Diasporic Subjects Research Articles

I cinesi among others: the contested racial perceptions among Chinese migrants in Italy

ABSTRACT This article examines the vernacular system of racial designations and perceptions deployed by Chinese migrants in Italy for making sense of the pluralistic and hierarchical racial reality in which they live. Data primarily came from 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Bologna from 2014 to 2015 and the subsequent annual visits until the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Focusing on three major racial labels, it sheds light on the ways in which Chinese diasporic subjects produce a racialized vocabulary related to racism and practice racial formations in transnational contexts. Their localised racial ideology reflects their predicament of being simultaneously both socially vulnerable and economically privileged. It paradoxically both reproduces and negotiates the preexisting Italian racial hierarchy that also reflects globally circulating racial hierarchies, while intersecting with their own understandings of civility and modernity. The perspectives of Chinese migrants who, themselves subject to racialisation, also racialise others reveal a contested bottom-up narrative of racial formation in a European society experiencing rapid demographic change. This ethnographic study thus challenges the existing narratives of racialisation and immigration beyond Eurocentric frameworks.

The Tiger (in)Flu(ence): Posthuman, Abject Bodies, ‘Speculated’ Femininities and Diasporic Subjectivities

Written by Larissa Lai, a Chinese-Canadian writer who has always alchemized her production with Chinese mythology, The Tiger Flu (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018) is a polyphonic novel because of the plurality of interpretative acts it evokes, and because of its interweaving of different literary frames and genres. In the first part of this essay, I analyse how Lai exploits this complex intertwining of genres to address a sense of diasporic belonging. In the second part, I explore how this approach leads to moving beyond normative and totalizing definitions. Lai sets up a multifaceted feminine space where issues about the rethinking of the category of woman, sisterhood and a broader conception of the community can be raised. I argue that Lai’s representation of non-normative female bodies becomes functional in revealing how abject bodies can challenge the hegemonic meaning of gender and identity. In a critical reading that cannot be divorced from a (trans-)Canadian context, I conclude by exploring how Lai guides her readers on an intimate journey across increasingly fluid borders and an unsolved (and unsolvable) vision of the future.

Transpacific Exodus: Japanese American Migrants in Japan through the 1950s

Arguing for a reconceptualization of Asian American history that utilizes a transpacific framework, this important and welcome study expands our understanding of Japanese American history by tracing the migration of young U.S.-born Nisei to Japan and its colonial empire during the decades prior to the Second World War. Michael R. Jin argues that this migration, in which as many as one in four Nisei participated, should be regarded not as a return to Japan but as a separate wave of migration originating in the United States. The resulting diaspora, as such, was a U.S. and not a Japanese diaspora. In so arguing, Jin explains, he “writ[es] against the predominant orientation of ‘diaspora’ as fixated on diasporic subjects belonging to a timeless, ethnicized, and often romanticized ancestral home,” in this case, Japan (5). Key among those who comprised this “highly mobile transpacific diaspora” were Nisei born in the United States who were sent to Japan as children to be educated and were known as Kibei (written with characters representing “return” and “America”) on their return to the United States (4). Also among those Jin includes are children who accompanied immigrant parents who decided to return to Japan, sometimes in response to the alien land laws adopted by many western states by the 1920s, as well as older Nisei who chose to emigrate to Japan or other parts of an expanding Japanese empire as young adults in search of opportunities denied them in the country of their birth on grounds of race, only to be confronted by “a world with its own complex racial ideology and hierarchy” (9).

Belonging beyond Borders: Japanese Brazilian Stories of Diasporic Return without a “Homecoming”

While some diasporic subjects may believe that they hold an “eternal” connection with their homeland, Arai Chisato and Tsuchida Machie question this presumption through their stories of postwar Japanese immigrant women in Brazil who return to Japan in the 1970s and find that it no longer feels like “home.” In this article, I bring Arai’s short story “Homecoming” (1974) and Tsuchida’s autobiographical memoir “I Cannot Sing the National Anthem” (2007) into conversation to critique the discursive processes that construct dominant national and diasporic identities through the exclusion of raced, classed, gendered, and sexualized “others.” I particularly consider how the notions of “home” and “family” used as models for community formation facilitate this exclusion, and I reconsider ways of belonging beyond national and diasporic borders.

