Diasporic Connections Research Articles

Beyond smell and sensationalism: remixing durian for and by Asians and Asian Canadians in Canada

ABSTRACT Increased imports of durian to Canada has reiterated what Wenying Xu identifies as the tension between dominant food sophistication and ‘crude’ immigrant practices, where denigrating immigrant foodways was integral to colonial assimilationist projects (2007). While fresh durian in Canada appears in sensationalist online media that associate durian with disgust, it is also made palatable and popularized by mainstream non-Asian food bloggers and chefs. Focusing on online food discourse, this article examines the fraught position of durian in dominant Canadian foodways as associated with disgust when imported for Asian consumers, and with intrigue and exoticism when marketed in ‘elevated’ dishes created or consumed by white Canadians. It proposes that durian has nevertheless developed into a diasporic cultural connector and site of community building within Asian and Asian Canadian creators and consumers that resists this Orientalization, linking durian’s emergence in Canada to a larger history of Asian food ingenuity and adaptation to global marketplaces. The ’remixing’ of durian by Asian chefs who combine Asian and Asian Canadian cuisines, and diasporic connections created over discussing durian in online spaces, contest xenophobic and racist sentiments focused on Asian foodways, positioning online responses to durian as an emerging yet significant site of community and resistance.

A “positive” turn in heritage language education: Multilingual children's voices on language learner well-being

This paper presents the first empirical attempt to understand language learner well-being in the context of heritage language (HL) learning. Adopting a positive psychology perspective, the research investigates the well-being experiences of Chinese heritage language (CHL) children to explore what flourishing means in HL learning. Data were collected from multimodal focus groups with 40 young CHL learners in the UK, involving a well-being exercise, a drawing activity, and semi-structured discussions. Following an appreciative inquiry approach, the findings indicate that HL learners' well-being revolves around “feeling good,” “doing well,” and “being connected,” including six essential components: positive emotions, affirmative self, perceived competence, active engagement, supportive relations, and diasporic connections. By centring young learners’ perspectives, we propose a multidimensional framework representing different aspects of their flourishing in the journey of HL development, which informs further theorisation of HL learner well-being as multifaceted, interconnected, and contextual. By shifting the emphasis from linguistic achievement to a more holistic approach that prioritises the socio-emotional wellness of HL learners, we also seek to instigate a “positive” turn in HL education which provides an intellectual basis for the design, implementation, and evaluation of future HL interventions with significant policy implications.

‘That is where the similarity ends’: refugee policies, communities, and connections between Cubans and Vietnamese

ABSTRACT This article explores US Cold War refugee policies toward Cubans and Vietnamese, as well as moments of connection between both communities in the United States. First, it identifies the legal and political scaffolding on which US government officials admitted and resettled Cuban and then Vietnamese refugees, since these bureaucracies often viewed Vietnamese refugees in light of, and in contrast to, their Cuban predecessors. Secondly, it explores diasporic connections, reflections, and refractions, highlighting where each community’s experience mirrored one another, differed, or directly crossed. These diasporic recognitions and misrecognitions demonstrate how Cold War refugee policy and politics played out on the ground through the often-unanticipated political actions of the Cuban and Vietnamese communities themselves.

