Life In Diaspora Research Articles

Small town markets and crowded buses: Later‐generation Australian–Hungarian ‘diaspora backpackers’ narrate their journey to Hungary

AbstractIn this article, I examine the ‘homecoming’ experiences of young second‐ and third‐generation Australian‐Hungarians. The aim of the paper is to challenge the compartmentalisation of tourism and migration studies by exploring how these two phenomena intertwine, merge, and influence one another in multiple and fluid ways. Specifically, I attempt to merge the two disciplines by analysing the meta‐narratives that have influenced Australian‐Hungarian youngsters' experiences in Hungary. In particular, I argue that, alongside images internalised in the diaspora, interlocutors heavily rely on a popular Western backpacker discourse. I demonstrate the ways in which these two meta‐narratives are in conflict while at the same time closely inter‐related. Specifically, I look at the ways in which the notion of authenticity and the idea of ‘traveller hierarchy’ are borrowed from backpacker discourse, and through them diasporic themes are targeted and deconstructed. I refer to these youngsters as ‘diaspora backpackers’ to indicate that their journeys are influenced by both diaspora life and contemporary youth culture.

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.

The Lambi Model: Haiti, Temporality, and a Holistic Methodology

Abstract: With Haiti at its helm, this article reimagines the conch shell as a methodology of resistance and renewal. The Lambi model is presented to interpret temporal pathways and ancestral practices within African Diaspora lives. Time and space serve as axes of intersection, connecting and delineating points of departure surrounding race, space, power, and freedom. A framework is established through the works of three Haitian writers and activists: Jemima Pierre, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and Edwidge Danticat. Grounded in an Antillean feminist lens, this formulation of Diaspora identity carries the cadence of a fluid and holistic orientation with ontological, epistemological, and pedagogical implications.

RAG HEAD, white supremacy, and violence: Dramatic reflections on a decade after the Oak Creek gurdwara shootings

ABSTRACT This essay examines how five playwrights from the global Sikh diaspora use theater to resist various forms of violence. My analysis of their plays shows how the playwrights engage with the messiness of diaspora lives, lives in which hate and state violence, domestic violence, the violence of [ongoing] colonialism, and intergenerational trauma are faced head-on -- including for the audiences of the plays and the perpetrators of violence. Through the plays, I present analyses on how experiences with violence structure our lives and on how the Sikh idea of sarbat da bhala provides a transformative and liberatory justice framework.

DOUBLENESS IDENTITY OF DIASPORA IN RANDA JARRAR’S HIM, ME, MUHAMMAD ALI

This study was purposed to reveal doubleness of cultural identity experienced by diaspora individuals in a short story written by Randa Jarrar, entitled Him, Me, Muhammad Ali. This story captured a life of diaspora who was not easy for a completely different culture between the homeland and the hostland. Jarrar depicted how being a Muslim living in a western country could be totally a mess for her cultural identity. To conduct this study, the method used was qualitative descriptive by collecting the data through reading the novels. Then, the certain quotations that relates to diaspora were analyzed by cultural identity and diaspora concept from Stuart Hall. This diaspora term refers to the character who owns two or more different culture in his life. The result of the analysis framed that being a diaspora living in a country with a completely different culture is complicated, especially to define the diaspora individual’s cultural of identity. The diaspora character was in the state of doubleness, which they could not completely belong to one culture. The character has culture in between his homeland (Muslim culture) and hostland (American culture). However, Jarrar depicts that there was a tendency for a culture to be more dominant than the other one.

Black Geospatial Inquiry and Aesthetic Praxis: Toward a Theory and Method

A growing and influential cohort of Black scholar–creatives are choosing to think, theorize, aesthetically practice, and articulate blackness (Black being and living) in excess of a settled Western racial logic (nonbeing) that produced it. I set forth to advance a paradigm of Black study for thinking and theorizing the intersections of Black livingness and its inherent fugitivity within and beyond chattel enslavement. By expanding on the concepts of Black compositional thought and wake work, I illuminate an assembly of metaphors and materialities, working collectively to articulate the overall, ongoing condition and circumstance of Black life as a predictable and constitutive aspect of existing in the shadows of antiblack violence. Juxtaposing Torkwase Dyson’s aesthetic practice in concert with Christina Sharpe’s theorization of reading metaphors of Black life in diaspora (the wake, the ship, the hold, the weather), I expose how creative production and Black consciousness serve as tools for refusing “death” and offer possibilities for living.

