Diasporic Experience Research Articles

“Trying to twist your way out of your skin” — different faces of Chinese Canadian experience in selected poems by Grace Lau

The notions of inclusion, exclusion, and otherness remain at the core of the diasporic experience and an integral part of the history of Chinese diaspora in Canada. In her debut collection The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak (2021), Grace Lau, a Chinese Canadian poet, explores these ideas and their impact on individuals and on the whole Chinese diaspora. Through the analysis of four of Lau’s poems — “When Yuhua Hamasaki Went Home”, “3 a.m. Communion”, “Pedicure at Pinky’s”, and “Escape Artist” — this article discusses how the poet connects experiences of inclusion and exclusion with both historical instances of prejudice and discrimination and their modern counterparts, highlighting the role consumerism plays in those processes.

Covering the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar: Football and (New) Cultural Politics

This paper explores the multifaceted cultural dynamics surrounding the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, with a specific focus on the Moroccan national football team. The narrative unfolds through the lenses of media and crowd behavior theories, revealing the complex interplay of global and local forces. As Western media engages in controversial representations rooted in Orientalism, the paper examines the contrasting celebration of the Moroccan team by Arabo-Islamic supporters. It delves into the culture wars triggered by biased coverage, epitomized by moments of ridicule for the team's expressions of Islamic identity. The study extends to the diasporic experience of Moroccan footballers, exemplified by the "both/and" logic that defines their global identity. Through the lens of key football players like Achraf Hakimi and Ziyech, the paper sheds light on the intricate relationship between football, migration, and the construction of cultural identities.

Gender Representation in Contemporary Indian Women Writers

This research paper delves into the nuanced exploration of gender representation in the literary works of two distinguished contemporary Indian women writers, Arundhati Roy and Jhumpa Lahiri. The investigation encompasses a historical analysis of their narratives, scrutinizing their impact on societal perceptions and the evolving discourse surrounding gender roles. Arundhati Roy's seminal work, "The God of Small Things," serves as a focal point for examining her adept dismantling of traditional gender norms within the socio-cultural fabric of India. Concurrently, Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, "Interpreter of Maladies," provides a diasporic lens through which gender intersects with cultural identities. The paper progresses through individual analyses of Roy and Lahiri's works, unraveling their unique approaches to gender representation. While Roy challenges societal expectations in India through vivid portrayals of characters breaking free from established norms, Lahiri navigates the diasporic experience, intricately weaving the intersectionality of gender with cultural identity. Common themes and divergent approaches between the two authors are explored, contributing to a broader dialogue on gender representation in contemporary Indian literature. As the narrative unfolds, critical reception and scholarly debates surrounding Roy and Lahiri's works are considered, shedding light on the dynamic nature of gender representation within diverse cultural landscapes. The research also anticipates future trends, emphasizing emerging themes such as intersectionality, global feminist perspectives, and the integration of technology in shaping narratives. Ethical considerations and the advocacy for inclusive publishing practices are discussed, recognizing the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. This research aims to amplify the voices of women in literature, providing a comprehensive understanding of their experiences while paving the way for a more inclusive and equitable literary landscape.

Witnessing as an ethics: relationality as a way out of survey course tourism

ABSTRACT This reflective account looks back on ‘Performance, Positionality, and Witnessing,’ a course taught in Summer 2022, which engaged various Filipinx Canadian performance texts. The course encapsulated an experience in teaching performativity while also introducing students to the notion of witnessing – that is, being cognisant of their positionality in bearing witness to diasporic experience encountered in performance text. As an intervention to ‘regular’ survey courses, ‘Performance, Positionality, and Witnessing’ challenged students’ detachment from course material by inviting them to examine their entry point to material as readers, thinkers, and creators.