Spilling the Tea: Aunty Discipline and the Queer Diasporic Child in D’Lo’s To T, or Not To T?

This article examines To T, or Not To T?, a solo play by D’Lo, a queer transmasculine Sri Lankan Tamil American performance artist and comedian. Considering the Super Aunty character, I examine how aunties orient diasporic life towards multiple modes of belonging and exclusion. Specifically, I explore how Aunty Discipline directed toward the queer diasporic child is vital in creating future hetero-reproductive diasporic subjects, then consider the intimacies of fictive kinship through the term ‘fam’. The queer diasporic body is a text on which others enact diasporic meanings, but D’Lo uses that very queer body to actively reimagine and re-image family and community, thereby infusing these spaces with his own queer ontologies and epistemologies.

From Divided to Diasporic: Re-envisioning Italian American Texts through Transformative Translingual Practices

From Divided to Diasporic: Re-envisioning Italian American Texts through Transformative Translingual Practices

Building a Culture of Life: A Conversation on Abolition, Feminism, and Asian American Politics

Abstract: This dialogue brings together feminists with decades of experience in abolitionist work to discuss what it means to take up abolition feminisms within Asian American Studies today. Margo Okazawa-Rey dialogues with Priya Kandaswamy and Setsu Shigematsu about who we need to become to create a “culture of life” and what it means to embody and practice abolitionist values in the present-continuous. Together we discuss the tensions between Asian American as an identity and abolition as a politics that seeks to dismantle America. While addressing the limits of identity politics, we ask about how Asian diasporic subjects are situated within systems of anti-Black state violence and interrogate our own relationship to the nation-state. Based on our experiences in different movement spaces, we suggest some ways to reimagine and reconceptualize how we relate to each other and what might be useful and/or dangerous theoretical frameworks that have emerged from Asian American Studies for our praxis of abolition feminism.

Cultural Expectations and Gendered Roles: Identity Formations in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland

Individual identities are not only a summation of one’s unique choices and experiences, but are also influenced by the culture, society and politics of the place in which individuals feel a sense of belonging or of the place where, on the contrary, they experience a disruption of the self. For a diasporic subject, the experiences in the home country and the country to which they’ve relocated create a binary identitary self, one that develops in the space that opens between the familiar feelings of belonging and the newfound sense of alienation. Within that space the immigrant resides in a transnational and global context that does not fully incorporate either place. Gauri, the protagonist in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, attempts to forsake her Indianness, but her new experiences and her determination to do away with the cultural signifiers of her traditional Indian upbringing provoke a synthesis, one that integrates fragments of the new, envisioned identity with remnants of a past identity that is very much alive in her unconscious. By analysing these fragments and remnants, the paper identifies patriarchy, sexuality, sexism, racism and conflicting ideas of motherhood and family as factors being negotiated by the protagonist as she contrives frames of reference for her new identity.

Diasporic Subjects in Multicultural World in Mukharjee's Stories

The present paper argues that globalization has created diasporas subjects among immigrants communities as they go through a number of adjustment in the host culture. As recorded by Bharati Mukherjee in her story collection Middleman and Other Stories the protagonists have to constantly adopt and adapt new forms of hybridity in the US. With an advent of globalization, people started migrating into first world in search of better opportunities and social security, but the cultural differences always played a role in determining their identities. In other words, globalization opened the space for multiculturalism, and multiculturalism, in turn, bore diasporic subjects. This immigrants thus lived with an identity that they can’t claim to be their own. They always struggle, constantly adopting and adapting a newer and newer form of identity negotiated heavily in a cross cultural setting.

