Diasporic Culture Research Articles

Diasporic Philanthropy and the Sense of Belonging as an Expression of Diasporic Cultural Identity and Inclusion

AbstractThis study examines how performing diaspora philanthropy in the country of origin (Morocco) and the experience of integration and inclusion in the country of residence (Netherlands) influences the sense of belonging amongst cross-border diasporic philanthropists. The examination combines theories on migration, cross-border diasporic philanthropy and the sense of belonging. Based on a qualitative exploration of the perspectives and motives of individual cross-border diasporic philanthropists (N = 30), the analysis reveals a profile of cross-border diasporic philanthropists for whom country of residence serves as a positive reference, due to the constant experience of inclusion. They use their country of residence as a reference for social change in their country of origin. This generates a sense of belonging amongst diasporic philanthropists. The findings of this study contribute to the existing literature on the sense of belonging within diasporic communities and cross-border diasporic philanthropists, thereby enhancing understanding of motivations for diasporic philanthropy.

Reappraising Land And Inheritance, Revisiting Ghosts: A Black Feminist And Decolonial Land-informed Reading Of Beloved by Toni Morrison And I, Tituba, Black Witch Of Salem by Maryse Condé

Abstract: How do we, Black women, experience “inheritance” as it relates to land, ghosts, and embodied experiences? How do we talk about inheritance in ways that are not capitalist nor predicated on the commodification of land that is also dominantly understood as outside, and therefore, not a part of us? With Beloved and I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem , this article traces material and immaterial possessions handed down via literature. By challenging existing settler-derived and dominant understandings of land, different experiences and states of possession, and thus, “inheritance,” arise. The African diasporic culture, subaltern, ancient, non-dominant and Indigenous onto-epistemologies, and methodologies, as well as altering encounters with the (im)material world, guide our study of ghosts as “inheritance.” Our ancestral onto-epistemologies, both native to us as Black women and those selected by us (such as Traditional Chinese Medicine’s concept of the ghost), point to our relational conceptualization of land as ancestral knowledge, and the concept of “the land within.” Cultural transmissions (in this case, literature), (im)material world encounters, and the transmission (of memory, energy, spirit, trauma) that gets coded into script of the (internal)body, present the (internal)body as a geographical scale and identify a composite of ancestral knowledge(s), memories, and experiences lodged within. “The land within” as inheritance neither reproduces settler racial capitalist notions of private property nor implies a static possession as it relates to time, geography, or expression.

Interpreting the Blind Man's Garden through a Post-Colonial Lens of Ideological Racism

This research paper explores the novel The Blind Man's Garden through the lens of ideological racism, offering a critical analysis within the framework of post-colonialism. Written by Nadeem Aslam, the novel delves into the complex dynamics of power, identity, and the consequences of Western imperialism in the post-9/11 era. By examining the characters, plot, and themes, this paper aims to unravel the layers of ideological racism prevalent in the narrative and contextualize them within the broader spectrum of post-colonial literature. The term ‘colonialism’ is all about manipulation and oppression over the people of third world countries but post-colonialism, on the other hand is the ‘reaffirmation of colonialism’ through the narratives of colonized people. Now- a-days, post-colonialism is related to trans-nationalism which is all about diaspora and hybridity. This paper explains the same traces of hybridity and diasporic culture through the narration of different characters portrayed in the novel. Moreover, this paper also gives a clear glance of Nadeem Aslam’s novel The Blind Man’s Garden as the traces of colonialism and imperialism through the lens of ideological racism in the light of Post-Colonial theory as explained by Edward Said (1978) and Bhabha (1994). The Blind Man’s Garden, presents pain, loss and grief of Pakistani community which they suffer at the hands of colonizers after being colonized. The researcher has selected the above- mentioned text to find out the traces of post colonialism to show the basic cause of all the sufferings which Asian community had with them since long after the period of colonialism. For this purpose the researcher has used the qualitative approach to analyze the basic elements of post-colonial literature through the lens of ideological racism in the selected text. The findings of the study indicate that the selected novel exactly explains the perspectives of Post-Colonial theory with reference to ideological racism by highlighting the issues of otherness, third -space hybridity, diasporic feelings and marginality among the aboriginals portrayed in the novel.

