Modern Diaspora Research Articles

Late Medieval Jewish Identities: Iberia and Beyond; Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern DiasporaCarmen Caballero-Navas and Esperanza Alfonso (eds), Late Medieval Jewish Identities: Iberia and Beyond . Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2010. xii, 306 pp. £55.00. isbn 978 0 230 60833 7.Julia R. Lieberman (ed.), Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora . Brandeis University Press, Waltham, MA,

Late Medieval Jewish Identities: Iberia and Beyond; Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern DiasporaCarmen Caballero-Navas and Esperanza Alfonso (eds), <i>Late Medieval Jewish Identities: Iberia and Beyond</i> . Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2010. xii, 306 pp. £55.00. isbn 978 0 230 60833 7.Julia R. Lieberman (ed.), <i>Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora</i> . Brandeis University Press, Waltham, MA,

“I'm a Greek Kiwi”: Constructing Greekness in Discourse

The article reports on the preliminary findings of a project on the constructions of Greekness in modern diasporas. The discussion draws on data from the self-identified Greek community of Wellington, New Zealand. Interview data, ethnographic diaries, and everyday real-life spoken interactions were collected. The analysis of the data shows that the interactants move away from a “teleology of return” (Clifford, 1997) and reconceptualise the host/minority dimension, highlighting the dynamics and complexities of Greek identity. Special attention is paid in the analysis to the role of institutions, particularly the Greek Orthodox community, in constructing a Greek identity in this context. The standpoint taken considers identity not to be a stable, predefined entity but an ongoing dynamic process that is constantly negotiated and co-constructed between the interactants (De Fina, Schiffrin, & Bamberg, 2006). Identity is not something interactants are or have but rather something they actively do in discourse. The article closes by arguing that diasporas are not static “definable” communities, but dynamic systems shaping and being shaped in the discourse of their self-affiliated members.

Book Review: Global South Asians: Introducing the Modern Diaspora

Book Review: Global South Asians: Introducing the Modern Diaspora

Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present (review)

Reviewed by: Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present Rhonda A. Semple Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present. By Robert Eric Frykenberg. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2008. Pp. xxxii, 564. $165.00 cloth, ISBN 978-0-198-26377-7; $45.00 paperback, ISBN 978-0-199-57583-1.) From the 1990s Robert Eric Frykenberg has increasingly focused his historical attention on Christianity in the Indian subcontinent, and in this latter work in particular Frykenberg's South Asia expertise reflects his upbringing in southern India, his identification as a Christian who believes in the positive influence of that belief system on the subcontinent, and his professional training. The text covers the immense period between the first century to the 1990s with varying depth of coverage. It also introduces the varieties of Christian expression in the subcontinent—Thomas Christians, Roman Catholic, and "evangelical" as each became manifest within the myriad of "Indian" ethnic and socioeconomic identities across the past 2000 years. Frykenberg organizes what is by necessity a complex study in a manner that both follows linear historic developments and that is partially organized around the critical analysis of Christianity within the interface between the subcontinent and its neighbors. After offering contextual arguments on the physical, ethnographic, and religious environment to which Christianity was introduced, he develops his history around the "nodes" of the genesis of the Thomas Tradition—the introduction and development of Pfarangi and Padroado Catholicism of the early-modern era, the developments of evangelicalism from early-modern continental pietism to the broad array of modern evangelicals that traveled alongside modern European empires—and finishes in the postcolonial era focusing on developments in the various Indian Churches and Pentacostalism. Chapter 6, "Evangelical Christians as Missionary Dubashis Conduits of Cross-Cultural Communication," is of particular value in its analysis of Christian practice and belief as embedded in the ethnic identities and historic specifics of a modernizing Europe—traveling alongside and sometimes in opposition to formal imperial economic, political, and military networks—and as re-embedded in and variously [End Page 740] accepted, modified, and rejected in the three communities discussed in this chapter. The analytic approach continues, examining denominational struggles, the contribution made by Christians within formal imperial structures and the field of education, and the criticisms levied by Christian converts against missionaries and Western officials. The mostly southern-focused study is broken by Frykenberg's shift in chapter 14 to a case study of nineteenth-century Adavāsi movements in the northeast of the subcontinent. It might be further developed—as it is, the rather short treatment feels added on to the much more in-depth treatment of the southern half of the subcontinent, which is in no way unsurprising given Frykenberg's expertise. Additionally, the text also could benefit from more detail about Christian communities from the subcontinent in modern diaspora—there are apparently hundreds of Thomas congregations in the United States alone, and that postcolonial development is important. A more serious criticism has to do with any sort of substantive treatment of the gender of imperial structures, faith, and institutional religious practice; the only substantive inclusion of gender focuses on the exceptionalism of Pandita Ramabai, when a more full treatment might have provided a link among structures, identity, and belief throughout the text. The text's notes alone make it an important addition to any library in that they will lead readers to follow up on specific localized studies and perhaps those that allow local voices themselves to be heard, as in the approach taken by editors Todd M. Johnson and Kenneth R. Ross in Atlas of Global Christianity (Edinburgh, 2009). Given all this, Frykenberg's volume provides rich ground, in particular for students of historiography and the Christian study of history; for example, the tension of belief and evidence evident in Frykenberg's rendering of foundation stories of the Thomas Tradition are promising, given additional analysis. Rhonda A. Semple Saint Francis Xavier University Antigonish, Canada Copyright © 2011 The Catholic University of America Press