The Experience of Return in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah: Expanding the Category of the “Cosmopolitan Stranger”

ABSTRACT This article examines Ifemelu’s experience of return in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah in order to expand upon Esperança Bielsa’s contention that the “cosmopolitan stranger” is also embodied by certain postcolonial diasporic subjects. Bielsa refers specifically to those returnees who become agents in the transformation of their societies of origin. Under this premise, the literary analysis focuses first on Ifemelu’s emotional attitude toward a homecoming while she is in diaspora, in the US, and then moves on to explore her experience of dislocation upon return in Lagos. This leads to the identification of the figure of the stranger as returnee. The final part of the analysis examines Ifemelu’s process of readjustment in the place of origin, paying attention to her critical ways of thinking and acting as, more accurately, a cosmopolitan stranger. This article underlines, however, a major shortcoming of Bielsa’s discussion in light of studies of nostalgia – the lack of consideration of the future-oriented dimension of this emotion. Ifemelu’s homecoming shows that a feeling of nostalgia in the context of migration may result in a decision to return home as a defensive reaction to the experience of racialization, which in turn may be put to work toward cosmopolitan social change in the homeland.

Virtual Connectivity through Creativity:

This article involves a popular Facebook group named Pencil that features creative productions from Bangladeshi people from around the world. While its basic focus is on writing, it also creates room for audio-visual productions such as songs, poetry recitation, dance, and photography. Among the contributors, a modest number is from diasporic Bangladeshi women who represent Bangladeshi culture through their artistic endeavors. The purpose of this research is to study how diasporic Bangladeshi women writers make use of the virtual platform of Pencil to express their kinship to Bangladeshi culture, as well as to carve an identity to endorse it. The prevalent discussion here is theoretical with a limited close reading of texts. While discussing the process of identity formation, this research refers to Stuart Hall’s concept of “cultural identity” to create its theoretical background. Another predominant idea of the research is the “cyberspace” provided by the Internet to diasporic subjects. The final concept is “digital diaspora” which is integral to the study of cyberspace and diaspora. Considering the debate on the ambiguous role of cyberspaces in women’s emancipation, this article argues in favor of cyberspaces by perceiving that the virtual platform promotes women’s resourcefulness.

Toward De-exceptionalizing Migration: Intra-African Diasporic Writing in South Africa

Migration has never before occupied such a prominent place in African cultural production as it does today. Yet, notwithstanding an increasing focus on intra-African migration in the social sciences, literary migration scholarship has largely focused on African migration to the West, as the growing body of studies on outward-oriented Afropolitan migration novels indicates. In this paper, I examine how the Afropolitan consciousness that structures South-North migration novels is reframed in literature of continental migration and mobility in post-Marikana South Africa. While the themes of xenophobia and migration have emerged as central preoccupations in South African literature from the early 2000s onward, there has been a shift in literary production more recently with the publication of a range of works by African diasporic writers in South Africa. Drawing on Ekow Duker's Yellowbone (2019), Rémy Ngamije's The Eternal Audience of One (2019), and Sue Nyathi's The Gold Diggers (2018), I argue that these texts interrogate South Africa's complex relationship to "Africanness" and forge new pathways for continental dialogue that allow us to resituate South African-based writing within larger debates in contemporary African literary studies. This category of intra-African diasporic fiction calls into question simplifying binaries of outward, Western-oriented African writing and locally produced popular, yet internationally disregarded, texts (Harris). Rather, it scrutinizes the idea of "Africa" in global literary circuits from the position of intra-African diasporic subjectivities. Drawing attention to the long history of intra-African mobilities, the cross-continental thrust in many of these works also productively speaks to recent scholarly efforts to reframe migration studies in ways that insist on the de-exceptionalization of migration and the breakdown of binary formulations of migrant and non-migrant identities.