Dis/Connected in Diaspora

Reflecting on the nature of my ethnographic research comprising open-ended biographical narrative interviews and participant observation, this article explores what transpires between people who are socialized in broadly similar postcolonial, multilingual, and multireligious environments yet meet for the first time away from “home.” What do they share; what divides them? Where do their paths converge; where do they fork? How do they connect to each other; wherein lies the disconnect? “Home,” in this case, is the Indian subcontinent—India for me and Sri Lanka for my interlocutors—and the new location abroad is Germany. In the context of academic research, both my research subjects and I detected several commonalities and differences, some overt and unwittingly acknowledged, but most covert and left unsaid. I argue that the dissimilarities, the distance perceived, and the disjunct between the life-worlds, real or imagined, enabled my connection to different women from Sri Lanka. Aged between twenty and sixty, they had arrived through various modes as refugees, tourists, or marriage migrants from the 1980s onwards. Subsequently, they settled in Germany and saw themselves as a refugee community connected with fellow exiles across continents. Viewing the narratives and reflections of Tamil women refugees in terms of their diasporic memories and transnational citizenship, a distinction emerges between concrete, transient, and symbolic sites of memory with their own varying shades of gendering. This article takes up encounters with differentinterlocutors and illustrates the wide-ranging connections that materialized in the diaspora context. For the sake of narrative brevity, I shall focus on, firstly, the shared language, Tamil, with different vocabularies, secondly, the insights as a translator and facilitator, and thirdly, the nature of diasporic connections and memories across nation-states.

Diasporic (Dis)Connections and In-betweennesses: German-Jewish Refugees and Indians in Kenya

Diasporic (Dis)Connections and In-betweennesses: German-Jewish Refugees and Indians in Kenya

Knitting as a Way of Honoring Black Ancestry and Creating Storytelling Through Community, Belonging, and the Reframing of Grief: A Womanist Perspective (Le tricot comme moyen d’honorer l’héritage noir et de créer la narration à travers la communauté, l’appartenance et le recadrage du deuil : une perspective féministe noire)

This paper is written with the flow of journey. It challenges the way that research is traditionally experienced in the field of art therapy in that it calls upon womanism with its emphasis on place making, survival skills, Black diasporic connectivity, storytelling, and experience centering, with an understanding that within a story there is more occurring than just the words spoken. It is written to be read as a whole, flowing experience and recognizes, openly, that the preface, research, and methodology all fed into the outcome. The research from its concept to completion was a back-and-forth process that needed honoring for its story and contribution just as much as the data output it created. Stories build on stories, as memories build on memories, in a messy, nonlinear way that is deeply reflective of life. This paper utilizes nontraditional research headings to honor the story.

Home visits, holy visits: Diasporic pilgrimage to the ‘Holy Land’ amongst Palestinian–Jordanian Christians from Amman

AbstractThis paper contributes to ‘visiting friends and relatives’ (VFR) discussions within migration and diaspora literatures by proposing a closer theorization of religious mobilities through the conceptual framework of ‘diasporic pilgrimage’. It advances VFR thinking by considering religion as a productive analytical category to interrogate relationships between people and place which sustain and constitute diasporic connection and attachment. This will be explored through the experiences and encounters of Palestinian–Jordanian Christians undertaking visits to places of religious and relational significance across Israel and/or Palestine from Jordan. Through an exploration of ethnographic data collected amongst diasporic Palestinian Christians living in Jordan, diasporic pilgrimage will be theorized as a localized process critically engaging with everyday facets of familiarity and regularity. This will revolve around three main elements of diasporic pilgrimage: translocal connections, temporalities and power geometries which constitute visits from Jordan and the so‐called ‘Holy Land’ a diasporic form of religious mobility.

African Diasporic Connections in the Americas: Toni Morrison in Brazil

Admired throughout the world, Toni Morrison’s powerful voice resounds in special ways in Brazil, where she conducted part of her research for Beloved –a novel she considered an interrogation about the legacy of slavery in countries like Brazil and the USA. Initially labeled «politically correct» by Brazilian media, her works have finally achieved great visibility in the twenty-first century thanks to translations, a wide readership and increasing academic attention. In fact, Afro-Brazilian women writers, literary critics, historians, and cultural workers have reached unprecedented recognition in recent decades, along with a belated embrace of Morrison and other Black authors. This essay relies on Black feminist, diasporic and decolonial thinking to investigate how Morrison’s writing connects with the ongoing process of racial awareness and empowerment in Brazil, as well as with the writer Conceição Evaristo.