The Making of Greece Abroad: Continuity and Change in the Modern Diaspora Politics of a “Historical” Irredentist Homeland

This article provides a historical analysis of the relationship between a “historical” diaspora—the Greek diaspora—and its irredentist homeland. In particular, it examines the diaspora policies the modern Greek nation-state adopted since having carried out, at least in its major part, the mission of its territorial unification—namely since 1922. It situates Greece within a broader set of irredentist cases that were involved in the movements for national unity. Moreover, it argues that what makes Greece a particularly interesting case is the attachment of its contemporary diaspora politics to the 19th century's Romantic versions of nationalism.

Creole Glossary: Tārāshankar Bandopādhyāy's HānsuIT Bānker upakathā

Tārāshankar Bandopādhyāy's novel Hānsulī Bānker upakathā ‘The Tale of Hansuli Turn’ (1946–51) straddles the period of independence and partition in India. Its literary staging of the creolized Bengali spoken by a marginal, un‐touchable, semiaboriginal group is both formally innovative and politically imaginative. Tārāshankar disperses the book's glossary throughout its text, and the workings of this glossary embody an unusual perspective on class and caste segregation in modern India. Te novel's historical narrative tells of the disin‐tegration of a rustic, semifeudal Kahar community under the crises of war and modernity in the 1940s. While this history says that proletarianization and loss of idiom are inevitable for such figures of the rural margins, Hānsulī Bānker elaborates a counterfactual possibility. Tis alternative history is not simply a romanticized novelistic preservation of a dying way of life but a minimal imag‐ining of a different line of connection between the realm of subalternity and the public sphere. In its reimagining, Hānsulī Bānker also rethinks and prefigures modern India's other internal partitions, internal diasporas, and emergent political dilemmas and the history of the Bengali novel itself.

‘Amsterdam is Standing on Norway’ Part I: The Alchemy of Capital, Empire and Nature in the Diaspora of Silver, 1545–1648

In the first of two essays in this Journal, I seek to unify the historical geography of early modern ‘European expansion’ (Iberia and Latin America) with the environmental history of the ‘transition to capitalism’ (northwestern Europe). The expansion of Europe's overseas empires and the transitions to capitalism within Europe were differentiated moments within the geographical expansion of commodity production and exchange – what I call the commodity frontier. This essay is developed in two movements. Beginning with a conceptual and methodological recasting of the historical geography of the rise of capitalism, I offer an analytical narrative that follows the early modern diaspora of silver. This account follows the political ecology of silver production and trade from the Andes to Spain in Braudel's ‘second’ sixteenth century (c. 1545–1648). In highlighting the Ibero‐American moment of this process in the present essay, I contend that the spectacular reorganization of Andean space and the progressive dilapidation of Spain's real economy not only signified the rise and demise of a trans‐Atlantic, Iberian ecological regime, but also generated the historically necessary conditions for the unprecedented concentration of accumulation and commodity production in the capitalist North Atlantic in the centuries that followed.