Lacking Home: Lacan Reads Diaspora1

ABSTRACT Diasporic dislocations entail the loss of a real, imaginary or mythologized home – a stand-in for various losses in displacement – which causes mutations in diasporic subjectivities, necessitating their re-subjectivation. Drawing upon Jacques Lacan’s concept of lack, this article posits that home is a constitutive lack of diaspora – an extension of the primally lost object of desire – which is installed via the subjectivation process entailing Lacan’s three Oedipal ‘moments of crisis’ namely frustration, privation and castration. Contrary to the conventional understanding of loss of home as a pathological illness, the article further argues that this lack functions as a source of creativity, enabling diaspora to create various day-to-day cultural and social forms leading to their painful, yet rewarding acculturation in the hostland. This understanding of home as creative lack justifies the nature of diasporic anxieties as manifestations of an ontological void which are, impossible to cure, but viable to manage.

Diasporic returns and queer kinship networks in contemporary French and Maghrebi francophone cinema

Recent portrayals of trans-Mediterranean mobility within French and Maghrebi francophone queer cinema have showcased the return of immigrant and second-generation queer men of Maghrebi origin to their diasporic homeland in North Africa. Focusing on two films from this corpus – Rémi Lange’s 2001 Tarik El Hob (The Road to Love) and Mehdi Ben Attia’s 2009 Le fil (The String) — this article traces the ways in which ethnic queer subjects have fostered alternative genealogies of kinship and intimacy in relation to the French nation state and the Maghrebi heteronormative family. It demonstrates how such a reconceptualization of kinship ties involves the renegotiation of domesticity for queer Maghrebi immigrant and diasporic subjects against the backdrop of institutional kinship structures such as civil unions and same-sex marriage in contemporary France.

Toward a Formal Language of Resonance: Diaspora and Place in the Video Works of Jin-me Yoon

Critically reflecting upon immigrant relations with place in North American and East Asian contexts, Jin-me Yoon’s lens-based art investigates the landscape as a site of diasporic emplacement. In her video works the artist uses a number of editing techniques as well as abstract camera work to interrelate sites in Canada and Korea, making visible the unseen impacts of colonialism, militarism, war, and tourism on the production of Asian diasporic subjectivities. This article examines the formal language the artist produces across three videos: Other Hauntings (2016), Long View (2017), and Living Time (2019), arguing that they function through resonance. I conceptualize how resonance operates visually, examining its potential to counter the representative, extractive logic of lens-based media and positing its use in Asian diasporic art.

Emigrate out of National Borders, Immigrate into Diasporic Spaces

Abstract The article explores the ways in which Vietnamese international doctoral students participated in and influenced social spaces to produce diasporic subjectivity among Vietnamese diasporic communities in the study countries, and how this diasporic subjectivity was produced in what I term ‘diasporised moments’. Guided by theory of space, I look at how Vietnamese doctoral students negotiated their ‘membership’ of those communities, how their national identity was challenged and contested, and how their nostalgia was triggered against the backdrop of their transnational life, leading to their diasporic subjectivity in the making. I argue that the theoretical bearings of space allow us to expand our understanding of the integration of international students into life on foreign soil beyond the common assumption of integration into the local culture only. I further argue that international students do not purely experience homesickness but actually produce diasporic subjectivity in their temporary migration for academic pursuits.

GIVING BACK: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving by L. Joyce Zapanta Mariano