Asian Diaspora: Understanding Toronto Public Spaces Through Art and Performances

In this article, I explore how art can help Asian immigrants in Ontario understand the public spaces and the community of Toronto. Using Shusterman’s Pragmatist Aesthetics as a theoretical framework, this study asks: How does navigating and responding to issues of equity, inclusion, and environmental resiliency foster residents’ understanding? The study is based on field research that involved a series of improvised art and performance activities in Toronto’s outdoor public spaces from February 2022 to May 2022. I argue that art can enable individuals to recognize and challenge the inequity in public places and develop relational understandings and practices that can inform public policy and inspire further research and action. The findings reveal that participants’ social interactions through artmaking in public spaces enhanced their personal growth, learning, and creativity, connecting their everyday lives with formal education. This article highlights the impact of diasporic experiences in shaping the process of placemaking within these spaces.

Misreading the Air: Narrative Ambivalence and the Burden of Representation in Dinaw Mengestu's How to Read the Air

Abstract: This article argues that Ethiopian-American writer Dinaw Mengestu's novel How to Read the Air (2010) generates a narrative and cultural conundrum. It contests mainstream, trauma-riddled depictions of immigrant life while simultaneously conforming to the reductive cultural tropes it criticizes. I approach the notion of the stereotypical "singular" immigrant story, wherein the individual's struggles stand for those of the diasporic community, by drawing on Kobena Mercer's and Stuart Hall's notion of "the burden of representation" as well as Cathy Park Hong's "literature of minor feelings." Situated within an ongoing critical conversation about Mengestu's relationship to diasporic identity and popular migrant stories, this article foregrounds How to Read the Air 's narrative dissonance and departs from the current scholarly discourse, which tends to either interpret Jonas' individual experience as reflective of collective diasporic experience or overemphasize the novel's revisionist self-consciousness. Through close textual analysis, I show that How to Read the Air both masterfully employs irony and falls victim to it. The novel might not ultimately rise above tropes, but its ambivalence blends opposed positions, sentiments, and tones, and in doing so creates a pluralist revisionist narrative that assimilates stereotypes creatively.

Exploring Transnational Identity and Borders in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines

In contemporary Indian literature, post-independent writers grapple with the complexities of identity and nationhood amidst historical legacies such as partition, migration, displacement, and violence. These issues delve into the primal origins of people and their subsequent diasporic experiences, which challenge their cultural and societal identities. This paper aims to delve into the theme of transcending national identity in Amitav Ghosh’s novel, The Shadow Lines. Through the novel, Ghosh interrogates the construction of borders and national identities, probing the boundaries between people and the geographical landscapes they inhabit. Set against the backdrop of significant historical events like the freedom movement in Bengal, the Second World War, and the partition of India in 1947, the narrative spans three generations across three distinct cities—Calcutta, Dhaka, and London. The characters navigate diverse horizons, shaped by memories of traumatic historical events and nationalist struggles. Their journey from ‘Going Away’ to ‘Coming Home’ is marked by blurred lines between nations and families, symbolized as ‘Shadow Lines,’ transcending temporal and spatial borders in their diasporic experiences. Additionally, the paper delves into the intricacies of individual identity and the inner and outward conflicts arising from geographical dislocation and cultural disparities depicted in the novel.

“We Became Religious to Protect Our Children”: Diasporic Religiosity among Moroccan Jewish Families in France and Israel

This article explores the formation and preservation of a distinctive “Moroccan Judaism” ethos, rooted in a connection to the homeland and an idealized Moroccan past. Through an examination of secularism, traditionalism, and modernity in Israel and France, alongside the resurgence of religiosity in secular societies, it assesses the impact of diasporic experiences on the religious practices of Moroccan-origin families in these countries. The argument posits that diasporic sentiments and the allure of Moroccan heritage significantly influence the negotiation and affirmation of religious identities within these families. Rituals and religious practices serve as expressions of this identity, undergoing adaptation and transformation both in Morocco and abroad. Consequently, “Israeli” and “French” approaches to Moroccan Jewish observance reflect distinct socio-political and historical contexts. The analysis draws from five family cases, illustrating a range of experiences within national and transnational frameworks, enriching our understanding of the dynamic interplay between personal narratives and broader social and historical landscapes.