Latin Jewish Families and Their Educational Choices: Navigating Multiple Identities

ABSTRACT This study explores how Latin Jewish families navigate their intersecting identities as they make educational and other socialization choices for their children regarding heritage language and culture. Using a qualitative approach, the study focuses on six women, all mothers of young children living in San Francisco/Bay Area, who have chosen to transmit Jewish and Latin cultures and Spanish language to their children. Data analysis involved thematic coding and a grounded theory approach. The findings suggest that parents’ (in this case, mothers’) diasporic and minoritized cultural experiences play a large role in shaping their views, goals and practices for transmitting multiple diasporic cultures to their children. Understanding their choices offers Jewish educators and institutional leaders a critical view into better serving this Jewish demographic.

WHEN JAZZ BROKE OPERA: SOUND AND MYTH IN …(IPHIGENIA)

As an anthropologist, I am no stranger to the importance of myth to both meaning-making and as connective tissue with ancestral forms of knowledge. Claude Levi-Strauss is synonymous with the study of myth in twentieth-century anthropology. Zora Neale Hurston, however, has only recently been reclaimed by the discipline of anthropology, even though she was both a student of Franz Boas—the so-called ‘father’ of American anthropology—and she conducted tireless ethnographic research in the US South and Caribbean for over forty years, focused on what she preferred to call folklore, or lies. Hurston is an important lens through which to interpret …(Iphigenia) because Hurston's corpus catalogues the mythocentrism of African American and African diasporic culture. She created a mind-bendingly prolific body of both fiction and non-fiction work centered on myth and provides an important context for the connections being drawn in this opera between jazz and Greek tragedy: that of sound.

Leyla McCalla’s Tributes to Langston Hughes

ABSTRACTClassically trained Black musician Leyla McCalla’s album Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes (2014) intertwines innovative folk- and blues-inspired settings of Hughes’s blues poetry, interpretations of traditional Haitian folk songs, and original compositions. This article argues that the album constitutes both a vital homage to Hughes’s impact on Black diasporic culture and a feminist boundary-breaking reshaping of the expectations of the hegemonic, white-washing contemporary music industry. It reads together the album’s ambitious liner notes, accompanying visual elements, and sonic choices of selected tracks to show how McCalla, by innovatively syncretizing typically disparate genres, inherits and extends the radical political and cultural tradition of the blues women whom Hughes’s poetry often depicted. Thus, it draws on frameworks from Hughes criticism and from performance studies scholars such as Daphne Brooks to suggest that Black female artists like McCalla warrant the attention of diasporic cultural critics equally to and alongside aesthetic ancestors like Hughes who inspire them. These women are epistemologically intervening in the construction of literary and cultural history through projects like Vari-Colored Songs, an impressive artifact that wrenchingly brings together traditions to address diasporic problems such as eco-precarity and to celebrate Black women’s resilient persistence through such endemic conditions.

Area Studies: From “Global Anglophone” to Afropolitan Literature

African Literature has gone through many phases: from its being denied a literary category to becoming Third World, Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature respectively and to its latter categorization as a “Global Anglophone Literature” subsumed under an overarching “Area Studies” American academic quota. This essay examines these shifts between categorizations and focalizes the politics, both professional and disciplinary, that undergirds such unstable and sliding nomenclature. It proceeds to tease out, within a postcolonial framework, the Euro-American empire-building imperatives of such naming. While some of these questions are not necessarily completely new, what is unique here is that this reflection concludes by suggesting Afropolitanism as a possible alternative discourse for reading postcolonial African and African diasporic culture.