Reviewed by: GIVING BACK: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving by L. Joyce Zapanta Mariano Josen Masangkay Diaz GIVING BACK: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving. By L. Joyce Zapanta Mariano. Temple University Press. 2021. While the enduring influence of the expatriate (or balikbayan) on the Philippine nation and its economy has been a long-studied phenomenon within Filipino, Filipino American, and Philippine studies, L. Joyce Zapanta Mariano offers a new critical way to explore questions about diasporic practices as they lie within the myriad structures of the global economy. Mariano’s monograph, Giving Back: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving, theorizes the politics of giving as a mode for studying the complexities of Filipino American belonging to the homeland and outside of it, shifting U.S.-Philippine relations, and circuits of development under the regimes of globalization. Mariano centers the practice of “giving back” as a key feature of Filipino American diasporic communities through which diasporic subjects send remittances to the home-land as both obligation and responsibility. Challenging the unidirectional movement of this immigrant narrative, however, the concept “diaspora giving” reconceptualizes giving back as a set of processes that attempt to stabilize homeland and Filipinoness in the name of diaspora. For Mariano, both “diaspora” and “giving” are sites of multiplicity that hold several different practices, identities, and arrangements that underscore the transnationality of Filipino American attachment to the homeland. Diaspora giving identifies Filipino Americans as development actors often recruited to participate in the neoliberalizing economy of the Philippine development state. Moving away from discourses that highlight “love” of homeland as the foundation of the remittance economy, the book disrupts the linearity of this narrative to argue that both migration and distance are themselves transnational spaces that cultivate ideas about connection and responsibility. To this end, Mariano skillfully points to the ways that Filipinoness is never a stable entity, and the interrogation of giving practices offers insight into the ways that these acts regulate and produce alternative Filipino American diasporic formations, what Mariano calls the resubjectification of Filipino Americans’ roles for national development under globalization. Giving Back relies not upon the “policy-oriented evaluations” that measure the impact of remittances on homeland states (13). Instead, its archive follows the paths of resubjectification, using ethnography and textual analysis to trace the complexities of charity and philanthropy, which are critical operations for international and global development. Mariano historicizes charity as a colonial discourse that “brings abstract citizens together into [End Page 73] nations, constructing home or the domestic in relation to foreign spaces populated by the colonial other” (13). The four chapters of the book conceive of different forms of diaspora giving, turning not only to individual remittances but also to transnational anticolonial activism. Where the Filipino American immigrant is often configured as distinct from the Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) based on the terms of citizenship and settlement, the first chapter traces the ways that these figures are mutually constituted by a political economy structured by labor migration and state development. Mariano argues that although Filipino American diasporic subjects might not see themselves as connected to other diasporic Filipino workers, both share histories and experiences of mobility and return and have been positioned to serve as key actors for national development. Mariano’s work to disrupt the logics of Filipino American choice and OFW duty is imperative. It reveals that both choice and duty are embedded within the structure of feeling of neoliberalism. In Chapter 2, Mariano studies writer and organizer Ninotchka Rosca’s activism to provide examples of counterhegemonic giving that does not subscribe to the logics of U.S. imperialism and global capital. In doing so, Mariano theorizes homeland “disorientation” as an analytic for locating moments of disruption within the progressive pathways of state development. Disorientation interrupts the singular orientations that Filipino Americans have toward homeland. The third chapter follows Philippine Development Foundation (PhilDev), a transnational nonprofit organization, as a model of philanthropy that frames itself as the singular vehicle for addressing suffering and precarity in the Philippines, especially in its collaboration with the Philippine state. Corporate social responsibility through PhilDev and earlier Ayala foundations regulates giving by imagining itself as “doing good...

Writing against colonialism in South African memoir

ABSTRACT Recent years have seen calls for a reorientation towards anticolonial perspectives and for further decolonization in many formerly colonized countries. Meanwhile, postcolonial studies have been criticized for being too western-oriented and too focused on diasporic subjects. This article addresses these critiques through an examination of anticolonial engagement in three South African memoirs: Reclaiming Home by Lesego Malepe, Memoirs of a Born Free by Malaika Wa Azania, and Born in Chains by Clinton Chauke. The texts exemplify an anticolonial approach in several contexts with regard to South Africa’s apartheid past and the nation’s still unequal present. The country has struggled to provide its citizens with educational and economic freedoms and equal prospects. Through their anticolonial positioning, the memoirs attest to the need for more nuanced views of the past and its effects in present-day South Africa. The rhetoric employed is eventually more geared towards contemporary challenges than struggles of the past.

Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora

What does studying visual and print representations of Mexican masculinity in flux/transit do for scholars of Bracero-era and twentieth-century Mexican and US pasts? Historians such as Deborah Cohen, Lori Flores, and Mireya Loza have reshaped our understanding of the lives of Braceros, bringing gendered explorations to some of the millions of Mexican men who arrived to the United States after the Second World War for labor. Nicole Guidotti-Hernández's Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora continues those conversations, injecting a critical examination of intimacy, belonging, and masculinity through photographs and private archives. Moreover, the author inserts the necessary theme of diaspora into her study and states that scholars must consider “how the interstitial experience of being between nations as diasporic subjects created opportunities for new manifestations of gender” (p. 21).This “feminist cultural transnational history” utilizes archives in Washington, DC, the US Southwest, and Mexico to consider how Mexican men—some migrants and others political exiles—grappled with race and gender over the course of the twentieth century (p. 4). What makes this analysis singular is how the author seeks to illuminate gender transformations, contending that scholars must reflect upon the gender of Mexican men through “transnational masculine intimacies,” which highlight the role of emotional bonds between these men and their transnational kin networks (p. 5). Within two sections and fourteen chapters, Guidotti-Hernández's book reshapes our understandings of Mexican gender and race, which scholars in women, gender, and sexuality studies and American studies will want to read.If cultural historian Gail Bederman asks scholars to consider manhood as a gender script that changes in relation to new experiences, Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora shows us how gender and masculinities need to be studied not just in context, but over space and time. Furthermore, Guidotti-Hernández maintains that scholars must attend to how Mexican men's relation to gender was precarious, and that “fragility was a function of the intimacies that” migrant men forged to help make sense of their racial, social, and political statuses in the United States. (p. 2). If the author contends that scholars must study gender and intimacy in both space and time, then the organization of the book must include different objects of study over time in different locales, which it does. The first half of the monograph traces cultural objects regarding the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) and Enrique Flores Magón, while the second section explores configurations of emotion through examining photographs at Leonard Nadel's Bracero archive at the Smithsonian (p. 5).My favorite part of Guidotti-Hernández's second monograph is her study of queerness and alienation in the photographs of Braceros within the Leonard Nadel Collection. Through a series of pictures taken of faceless Braceros picking lettuce in Salinas, Guidotti-Hernández contemplates the relation between Mexican migrants and the food crops they cultivate in a space where Braceros are removed transnationally from family. The author asks the reader to consider the nuance of the relationships between Mexican migrant men. While she determines that Braceros may not have had social and political overlap with the Anglo gay domesticity of the US- or Mexico-based middle-class and upper-class homophile movement, one thing was certain: “they were parallel experiences that idealized friendship and intimacy among and between men” (p. 223). I think this is important, as further studies of Braceros should consider how race, gender, and sexuality shaped these homosocial spaces.Guidotti-Hernández's visual analysis of the Nadel Collection is masterful. Yet, although I appreciated her insertion of queer possibilities to help the reader rethink masculinities in diaspora, I also wanted to learn more about the histories of the men in the photographs. Flores's Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement utilizes not just photography, but also Monterey County newspaper and print media stories that piece together how Braceros encountered racial discrimination, worker exploitation, and everyday life in central California. I think that paring both monographs would demonstrate how a critical investigation of how Bracero men forged intimacy and friendship alongside how photographers and the state viewed Braceros.

African Pentecostalism in India: Being Born Again in the Diaspora


 
 
 Over the past four decades, since the 1960s, there has been a steady flow of Africans moving to India for short-term activities: education, medical treatment and trade. There is a visible African diaspora in many localities in India. This diaspora is a layered one, consisting of diverse groups of people with different degrees of attachment to India: Africans settled in India with kinship ties, mobile professionals and students, and itinerant traders. Its composition and strength are in a constant flux. This paper will explore how debates and rituals in primarily Pentecostal- Charismatic churches – which have emerged as the focal point of community interaction for contemporary Africans in India – become crucial in shaping, reconfiguring and showcasing the markers of an imagined Africanness. Complex Pan-African diasporic subjectivities are invented, performed, and transmitted (from older residents to new arrivals), in conversation with prejudices and expectations of the host culture. These subjectivities are informed by educational and economic aspirations; visions of moral, personal, and corporate African progress, embedded in memoryscapes of an (Afro) future, articulated through the meta-language of African Pentecostalism.