Refashioning History: Women as Sartorial Storytellers

My dissertation, “Refashioning History: Women as Sartorial Storytellers” illuminates the relationship between history and literature as fields of cultural production within the African diaspora. By examining clothes and textiles as narrative forms of individual self-expression and of diasporic connectivity, “Refashioning History” shows how twentieth and twenty-first century women writers from Haiti, the United States, Jamaica, and Guadeloupe mobilize the authorial possibilities of fashion to counter colonial archival silences around the everyday experiences of enslaved women. “Refashioning History” contends that fashion is a powerful narrative mode in history and is critical to understanding how Black women claim—and have been claiming—agency over the fashioning of their own bodies and stories in public and private space. By telling the stories of enslaved, indentured, and free African women and women of African descent that national and colonial histories often ignore, I argue that authors such as Toni Morrison, Marie Chauvet, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Andrea Levy collectively offer a powerful vision for a decolonial Black feminist history of slavery in the Americas.

Introduction

Introduction

Collective memory and the transatlantic slave trade: Remembering education towards new diasporic connections

In countries from which enslaved Africans were forcibly taken to the new world, critical discussion of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (TST) and its Diaspora remains elusive, especially in educational spaces. Ghana is one such country that is deeply connected to the TST and yet struggles to engage it in the social studies syllabus. This article contributes to this literature by using a single instrumental case study approach to interrogate the inherent contradictions in Ghana’s collective remembering of the TST and its Diaspora in the junior high school (JHS) social studies syllabus. Using data from nine interviews and a directed content analysis of the 2007–2019 JHS social studies syllabus, I find that while the syllabus highlights the TST, it fails to critically and deeply engage students on either the TST or its Diaspora. Rather, it situates the TST as a minor event in the broader and monumental colonial, anti-colonial, and post-independence narratives. Ultimately, this creates misinformation and ignorance about the TST and its Diaspora among Ghanaian youth, further facilitating a disconnection between them and the TST’s Diaspora. In the article, I discuss broader implications for African and African Diaspora relationships and solidarity. I recommend a critical collective remembering (CCR) approach to teaching the TST which comprehensively highlights actors, victims, survivors, counter-narratives, and contemporary implications. CCR uses relevant creative, technology-based, and collaborative pedagogical and dialogical methods to make this history and social studies education relevant and meaningful for the younger generation.

Entangled histories of place and reconfigurations of diasporic home: Al‐Andalus history and the Moroccan diaspora in Granada, Spain

AbstractIn this paper, I contribute to scholarship on diasporic geographies of home and develop ideas around “diaspora transregions” and “diaspora cities.” To do this, I examine Moroccan diaspora formations in the city of Granada in the south of Spain. I utilise the spatiality and history of Granada to reveal complex interpretations of diasporic home. In particular, I examine how the Muslim history of Al‐Andalus – which is intimately embedded in the urban landscape of Granada and also entangled into the history of the wider region – impacts on Moroccan diaspora consciousness. This involves examining how histories and geographies of Al‐Andalus are interpreted and experienced by those in the Moroccan diaspora, which in this analysis is a diasporic population primarily from northern Morocco. I analyse four intersecting impacts of history and place, including nostalgia and imagined geographies, religious and genealogical links to Granada and the wider region, identification with culture and the built environment, and finally the ambivalence of history on belonging. What this examination reveals is that the history of Al‐Andalus and an identification with historical circular migrations between northern Morocco and southern Spain can engender a sense of being part of multiple diasporic journeys and settlements, and subsequently a ‘homing desire’ to multiple spaces. A key contribution here is the illustration of how entangled urban and regional histories can reconfigure more normative notions of the diaspora condition. Diasporic connections to deep histories of place and migration can rework senses of home and refute notions of a linear homing desire to a singular nation‐state. This demonstrates that diasporic belongings are not always limited to the parameters of the nation, but rather are informed by the intersections of urban and regional cultures, religions, and histories.