Migrating narratives: re-inscribing black diaspora cultures

ABSTRACT This essay traces the predominant counter-hegemonic, counter-discursive political and cultural models that obtain on either side of the Atlantic – the black Atlantic and the (pan-)Africanist. Typically read as disparate, even oppositional, competing ideologies, this essay examines the ways in which black Atlantic and Africanist thought migrate – travelling and journeying in ironic echoes and reverberations – across space and time, following similar contours that inscribe troublingly totalizing and exclusionary ideational narratives of black diaspora cultures and ontologies. Engaging the delimiting, signifying imprints and prescriptive modalities that inform and structure both theoretical models, this essay attempts to put black Atlantic and Africanist paradigms into conversation in ways that expand critical studies of black diasporic cultures, African cultures, and their intersecting relationships. In this regard, arguing that such intersectional relations can be evidenced in the migratory, border-crossing ethos and transgressive aesthetic of contemporary African diasporic literature, the essay’s particular reading of Adichie’s Americanah and Bulawayo’s We Need New Names suggests the ways in which these texts advance an ethical imperative for more malleable, inclusive and expansive, ways of reading and re-inscribing the (black) world.

How Does the Supernatural Matter to Our Study?

How Does the Supernatural Matter to Our Study? James Padilioni21 Jr. In my research and teaching of Catholicism across the African Diaspora, the supernatural as a category of analysis matters very much. While the etymology of super-natural describes experiences of an ethereal and elusive nature, my scholarship foregrounds the supernatural as a thoroughly embodied and everyday phenomenon experienced by Catholics of the African Diaspora. As a cradle Catholic and descendant of enslaved Africans, the stakes of my ancestral lineage are tied with my scholarship, and I proudly take up the intersection of Blackness, ritualized memories of slavery, and sainthood as observed through the figure of San Martín de Porres Velázquez, OP (1579-1639), the sixteenth-seventeenth century Afro-Peruvian friar canonized by Pope John XXIII in 1962 as the patron of social justice and interracial harmony. My forthcoming book project, To Ask Infinity Some Questions: San Martín de Porres and the Black Hagiographic Mysteries of Florida (Fordham University Press), explores hagiographic rituals of Martín de Porres performed by South Florida's twentieth and twenty-first century African-American, Cuban, Bahamian, Haitian, Dominican, and Puerto Rican communities that invoke the sacred memory and sensuous-material presence of Martín de Porres in their everyday endeavors "to ask infinity some questions" about the mysterious and sublime nature of Black being.22 I further interpret the supernatural experience of Afro-Catholic sainthood in my classes at Swarthmore College, a majority-minority [End Page 11] institution of Quaker heritage in the suburbs of Philadelphia.23 As a member of the religion department affiliated with environmental studies, Black studies, and Latin American and Latino studies, my classes feature an array of Black and brown students from diverse ethnic-national backgrounds who are eager to recover histories of the African Diaspora and the global geography of colonialism, and who wish to reclaim knowledge of their ancestral and indigenous religious traditions that lay encrusted within Catholic devotional practice. Thus, I encourage Catholic Studies scholars to "think with saints" and honestly reckon with the full implications of saintly supernatural phenomena, not only as a folkloric measure of personal devotion, but an archive for scholars who wish to "free subjugated knowledge" and center the metaphysical perspectives of American Catholic communities forcibly brought into the church via the strong arm of slavery and conquest.24 The freeborn son of an emancipated African mother and Spanish colonial administrator father, Martín de Porres came of age during a violent and tempestuous time in the history of the Catholic Church, characterized by the religio-racial antagonisms of the Counter-Reformation, the transatlantic slave trade, and the conquest and colonization of the Americas.25 Though he was an apprenticed herbalist and "surgeon-barber," Martín entered the Dominican Order as a tertiary donado domestic servant, legally barred from taking full vows because of his mulatto racial status within the colonial casta system.26 However, Martín's holy charisma exceeded the scope of this lowly position, and as he enacted a ministry of healing and consolation among the enslaved African and oppressed indigenous Andean communities of Lima, he earned a reputation for the mighty powers he wielded: bilocation (the ability to be in two places at once); subtlety (the ability to pass through solid objects); zoolingualism (the ability to talk with [End Page 12] animals); herbal curing and miraculous healing, either through sympathetic objects that Martín had touched or by the direct laying on of his hands; episodes of ecstasy; and, most-spectacularly, eyewitness accounts of levitation. In my research, I hold up Martín as a figure of multiplicity in African diasporic culture, as the ultimate "meaning" of his legendary power is not singularly controlled by the church's authorized hagiographic narrative. I analyze together the various ways Martín manifests within both institutional and folk Catholic rituals of devotion, particularly Cuban Santería and Dominican Vodú. I contend that these rituals open points of encounter between Martín and his devotees in which Martín's "real presence" radiates through the bodies of his devotees, and is present in their beloved sacramental objects of statues, candles, and prayer cards.27 Because I write for...