Provincialism and the Modern Diaspora: T. S. Eliot and David Jones

This article considers how T. S. Eliot's promotion of the work of the Anglo-Welsh poet David Jones after the Second World War further involved him in a process of considering the resonances of the local and familiar as operative within the displacements of modernity. This promotion therefore retrospectively prioritized an aspect of Eliot's poetics which had been present, but occluded, all along. Conversely, the article considers how similar resonances in Jones's own work were enhanced by his encounter with Eliot's translation of the Francophone Caribbean poet St-John Perse's Anabase, an encounter which enabled Jones to establish an idiom responsive to the divergent cultural affinities inherent in ‘our situation’.

Retaking the Middle Passage: glimpses of a modern African diaspora in Brazil

Enticed by the various economic, academic and social promises offered by this new ‘metropole’, Africans have begun to form a new diaspora in Brazil, the country with the largest concentration of Afro descendentes outside of Africa. This paper aims to explore, through interviews, the various motivations and experiences of these Africans, as well as to examine the official attitude of the Brazilian authorities and that of the society at large to the new residents of this modern African diaspora.

The reinvention of political community in a transnational setting: framing the Kabyle citizens’ movement

Spontaneous demonstrations of solidarity in response to some significant event in migrants’ homes are a common feature of modern diasporas. Periodic mobilizations around natural disasters or political events activate latent feelings of belonging and challenge notions of deterritorialized identities. Analysis of transnational social movements highlights framing processes as a key tool of analysis, focusing attention on the agency of participants. The Kabyle citizens’ movement provides an important example of a transnational organization that was rapidly established in the absence of, and indeed as a rejection of, institutional forms of political engagement. Attention to framing processes highlights key differences in the ways in which this movement was presented to participants within Algeria and to those in the diaspora. The emphasis on the central importance of territorially based legitimacy gradually redefined the understanding of the Kabyle diaspora among those who identified with it. This ultimately resulted in a decline of agency in the diaspora which was unable to sustain mobilization once the cycle of protest within Algeria came to an end.

Global South Asians: Introducing the Modern Diaspora, by Judith M. Brown

<i>Global South Asians: Introducing the Modern Diaspora</i>, by Judith M. Brown

Global South Asians: introducing the modern diaspora

By the end of the twentieth century some nine million people of South Asian descent had left India, Bangladesh or Pakistan and settled in different parts of the world, forming a diverse and significant modern diaspora. In the early nineteenth century, many left reluctantly to seek economic opportunities which were lacking at home. This is the story of their often painful experiences in the diaspora, how they constructed new social communities overseas and how they maintained connections with the countries and the families they had left behind. It is a story compellingly told by one of the premier historians of modern South Asia, Judith Brown, whose particular knowledge of the diaspora in Britain and South Africa gives her insight as a commentator. This is a book which will have a broad appeal to general readers as well as to students of South Asian and colonial history, migration studies and sociology.

Global South Asians: Introducting the Modern Diaspora – By Judith M. Brown

Global South Asians: Introducting the Modern Diaspora – By Judith M. Brown

Global South Asians: Introducing the Modern Diaspora (New Approaches to Asian History)

Global South Asians: Introducing the Modern Diaspora (New Approaches to Asian History)

Global South Asians: Introducing the Modern Diaspora. New Approaches to Asian History.

Global South Asians: Introducing the Modern Diaspora. New Approaches to Asian History.

Erwählung erinnern: Literatur als Medium jüdischen Selbstverständnisses (review)