A Pilgrim People: No Peace Theology without Peace Ecclesiology

Deep questions of identity are always at play in war and peacemaking, sometimes hidden yet always decisive. Thus, for Christians, peace activism needs peace theology and, indeed, peace theology needs peace ecclesiology. Efforts to transcend classic debates between just war theory and Christian pacifism by developing a just peace ethic will falter if they fail to address more basic questions of how Christians are to sustain a primary loyalty to Jesus Christ in relationship to other identities of family, tribe, nation, and global citizen. Attention to the biblical trajectory of Abrahamic community, the patristic embrace of life in exile, and Vatican II calls for the Church to be the “sacrament of human unity” by recognizing itself as a “pilgrim people” suggests that the Catholic Church can truly be a “peace church” only if it embraces life in diaspora.

Future face of Christianity

The author of the article reflects on the future of the Christianity. Its features will include the disappearance, at least partially, of the existing forms and the appearance of its new versions. The purpose of the analyses, which consist of two main parts, is to show, above all, the situation of the Christianity in contemporary European culture – marked by an aversion to it, depriving it of its supernaturality, treating it functionally and denying it the right to be in possession of the truth. Then it will be emphasized that religion will survive by being an inalienable element of the structure of human being and a response to human existential problems, and attention will be paid to the four basic forms of future Christianity (reduction to ethics, pantheistic versions, transformation into spirituality or life in diaspora).

International marketing strategy of emerging market firms: the case of Bangladesh

PurposeThis study aims to increase understanding of factors influencing the international marketing (IM) strategy of products from emerging markets (EMs) to international markets.Design/methodology/approachThis study conducted case studies by collecting qualitative data through semistructured interviews with respondents from four food product companies in Bangladesh.FindingsThis study finds that the firms employ local Bangladeshi people who are knowledgeable in the company culture. They strategically focus on countries where the Bangladeshi diaspora lives and initially target them, approaching natives later. They adapt and customize products to the importers’ requirements to make them visible and increase understanding between product providers and local customers. The findings show that EM firms encounter a mentality that poor countries produce poor quality products; this mindset makes the internationalization of their business difficult.Research limitations/implicationsThis research contributes to international product marketing of EM firms by constructing a model of a modern people-oriented marketing strategy for food products. This study contributes to literature on culture by illustrating that the cultural dimensions of collectivism and uncertainty avoidance enhance the development of networks and trust and impact marketing strategy.Originality/valueThis study theorizes the importance of context and an innovation-driven modern people-oriented IM strategy that adapts to customers’ preferences for food products and emphasizes the contribution of diaspora. This research reveals that Bangladeshi firms face challenges both because customers link the country and the companies to low-quality products and because governmental regulations prevent them from establishing a local presence in other countries. This study analyzes challenges EM firms face in the process of IM and the factors affecting Bangladesh in particular.

‘I walk in language circles’: transnational-translocal entanglements of a refugee-background Somali-Bantu’s multilingual identity

ABSTRACT This narrative case study examines the multilingual practice and identity of Haben, a refugee-background Somali-Bantu in a larger one-year (2019-2020) ethnography with refugee arrivals in coping with new linguistic and cultural environment in a northeastern U.S. city. Framed by the entangled transnational-translocal approach to multilinguals, languages, and identities, this study finds Haben’s African languages and English were acquired and used as resources for survival and thrival and weaponized against bullying and discrimination in his early and later life in diaspora. Haben’s multilingual identity was (re)produced by the sociocultural and linguistic flows across national boundaries and his responses to local needs. This study indicates multilingual identity as a discursive spatio-temporal entanglement that blurs the boundaries between transnational-translocal, past-present, human-nonhuman. This study challenges deficit discourse that perceives immigrant multilingualism as a deficit.