Creative Expression and the Material Culture of Italian POWs in the United States During World War II

This study concerns the history of Italian prisoners of war in the United States during World War II through an analysis of the art and architecture they created. These crafted expressions highlight how Italian culture was transported and reshaped during the war and suggest alternate understandings of Italian diasporic culture and wartime experiences. They reinforced cultural heritage, mediated personal and community identities, and negotiated some of the atrocities of war. As a cultural studies scholar engaging with Italian transnational concerns, my approach emerges from an interest in the use of space, place-making, and the meanings ascribed to the material world.

At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War

At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War

“That’s My Tomboy”: Queer Filipinx Diasporic Transmasculinities

This essay explores the circulation of the figure of the tomboy within queer Filipinx diasporic culture. In particular, I examine “That’s My Tomboy!” a segment of the popular Philippine variety show, It’s Showtime, an ABS-CBN show filmed in front of a live audience in Quezon City, Philippines. Circulated globally on the international cable channel, The Filipino Channel (TFC), It’s Showtime, stars the hugely popular bakla performer, Vice Ganda. As a vignette on the show, “That’s My Tomboy” is a talent competition in which tomboys compete for cash prizes through modelling and singing. This essay uses an interdisciplinary approach that integrates personal narrative and analysis of television and social media to analyze the queer diasporic figure of the tomboy. Beginning with an autoethnographic vignette, I describe my experience, as a queer diasporic Filipina American femme woman, with the term “tomboy.” In particular, I describe the experience of bringing my masculine-presenting, nonbinary partner to meet my family in Dallas, Texas, for the first time. Upon meeting my partner, my Filipino father immediately asked her if she had seen, “That’s My Tomboy.” In this encounter, my partner was immediately recognizable to my immigrant father as a tomboy, both from his personal experiences with Filipinx female masculinity, but more importantly, through his engagement with Filipinx diasporic popular culture. My father’s familiarity with the figure of the tomboy – mediated through his consumption of Philippine popular culture through The Filipino Channel – reflects the circulation of this figure within the Filipinx diaspora. Drawing on this initial theorization of the figure of the tomboy within Filipinx diasporic culture, I then analyze the emergence of other tomboy figures, such as Jake Zyrus and Ice Seguerra, within both television and social media that circulate throughout the diaspora. Ultimately, I argue that social media representations of tomboys create possibilities for queer pleasure and spectatorship, contributing to a broader Filipinx queer diasporic mediascape.

Music and words against racism: a qualitative study with racialized artists in Italy

ABSTRACT The present article recognizes the limits of anti-racism in continental Europe and it looks at the emergence of a new form of political anti-racism in Italy developed by racialized youth through rap music and slam poetry. Drawing on Gilroy’s work and on the theoretical framework of “Black Mediterranean”, it explores Black resistance to racism in Italy. Based on a qualitative research study which used mainly in-depth interviews with artists, it shows how Italian artists of African descent enact processes of counter-racialization. One section focuses on Black Italian rappers, who resist racism thanks to their diasporic political imagination; another section discusses the cases of two Italian artists of North African descent who have embraced Black diasporic cultures to fight racism together with Black Italians. Finally, we show how their struggles are connected with the Black Lives Matter global movement.