Crossing Borders, Shaping Identities: Exploring the Diasporic Experiences of Arab Women in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Arabian Jazz

This paper discusses the different and multiple types of oppression that affect Arab diasporic women’s life in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Arabian Jazz (1993). The paper traces Arab women’s resistance to patriarchy in their native culture, and the challenges of adaptation to new countries. The paper also comes across the significance of ethnic and gendered homeland–memory in molding and expressing Arab diasporic women’s identities, and the impact of these homeland–memories on the sustainability of violence in the host country. Moreover, the term “Reversal Tension” which is a new term, is used to refer to the effects of the Arab community's counter-attempts in the diaspora to prevent Arab women from assimilating into the host countries’ culture.

Burning Witnesses in Limbo: Moroccan Diasporic Literature

This article proposes a comparative reading of two works by Moroccan writers that explore migration and expands upon Ato Quayson and Yoon Sun Lee’s research on diasporic cultural production. Ruth Knafo Setton’s The Road to Fez (2001) and Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005) raise questions of genre. Knafo Setton employs elements of the Gothic while Lalami utilizes travel writing to delve into Moroccan migrant and diasporic experiences. A contrapuntal examination of their texts from a genre-oriented perspective highlights the interplay between the author, text, and reader, shedding light on Moroccan literature in English and the distinct characteristics of diasporic writing and reading.

Navigating Identities in Flux: Exploring Diasporic Black Identity Issues in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

This paper critically explores the concept of identity in diaspora literature through Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, highlighting the identity crises and rebuilding efforts of the African diaspora within a postcolonial context. It examines the challenges faced by these individuals, such as racial discrimination, isolation, and prejudice in Western societies, and how they impact their quest for belonging. Utilizing identity theory, the study analyzes the experiences of characters like Ifemelu, Obinze, Uju, and Dike to understand their struggles with cultural displacement and the search for identity in either their homeland or abroad. Adichie’s narrative emphasizes the importance of maintaining cultural identity and self-confidence against the backdrop of global diaspora challenges. The paper concludes by recognizing Adichie’s significant impact on altering global views of Africa and her efforts to enhance African cultural pride, positioning her work as a key contribution to the discourse on diaspora and identity. Through Americanah, Adichie offers a profound insight into the diasporic experience, promoting a richer, more nuanced understanding of cultural diversity in our interconnected world.

Where is the Place for Black Atlantic Literature and Authorship?

In the wake of Black Atlantic terror, enslavement, colonialism and violence, is there a place for literature? Where is there a place for the author? In other words, to rethink poet Muriel Rukeyser’s question, where is there a place for Black Atlantic literature and authorship? Proposing Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic as the window through which to answer these questions, this essay focuses on the place for/of literature and authorship as Gilroy thinks them through an engagement with Richard Wright’s life and work, and also through the work of other Black Atlantic authors, primarily C.L.R. James, Toni Morrison, Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant. These figures show that the Black Atlantic author must persist in tenaciously writing through and within the violence that defines their experiences, revealing the necessity of such literature and the importance of producing such a literary practice. This essay poses that there is no place for Black Atlantic authorship if the author is not grappling, writing, and “living with,” as Toni Morrison would suggest, the unspeakable violence and absolute terrors of experience—scenes of horror must be (re)made through cultural production or there can be no poesis. This process of transformation amid (dis)location is grounded in the Black Atlantic experience of terror and diaspora, about which Gilroy writes, concluding his final chapter with an analysis of the Jewish diasporic experience. Because this essay engages a Jewish poet’s provocation in order to think the Black Atlantic, it is crucial to interrogate both the significance of this invocation and Gilroy’s assessment of the intimate interconnection and solidarity between the Black and Jewish experiences.