Freedom with Local Bonds: Custom and Manumission in the Age of Emancipation

Abstract Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, across Latin America, expansive rural communities of African descent forged freedom from below in the shadows of highly exploitative extractive economies. Their efforts push us to reconsider established genealogies of the age of emancipation. Freedom through conditional manumission and enslaved people’s reliance on social networks to obtain it opened the door to custom inside first-instance district courts in such areas. Judges turned to vernacular understandings of rights and obligations as they clarified the ambiguous statuses of the conditionally freed for which written law offered few provisions. Through manumission and legal actions to defend freedom, peasants of African descent on the margins of the global economic system grounded their rights in state structures as local custom. Black freedom within such territories represents a mode of community governance that remains invisible if studied by focusing on mobility or nation building. Seen from a place such as Santiago de Cuba, the nineteenth century was not just a time when Africans and Afro-descendants pursued social inclusion through ideologies of national citizenship and diasporic connections. It was also a time of freedom through membership in local communities, which women and families were especially instrumental in forging.

Digital polycentricity and diasporic connectivity: A Norwegian‐Senegalese case study

AbstractDigital communication remains largely unexplored in sociolinguistic research on diaspora and language. In this paper, ethnographically collected data from Norway‐based families of Senegalese heritage are explored to identify how family members use digital media to engage with diaspora concerns and projects, and how this engagement shapes their multilingual practices online. We re‐contextualize the concept of polycentricity (Blommaert et al.) from the physical setting of a neighbourhood or region to complex ecologies of digital media, and identify four ‘centres’, that is, distinct orientations for participants’ digital language and literacy practices, in which linguistic choices are associated with diaspora discourses, genres, and imagery. Each centre constrains the deployment of linguistic and semiotic resources in ways that are related both to historically rooted sociolinguistic hierarchies and affordances of digital media. The findings support a key claim in language and diaspora research, that is, the fine‐grained patterning of linguistic resources in diaspora communities. They also underscore the need to extend the empirical scope of a sociolinguistics of diaspora from co‐present to mediated interaction, and to explore the interplay between the two.

Diaspora and development: the case of Mauritius

ABSTRACT This paper explores the different prospects offered by diasporic connections towards development in the island of Mauritius. Mauritius maintains strong diasporic connections with the homelands of the “ancestral” diasporas of its multi-ethnic population. The contribution and assistance of these countries towards the development of Mauritius at multiple levels has been significant and is still ongoing. However, the connection between the Mauritian diaspora and Mauritius as a homeland is so far less solid. The paper explores the two dimensions of diaspora in terms of their contribution to development, arguing that Mauritius needs to do more towards reaching out to its diaspora.

Homeland and Heartland: Conceptualizing the “Muslim” “Diaspora”

Arguing for more conceptual specificity regarding the term “Muslim diaspora,” this article identifies two conflation problems in the scholarship on Muslim immigrants. First, the immigrants’ “Muslimness,” which refers to the signifiers, thought-processes, discourses, and actions that others perceive to be associated with Islam, is often conflated with the immigrants being “Muslims”—i.e., members of a discrete, bounded group supposedly different from non-Muslims. Second, Muslims’ transnational engagements—meaning, their cross-border ties between exclusively the sending and receiving countries—are often conflated as being diasporic—connections targeted towards other Muslims abroad motivated by a sense of religious solidarity. Consequently, researchers have been largely unable to distinguish Muslims’ religious performance from an ethnic one and have taken Muslims’ immigrant transnationalism as evidence of an emerging “Muslim” “diasporic” consciousness. This article parses existing scholarship on Muslim immigrants in the West and offers a new way of conceptualizing “Muslim diaspora” to move past these ambiguities. It offers the concept of “heartland”—distinct from immigrants’ “homeland”—to better distinguish Muslims’ religion-based diasporic expressions from their ethnicity based transnational ones.

