Plight Of Immigrants Research Articles

The Disillusionment of “Home” in Abla Farhoud’s Au grand soleil cachez vos filles

The Disillusionment of “Home” in Abla Farhoud’s Au grand soleil cachez vos filles Nancy M. Arenberg Born in Lebanon, Abla Farhoud is recognized as a prolific author who, at the young age of five, immigrated to Quebec with her family in the early 1950s. Over the years, she has attracted considerable critical attention as a successful playwright, but is also celebrated for her prose works in which she explores the plight of migrants, often women, who find themselves opposed to traditional cultures and values in Canada.1 Most notably, Farhoud concentrates on a Lebanese woman’s struggle to adapt to life in Montreal in Le Bonheur à la queue glissante (1998), a seminal text that places many of her literary productions within the category of écriture migrante. It is Farhoud’s focus on nomadism, identity, and problematic homecomings that establishes a connection to other migrant writers located in Montreal, such as Dany Laferrière, Régine Robin, Ying Chen, Marie-Célie Agnant, and Émile Ollivier. At a later stage of her career, Farhoud published Toutes celles que j’étais (2015), an autofictional work in which the author’s avatar, Aablè, moves to Montreal with her family as a young girl. But after fourteen years in Quebec, Aablè’s family travels to Lebanon, which sets the stage for the second novel in this projected trilogy. Farhoud’s Au grand soleil cachez vos filles (2017) reprises some key immigrant issues seen in the previous text, mainly the themes of disenfranchisement, nostalgic longing, and exile. In this work, the father of the Abdelnour clan makes the decision to repatriate the family to Lebanon, thus uprooting the children from their comfortable lifestyle in Montreal. As seen in Toutes celles que j’étais, this novel also channels many of Farhoud’s actual experiences, for the narrative is situated in the pre-civil war period of the 1960s. In fact, Farhoud did return to Lebanon at the age of twenty in 1965 but fled to France before the onset of the Six-Day War in 1967. Since the Abdelnour family’s migration emphasizes travelling across significant geographical boundaries, the first part of this article examines the complex representation [End Page 337] of the homeland, a distant mirage on the horizon. At the nexus of the family’s journey is the crisis of radical displacement, as they cross borders to arrive “over there,” but struggle to establish roots to create a sense of “home” in this unfamiliar place. To delve into this intricate notion of returning “home,” Salman Rushdie’s perspective on imaginary homelands is interpolated into the discussion in concert with Edward Said’s notion of imaginative geography. Although the narrative unfolds from the alternating viewpoints of several family members, the main part of this study focuses on the problem of disillusionment, stemming from the difficult experiences of the two older daughters, Ikram and Faïzah. Seen through a feminist lens, the overarching crisis of disillusionment is also manifested on a corporeal level. To clarify, the bodies of the two sisters demonstrate resistance, at times, to cultural traditions and norms in Lebanon. Most importantly, Farhoud concentrates on the two sisters’ struggles to assimilate into the restrictive and foreign customs of Lebanese society, a challenge for independent women accustomed to mobility, freedom, and vast opportunities in Montreal. The concluding part of this article briefly considers Farhoud’s perspective on the plight of immigrants who live in a perpetual state of exile in search of a place to call “home.” According to Sara Ahmed, “home” can be defined as a place with fixed, stable boundaries, signifying the notion of belonging. However, in migrant narratives, this conception is unattainable, as immigrants are perpetually dislocated from a place or a space to call home (see Ahmed, “Home and Away” 339). It is useful to begin this study by looking at the family’s path of migration, a key component of Farhoud’s textual production. At first glance, one of the most striking aspects of the novel is the author’s reversal of the more traditional path, often seen in Québécois migrant narratives, in which immigrants move across borders in search of better lives in the new world...