Cultural Dissemination of North African Diaspora in Western Europe: From Pasts to Pixels

This study takes stock of the North African diaspora's experiences in Western Europe across four distinct generations. It draws on a tailored theoretical framework to deconstruct the interactions of the historical experiences, societal shifts, and identity negotiations these generations have gone through in the process of cultural dissemination. The central question of the paper revolves around understanding the ways digital platforms and social media influence the negotiation and preservation of cultural heritage, as well as looking into how these technological advancements impact the formation of diasporic identities. The primary objective herein is to shed light on the challenges, resistances, and adaptations experienced by the four generations (Pioneering, Integration, Globalization, and Digital Generations) in the face of cultural differences, discrimination, and the unique opportunities afforded by the digital age. Furthermore, the objective is to contribute to the existing body of literature by adopting a holistic approach that synthesizes various aspects of the diasporic experience, shedding light on the ways in which technology shapes the cultural narratives of North African communities, ultimately offering some insights into the broader discourse on cultural resilience, connectivity, and the evolving nature of diasporic communities in the contemporary world.

Talking to Our Sons: The Power of the Reproductive Sphere in Agnès Agboton’s and Najat El Hachmi’s Autobiographies

Abstract In their autobiographies Más allá del mar de arena (2005) and Jo també sóc catalana (2004), Agnès Agboton and Najat El Hachmi narrate their diasporic experience of living and mothering in Catalonia. In both cases, the narrators address their sons. The close connection between the mothers (narrators) and their sons (addressees) establishes an intimate space of power which is analyzed through Irene Gedalof’s concept of the reproductive sphere. This essay proposes that the authors of both texts establish mothering in the diaspora within autobiographical narratives as a site of negotiation, creation of identity, and intervention both for the addressees and for a larger audience.

Emotional Bonds in Agha Shahid Ali’s Postcard from Kashmir

Diaspora literature, recognized as an independent academic discipline within universal literary canon, encompasses works produced by authors who have migrated from their home countries. Referred to interchangeably as ‘expatriate’ or ‘migratory’ writing, it has garnered increasing scholarly interest globally, particularly due to escalating socio-political and economic tensions worldwide.Indian Diaspora literature has evolved into a significant component of Indian English literature, reflecting the extensive reach of the Indian Diaspora, which spans the globe and ranks as the third largest after the British and Chinese Diasporas. Its influence extends across various fields, notably in creative writing, where authors of Indian origin have articulated their diasporic experiences. This literary realm boasts a plethora of distinguished male and female writers who have migrated abroad for various reasons.

Muslim women’s diasporic identity: a critical discourse analysis of Leila Aboulela’s Minaret (2005)

ABSTRACT Due to different unpropitious circumstances, immigration is globally on the rise. A Muslim Sudanese woman’s diasporic experience can be best perceived through a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of Leila Aboulela’s novel Minaret (2005). In a study of Minaret’s textual analysis, this article applies three central CDA postulations: 1. Teun A. van Dijk’s (1993a, & 2006b) three layers of study through ‘Discourse, Cognitive, and Society’, 2. Ruth Wodak’s ‘Language, and Ideology’ in the study of discourse analysis, and 3. Norman Fairclough’s (1996a, 2001b & 2013c) ‘3D model of CDA’. This research explores the social, diasporic, and historical challenges through a textual analysis of Minaret, which is faced by Sudanese women in Britain. Najwa, the protagonist struggles to find her identity while encountering innumerable challenges in the diasporic route. Her dis/placement of identity, and religion can be seen to construct an identity in a multicultural world (like Britain). In a nutshell, Minaret presents Najwa’s identity, representation, and language relation in social practice. Class conflict, power inequality, and a struggle for identity quest are contemporary issues that have been demonstrated around Najwa’s life.