Playing with Saris: Material and Affective Unfoldings of Violence and Resistance in Shailja Patel’s Migritude

Shailja Patel’s Migritude engages in strategies of addressing, negotiating, and ultimately opposing violence that all play out along differing visual, textual, and material routes. Migritude can best be described as multi-modal and hybrid; it initially originated as a spoken-word performance and has since metamorphosed and become a conglomeration of art, poetry, and autobiography in book form. It is not only the story of Patel’s own movements across the world, but is also intertwined with her family’s transoceanic migration stories from Gujarat to Nairobi as one possible narrative of the Asian-African diaspora. What lies at the heart of Migritude is a suitcase full of saris which Patel inherited from her mother: working with and through the cloth of the saris, Migritude showcases both female vulnerability and resistance. By transferring the saris’ affective materiality onto the stage and onto the page, Patel engages in processes of visually and physically engaging with the cloth of the sari to excavate stories of violence, trauma, and healing. This essay will outline how Migritude facilitates processes of resistance and of community building via performance, via intermedial and textual strategies, and via the physicality of its stage show. It posits that Migritude can be regarded as a visual and material text that words the oceanic travels of the Indian and African diaspora, and through its textile and textural indebtedness to the violent histories of colonization produces alternative spaces that further the notion of diasporic connectivity and encounter.

Diasporic ambassadors: Black women, pageants, and building connections across the African diaspora in the late twentieth century

ABSTRACT The 1965 Hart Cellar Act opened the US borders to African, Latin American, and Caribbean peoples in an unprecedented way. Yet, this migration is an extension of the connections Black people built with each other in the decades before. Black internationalism grew over the course of the twentieth century which laid the foundation for diasporic communities to form across the US in the latter half of the century. In particular, the travel of Black women between Haiti and Chicago helps to explain how a thriving Haitian community formed in the city during the late twentieth century. Black women like Gerthie David, Ms. Haiti 1975, and Marjorie Vincent, Ms. America 1991, exemplify the diasporic ties that were created and strengthened via pageants. This paper argues that Black women used pageants to build diasporic connections (for self and communal interests) and challenge derogatory stereotypes of Blackness and women across the diaspora.

Beyond Nations and Nationalities: Discussing the Variety of Migrants’ Identifications in Russian Social Media

This article examines how transnational labor migrants to Russia from the five former Soviet Union countries – Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan – identify themselves in social media. The authors combine Rogers Brubaker's theory of identifications with Randall Collins' interaction ritual theory to study migrants' online interactions in the largest Russian social media (VK.com). They observed online interactions in 23 groups. The article illuminates how normative and policy contexts affect the Russian Federation's migration processes through a detailed discussion of migrants' everyday online interactions. Results reveal common and country-specific identifications of migrants in their online interactions. Migrants from Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan employ identifications connected to diasporic connections. Migrants from Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan in their identifications refer to low-skilled labor migration to Russia as a fact, a subject for assessment, and as a unifying category. For these countries, the present and the future of the nation is discussed in the framework of evaluation of mass immigration to Russia.

Joyraj and Debanuj: queer(y)ing the city

ABSTRACT In this article we want to evoke two characters that each suggest different points of departure for thinking about Kolkata as a queer kind of space. By this we want to evoke something of the sexual geography and life-ways of the city, but to go beyond this standpoint too, to question ways in which ethnographic characters might be evoked in respect of any context, Kolkata or elsewhere. In one sense this is to open out a perception of Kolkata as a scene of many sexual life-worlds, inviting a plural kind of analysis suggestive of a multiplicity of perspectives; persons/subjects each with a unique viewpoint to be captured. The two characters we explore here each draw attention to issues of belonging and migration, of both wanting to move to and away from Kolkata; creating new life-worlds via the city amidst its shifting sexual geographies, class and caste divisions, and wider diasporic connections and fault-lines. Kolkata itself emerges as an attribute of the characterisations to hand: sometimes as distinct mise-en-scene, at others a kind of sensibility or resonance field for understanding self and others.