Feeling against the plot: an African diaspora feminist politics of happiness

ABSTRACT This essay maps the uneasy terrains of Black feminist happiness in the diaspora as a complex reckoning with radical political and social theories of subject formation Refusing analytics that prioritize loss, injury, lack, stasis, and trauma as the defining features of the Black diaspora, African diaspora feminist happiness displaces whiteness and the West as its referents in favour of more difficult intimacies across Black geographies that imagine fleeting alliances, inevitable inequity, and tension across diaspora communities rather than similarity or belonging. This essay traces texts, often in popular genres, that plot intimacies that acknowledge legacies of injury but seek out other roots and routes to define the present and futures of Black feminine subjects, futures often knowingly in tension with the given materiality and resources of diaspora life, and in tension with the dominant modes of critique hewing toward death and pessimism in the field of Black diaspora studies. Through the global self-help genre, the Afropolitan literary novel, African young adult fiction, and sensational Kenyan LGBTQ cinema, this article traces the generic plots of African diaspora feminist happiness to find neither neoliberal hailed subjects nor subversive resistance. If in the masculine diaspora imagination, coming together via racial and political identity equals a new sense of community, the feminist genealogies that this essay traces through diaspora happiness are uncomfortable and deeply self-conscious about their traffic in capital and middle-class resources and desire. The texts that I look to do not attempt to erase, flatten, or romanticize difference into the poles of resistance and complicity, but instead define diaspora feminist happiness through tension and temporariness. These texts use diaspora pathways as structures of feeling conducive and conductive of happiness even as they do not engage the romance of racial, political, or even ethical community to find them.

Australian Identity Politics Playing Tricks for Young South Sudanese Australians

ABSTRACT This article explores the key themes of African diaspora life for young people in Australia and their interplay with identity politics, primarily focusing on young South Sudanese Australians. This is captured through their participation in youth participatory action research (YPAR) facilitated by a small non-profit, Footprints. The notion of ‘identity politics playing tricks’ was derived from observing Footprints YPAR projects as South Sudanese Australian (SSA) Hip Hop artists discern their diaspora identities in the backdrop of a nation that often displays a political agenda about their presence. Alternatively, young people re-frame and assert their identity formation through their Blackness and pride in culture and establish themselves as social agents in the world. Utilising ‘critical race theories’ through the lens of ‘urban youth culture’, this article demonstrates how participants examine their multifaceted experiences whilst navigating cultural codes; how they negotiate and articulate their own identities in challenging circumstances and seeks to understand communities’ views on diaspora, social, national and cultural identities’ in a diverse environment. It addressed the themes of the politics of ‘reclaiming identity’. Findings point to the necessity to further explore racialisation discourses in localised contexts whilst prioritising the self-articulation of identities reviewing how young people enact agency and resilience.

Human Rights and Christian Values in a Digital Society. Selected Issues

The subject of this study is the analysis of the contact between Christian values and human rights or the concept of human rights in the context of the dynamic development of IT technology and the shaping of not only global but digital society. The new organization of society is characterized by a multiplicity of value systems which interpenetrate each other. In the area of Western culture, the human rights system occupies a central place, which has become a kind of new decalogue. The aim of this study is an attempt to define the place of traditional Christian values in a digital society. The research hypothesis was the statement that Christian values are not only timeless, but also universal and perfectly fit into the functioning of the digital society. The study uses the method of legal and dogmatic analysis of legal provisions and judgments as well as the analysis of cases of conflicts between Christian values and human rights. In my conclusions, I state that the confrontation of these two systems of values leads to the need to rebuild the organization of Christians. An ideal model may be the diaspora life of people who not only preach but also practice these values.

Her resistance is many: the accented filmmaking practice of Mizgin Müjde Arslan

ABSTRACT This paper aims to understand the “accented” documentary practice of Mizgin Müjde Arslan, a contemporary Kurdish female filmmaker who was born in Turkey but lives in diaspora. I will discuss her filmmaking through the features of accented cinema, developed by Hamid Naficy and furthered by Asuman Suner. These features are multi-perspectivity, liminality, being the subject and the storyteller simultaneously, deconstructing the borders, replacing the history with a new memory, and cyclicity. As Naficy’s model lacks the gender dimension in its imagery of nation, identity and belonging, I will discuss his model from a broader perspective by adapting Suner’s approach, adding the gender dimension into my discussions. For this purpose, I will use the principles of “accented feminism”, a term I develop within the paper and draw the concept of “accented feminist cinema” from.