Diasporic Experiences, Identity Crises and Ontological Insecurity in Lola Aworanti-Ekugo’s Lagos to London

Diasporic Experiences, Identity Crises and Ontological Insecurity in Lola Aworanti-Ekugo’s Lagos to London

Diasporic Narratives: Cultural Hybridity, Identity and Multiculturalism in Lahiri’s “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine”

Jhumpa Lahiri, a prominent Indo-American author, is acclaimed for her insightful depictions of diasporic experiences. This research delves into the complexities of identity construction in Lahiri's works, with a particular focus on her engaging short story, "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine." The study examines the challenges faced by individuals navigating dual cultural worlds, centering on the character of Lilia and her responses to multicultural experiences. This analysis reveals the continuous process of identity formation within a multicultural context. Grounded in Homi K. Bhabha's theoretical framework, the research explores concepts of cultural hybridity and the third space. The third space is conceptualized as a neutral cultural zone that transcends binary oppositions, allowing for the emergence of alternative identities. Cultural hybridity is examined as a method of balancing diverse practices, values, and customs associated with different cultures. Through an in-depth analysis of Lahiri's writings, the study offers crucial insights into the challenges of cultural identity construction and the difficulties encountered by individuals straddling multiple cultural realms. The exploration of cultural hybridity and the third space enriches the understanding of identity formation. The findings are expected to contribute significantly to the broader discourse on identity construction, illustrating how Lahiri’s work continues to inspire and resonate with literary enthusiasts.

NAIPAUL'S A HOUSE FOR MR. BISWAS: A STUDY OF THE COMPLEXITIES OF CULTURAL IDENTITY AND EXISTENTIAL STRUGGLE

This article examines V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas, focusing on the intertwined themes of assimilation, acculturation, displacement, and desolation in the context of post-colonial Trinidad. The novel, a poignant narrative of the protagonist Mohun Biswas, delves into the complexities of cultural identity and the existential struggles faced by individuals navigating the remnants of colonial rule. Mr. Biswas’s relentless quest for a house symbolizes his yearning for stability, autonomy, and self-worth amidst the socio-cultural constraints imposed by both his ancestral heritage and the colonial society he inhabits. The analysis highlights how Naipaul portrays the protagonist’s efforts to reconcile his inherited Indian identity with the demands of a dominant colonial culture, illustrating the broader challenges of cultural integration in a postcolonial world. Furthermore, the paper explores how the novel’s depiction of Mr. Biswas’s emotional and physical displacements reflects the broader diasporic experience, emphasizing the pervasive sense of alienation and existential despair that characterizes his life. Through this exploration, the article offers insights into the novel’s commentary on the enduring impacts of colonialism on personal and collective identities, contributing to the broader discourse on postcolonial literature.

Diaspora, Gender and Identity Transformations inthe Context African Philosophy and Culture: A Case of Zimbabwe.

his paper sought to explore diaspora, gender and identity transformations in the context African philosophy and culture. The paper explored diaspora, gender and identity transformations of Zimbabwean society and the concomitant demise of socio-cultural practices, dissecting how diasporas have shaped its cultural identity. 20 participants were purposively drawn from adult Zimbabwean family members living in the diaspora or with diasporic lived experiences of more than three years. The author used a scoping review of literature related to African philosophy, diaspora, gender and identity using search engines. Questionnaires and interview schedule were also used to gather data. Results show that diasporic experiences produce fused, identity and gender modes of cultural dimensions marked by significant, negative transformations. Gender was found to be a central cog that affects every stage of the migration process, interactions and subsequent outcomes. Additionally, it was noted that men are the worst affected as they are faced with challenges of trying to model families within the philosophy or context of African gender, sex and identity whilst children born in the diaspora face a myriad of challenges trying to meet the desired or accepted status. From these findings it could be concluded that diaspora life and identity exist under highly toxic and polarized relations which harbours identity confusion, mental instability, altered gender roles and to some extent self-destructive behaviours like prostitution, drugs and substance abuse, mutilation and suicide. The researcher therefore recommends collaborative, large-scale researches with those in the diaspora. The government should establish Zimbabwean culture centres in countries where Zimbabweans are diaspora to preserve our philosophies. Another recommendation is to curb the diaspora ecstasy as well as provision of multicultural counseling to those in the diaspora.