Contributors

Contributors

Cover Art

Cover Art

Exu: the language as a crossroad in Black diasporic culture(s)

Exu: the language as a crossroad in Black diasporic culture(s)

Afrofuturism Revelation and Revolution; Voices of the Digital Generation

The art movement known as Afrofuturism uses various forms of artistic expression to create speculative fictions linking African-Americans’ ancestral past with envisioned, utopian futures. In the process, Afrofuturists shift the narratives that influence African-Americans’ lives from narratives of oppression to narratives that re-imagine a world in which African diasporic culture is at the center of social life. In previous analyses of the significance of Afrofuturism, however, the voices of actual artists are glaringly absent. Current public uprisings and demands for social reforms provide new opportunities for elevating Afrofuturism’s traditional emancipatory themes across digital platforms with a global reach. Using a critical race theoretical lens, this multimodal anthropological study focuses on the voices of contemporary Afrofuturists at the intersection of Afrofuturism, social injustice, and digital technology.

"Glass Transition: Figuring the African Diaspora in From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate"

This essay analyzes Nathaniel Mackey’s deployment of glass imagery in From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. While the title evokes fragility as the primary property of glass, a greater emphasis is placed on its malleability as the series progresses. To gain perspective on Mackey’s creative use of the image, the first section of the essay examines the meaning attached to glass in mid-century African American literature. Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and Gwendolyn Brooks employed the image to depict and criticize the experience of racial segregation. For Mackey, however, glass figures African diasporic culture that is always already broken. This brokenness is embraced as a necessary part of improvisation, and Mackey works and reworks the material to the point of recasting it as an antifragile matter. Glass transition thus provides the physical analogue to the diasporic aesthetics that undergird black expressive practices, enabling Mackey to both embody and theorize the aesthetics of the diaspora in From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate.

Reverse migrations and women’s role in shaping religious identities in Hyderabad

ABSTRACT The paper is based on ethnographic observations of religious practices among Muslim return migrants from the Gulf, and among Hindu return migrants from the United States. The goal of these observations was to understand the ways that diasporic cultures have transformed these migrants’ religious practices after they return to India. We focus on the city of Hyderabad, in South India, with its long history of diverse Muslim communities, and recent histories of migration and reverse migration to the Gulf region in Western Asia, as well as recent transformations through the growth of gated communities that have attracted Hindu reverse migrants from the United States. We focus on women’s engagement with religious cultural practices and the ways in which religion and gender are restructured through the process of migration and reverse migration.

The Emerging Critical Pedagogies of Dance Educators in an Urban STEAM After-School Program for Black Girls

The preparation of urban educators has gained widespread attention across education policy, research, and practice. As US urban cities have become more diverse, the teacher workforce has not kept up, and the racial/ethnic demographics of students and teachers are disproportionately incongruent. In order to eradicate an education landscape that perpetuates white, middle-class ways of knowing and being, often at the expense of the cultural practices and cultural wealth of historically marginalized students of color, urban teacher education must be centered toward justice and rooted in critical pedagogies. The literature, albeit bleak, reveals that these perspectives must also be applied to urban dance education. Dance education programs have been significantly eliminated from urban schools over time, and although dance has historical roots in African and African diasporic cultures, dance education continues to be Eurocentric. This phenomenological case study examines the emerging critical pedagogies of undergraduate dance majors and minors who served as dance teachers in an urban Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) after-school program for 7-12-year-old Black girls. Findings reveal that (a) navigating race, place, and space; (b) mentorship and practice; and (c) critical reflection and self-efficacy were critical components of the urban dance educators’ emerging critical pedagogies. Implications for urban dance education and the broader field of urban education are provided.