Polacy za granicą i Polonia we współczesnym świecie a wybory prezydenckie w latach 2000–2015

Due to the complicated history of Poland, many Poles live outside the country. This state was influenced by many processes, such as: economic emigrations, refugees, the effects of deportations carried out by the invaders during World War II and the shift of national borders after it. Polish citizens retain voting rights without any restrictions related to living outside the country and the duration of their stay abroad. These rights are enforced by the country government by creating voting wards in the countries where the Polish diaspora lives.
 In order to answer the question about its real influence on shaping the Polish government, the size of the Polish diaspora should be determined and also how much the Poles abroad are involved in domestic affairs. One of the criteria for analyzing their involvement is their participation in the Polish presidential election (the analysis is based on data from the presidential elections taking place from 2000 to 2015).

Russians in the Work of Blaže Konesky

The Russian culture has prominently been a field of interests of Blaže Koneski. A number of works capture the Russian emigrants, with whom Blaže Koneski was acquainted. Their vivid images complement the representation of the Russian diaspora life and fate. The article introduces three works of the writer. Each of them is dedicated to one Russian: a librarian of the Institute of Slavic Studies in Paris Vladimir Vladimirovich Butchik, an outstanding scientist Vladimir Alekseevich Moshin and one Russian hegumen Vitaly.

Transnational lived citizenship turns local: Covid‐19 and Eritrean and Ethiopian diaspora in Nairobi

AbstractThis paper analyses how migrant community practices of transnational lived citizenship were altered by both, COVID‐19 and the policy response from the Kenyan government. It is based on interviews with members of the Eritrean and Ethiopian diaspora residing in Nairobi. The paper demonstrates how policies introduced because of the pandemic caused migrant communities to lose local and remittance income. More than the loss of material resources, however, they were impacted by the elimination of social spaces that enable diaspora lives. These two dynamics have intensified a trend that may have been present before the pandemic, a local turn of transnational lived citizenship. By focusing on lived experiences and how they have been re‐assessed during the pandemic, the paper argues that transnational lived citizenship is always in flux and can easily become reconfigured as more localized practices. The concept of transnational lived citizenship is demonstrated to be a useful lens for analysing shifting migrant livelihoods and belonging.

Activity of Ukrainian cultural and educational society “Kobzar” (city of Zagreb) in organization of life of diaspora in Croatia

The article examines the public life of Ukrainians in Zagreb (Croatia) using the example of the activities of the Zagreb cultural-educational Society “Kobzar”, which for 50 years has been the main center for organizing diaspora events in the capital of Croatia and beyond. Over the years of its existence, it has conducted and continues to perform different kind of activities, to carry out their mission better – unification and preservation of ukrainian community in the Balkans. The society was created in 1972 and was named Zagreb cultural and educational Society of ruthenians and ukrainians, and in 2012 it changed its name to the Ukrainian cultural and educational Society “Kobzar” of Zagreb. The analysis includes a number of materials from Slavko Burda's own archive, the current chairman of the Society, and an interview with him. The research also used reports and informational materials from diasporic periodicals, in particular from the magazines “Visnyk”, ”Nasha Gazeta”, “Nova Dumka” and others. Active public figures of the Ukrainian diaspora in Zagreb were published in the columns of this periodical: Slavko Burda, Serhiy Bura, K. Tlustenko, O. Filima, O. Maritynyuk and others. 50 years for a public organization is quite an important date to evaluate its activities. Over the years of its existence, UCES “Kobzar” withstood many difficult challenges, starting from organizational changes and ending with the military conditions in which it had to work in. Despite all the difficulties, the Society managed to regularly hold already traditional and start new cultural events. The Society often held such events together with other national (Ukrainian and not only) minorities of the Republic of Croatia. A large share of the Society’s success depended on the activities of its president/chairman. For the last 30 years, UCES “Kobzar”" was headed by Mr. Slavko Burda. Thanks to his energetic nature, and most importantly, his desire to popularize the Ukrainian language, culture, and spirituality, the Society implemented dozens of new projects. Thanks to people like Slavko Burda, Ukrainians abroad remain Ukrainians, and the Ukrainian State has reliable defenders of its interests in the world in them.

The singing Jewish women of Kerala

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the much-underplayed Jewish presence in Kerala for 2000 years and the songs of Jewish women, which preserved the community memories and the narratives of diaspora life. They also contain the emotional and intellectual diversity of hope and exile. Jewish Women’s songs kept alive the stories of the race and the customs handed down from generation to generation.

A.Muthulingam "What time is it there now" - Diaspora life situation and the way it was faced

A.Muthulingam "What time is it there now" - Diaspora life situation and the way it was faced