Erwahlung erinnern: Literatur als Medium judischen Selbstverstandnisses, by Almuth Hammer: Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004. 229 pp. euro49.60. Hammer's study of literature as a medium of Jewish identity was written at the research center Erinnerungskulturen (Cultures of Memory) at the University of Giessen, where the author serves as coordinator and editor of the series Formen der Erinnerung (Forms of Memory). Her book is divided into two parts of equal length. The first deals with Jewish identity and how enlightenment and secularization led to from Jewish tradition. Acculturation as well as antisemitism undermined Jewish identity. Hammer gives a concise summary of Jewish reactions to this development, from Zionism to the so-called Jewish self-hatred, with an intelligent rebuttal of Sander Gilman's book on the latter. Around 1900, Judaism had become accepted as one of several religious denominations. Jewish identity was less a collective experience than a private one. At the same time, however, renewed interest in this tradition manifested itself in the works of writers and intellectuals. In a close reading of three biblical court stories, Hammer shows Daniel, Esther, and Joseph as forerunners of Jews living in the modern diaspora. They were accepted but also endangered and finally saved, i.e., chosen not only for their own sake but for that of their people. Hammer chose two writers who turned to Jewish tradition in this era. They could not be more different. Joseph Roth (1894-1939) grew up in a Galician shtetl. Else Lasker-Schuler (1869-1945) came from an assimilated family in the Rhineland. Roth produced a great number of stories and novels such as Radetzky March, one of the best in 20th-century German literature, as well as a vast amount of journalistic writing. Lasker-Schuler left a comparatively slender work. She is best known for her poems, among them her Hebrew Ballads. In Der Roth tells the story of Nissen Piczenik, a dealer in corals who lives in a small Russian town. Nissen feels a deep relationship to his corals and an irrepressible desire to go to the ocean where the Leviathan guards them. The story of Nissen's estrangement from Jewish ways, his buying and selling plastic corals, his trip to Odessa where he finally sees the ocean, his renounciation of the false corals, and his death on the high seas on his way to Canada has been read in different ways: as parable of assimilation gone wrong, as example of Roth's pessimism, and as shretl nostalgia. Hammer demonstrates that, in his Roth renews tradition with tradition. Nissen overcomes his dissatisfaction-he follows the law rather automatically-by creating a new tradition. He sees the positive aspects of Leviathan, who is usually depicted as a monster. Nissen believes him to be the guardian of the corals, and he identifies with him. Nissen finally turns from his bad ways and in the end of the story jumps from the ship before it goes down, to be united with the Leviathan. Compared to the lucid and equally simple language of the which has been compared to that of a legend, Lasker-Schuler's story Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona (The Miraculous Rabbi of Barcelona) contains highly poetic passages and others whose language is wracked by pain. …

Kazakhstan's Kin State Diaspora: Settlement Planning and the Oralman Dilemma

the former soviet republics, now independent states, of Central Asia are some of the most fertile environments in the world for research into the trans-state dimensions of ethnicity.1 Having only r...

Gabriel Sheffer and the Diaspora Experience

Over the years, Gabriel Sheffer has written frequently on the significance of diasporas as political agents in the modern world (“New Field”; “Ethnic”; “Whither”; “Nation”). His 1986 article “A New Field of Study: Modern Diasporas in International Politics” describes the triadic network involving homeland, diaspora, and host country as the core of a new field of study; he adds that he is especially interested in analyzing this triad in the modern world (10). In his earlier contributions, he often makes explicit use of the term “modern diaspora” to mark the difference with “classical diaspora.” But, as befits a typical “long-sighted” person, his studies have broadened to include a great variety of diasporic situations in different historical settings.

Modern Diasporas in the Age of Globalization

Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad. By Gabriel Sheffer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 304 pp., $60.00 (ISBN: 0-521-81137-6). The historic upsurge in international migration during the past fifty years has affected communities around the world at both the macro and micro levels. Correspondingly, public opinion and policymakers in the societies that send and receive immigrants have expressed renewed interest in and have given increasing attention to migration-related issues and concerns. In the same vein, a resurgence of scholarship in the field of migration study has occurred. However, despite the numerous hypotheses that have emerged during the last decades to identify the root causes of migration and explore the immigrants' adaptive modalities, no unified grand theory of migration has emerged because of the complexity of the issue. Consequently, the theoretical underpinnings of this branch of the social sciences have remained disparate and divergent. It is, therefore, heartening to see that Gabriel Sheffer, although refraining from offering “normative and prescriptive solutions for problems caused by the presence of ethno-diasporas in host countries” (p. 6), has engaged his talent and expertise to formulate “a more comprehensive theory of current diasporism” (p. xii). In short, Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad seeks to explain migration's various facets and strives to provide a sound basis for public understanding of migration …

The Politics of Re-homing: Asian Diaspora Poetry in Canada

This article examines the changing nature and meanings of home in diaspora, and discusses the complicated re-homing process among various cultural locations. Asian diaspora poetry in Canada represents a paradoxical feeling of both home-sickness and home-crisis, for the movement between multiple locations of cultures suggests a co-belonging dialogue which, by situating diasporans simultaneously inside and outside of a culture, intensifies both the desirability and the impossibility of a given home-place. In modern diaspora, to re-home is not to go home but to undergo a constructive process in which different cultural passages are convoluted to produce new senses of (in)dwelling around the "axis of a mobility."