Benyamin gained a wide readership. His jasmindays won JCB prize. Marubhoomiyude atmakatha is a travelogue by V Musafar Ahammad won Sahitya Academy Award in 2010. Babu Baradwaj’s pravasiyude kurippukal translated as notes of an expat is the memoir of a man in exile. P Manikandhan’s malayaliyude swanthanweshanangal was winner of NV Krishna Warrier Award for best critical work. Deepak unnikrishnan's temporary people is an another important work. Many more works were translated to Arabic such as Chemeen, Shabdikunna Kalappa, Oru Sangeerthanam pole, Nilavu, Kaalam, Balyakala sakhi are among them.