The Limits to Openness and Tolerance: Theorizing Migration in the Case of Clermont Township, Durban, South Africa

This article discusses the limits to tolerance for diversity and difference in relation to attempts by international migrants to claim a share of the local township economy. Much has been written about the challenge that difference poses to the planning system in terms of ethnicity, religion, class, sexuality and gender among others. Rarely has the focus been on the limits to tolerance on the part of receiving communities. This article makes a contribution to debates about tolerance and diversity in the context of the plight of immigrants who until recently operated shops in the African townships of South Africa. It documents the uneasy relationship between local shop owners who lease their property to foreigners, the community who patronise the shops, and community groups who are enraged by this perceived ‘take-over’. The article draws on media reports, interviews with some shop owners and community groups to explore the fluid and complex nature of their encounter with foreigners. The study found that the interactions and relationships between locals and foreigners are complex and can both be harmonious and discordant, thus calling for reflection on both sides that recognizes commonalities for mutually beneficial co-existence in diversity. It proposes a conceptual framework of migration tolerance, which contributes to our understanding of the relationships between locals and international migrants. The framework can assist in explaining the complex interconnections between the locals and international migrants which manifest in three effects: residence, nostalgic and integrative, and three forms of tolerance: cohesive, restrained and intolerant tolerance. The paper concludes with references to Lefebvre’s (1968) notion of the ‘right to the city’ as inclusive means for transcending these perceived limits towards tolerance and co-existence. Ultimately, a much more nuanced understanding of the complex relationship between foreigners and the community is required, one that contributes to more tolerance and understanding.

How did son jarocho become a music for the immigrant rights movement?

ABSTRACTChicana/o activists and artists in Greater Los Angeles have turned son jarocho, a traditional music genre from southeastern Mexico, into an organizing resource and a means to express the plight of immigrants. Building on a movement that started in Mexico to reestablish the communal celebration of the fandango as the centre of the son jarocho tradition, these Chicana/o activists have reinterpreted fandangos as the enactment of community. They have also repurposed son jarocho and its lyrical content to articulate demands for the rights of undocumented immigrants and other social justice causes. These endeavours take place in community and cultural centres founded and led by a mix of immigrant generations: veterans of the Chicana/o civil rights movement of the 1970s, first generation immigrants and their adult children and grandchildren. These actors embrace fandangos as a metaphor and blueprint for community participation as they write new lyrics to demand justice for immigrants.

Empathy and sinophobia: depicting Chinese migration in Biutiful (Iñárritu, 2010)

Biutiful by Alejandro González Iñárritu (2010) engages issues of immigration and their economies through a broader, decidedly transnational perspective. While this ‘global cinema’ lens has the benefit of putting spectators in contact with the less visible, even unsightly components of immigration and irregular economies, Biutiful, perhaps unwittingly, also reifies stereotyping as well as neoliberal fears of immigration, in particular as it relates to Chinese migrants and their business practices, ultimately creating an image of the immigrant Chinese entrepreneur as a global villain whose moral turpitude plays a large role in the current cycle of labour exploitation. This essay explores the ways in which the film is constructed as part of a cinematic tradition that seeks to connect the spectator with the plight of immigrants who are trapped in their socio-economic conditions while simultaneously hooking up with a certain pre-existing anti-Chinese sentiment – one that is fostered by daily reports of Chinese espionage, economic foul play, human rights abuses and mass contamination.

Cinema and the Republic: Filming on the Margins in Contemporary France

Much was made of the banlieue film in work on French cinema in the early 2000s. The sensationalist La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) attracted considerable attention from politicians, notably Jacques Chirac in his presidential campaign of 1995, and from film scholars, who saw it as a symptom of Chirac's theme of fracture sociale. Film scholars have shifted their focus in recent years, partly because of a growing interest in the films of Maghrebi directors in postcolonial contexts, and partly because of a resurgence of interest in political cinema as exemplified by Martin O'Shaughnessy's The New Face of Political Cinema (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), in which the Dardenne brothers' films are as important as any broad category such as banlieue cinema. Jonathan Ervine's book frequently references O'Shaughnessy's work (as well as Mireille Rosello's essential study, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Stanford University Press, 2001)), and is a useful addition to it. Ervine focuses on fiction and non-fiction films since 1995 that deal with the plight of immigrants and banlieusards. Feature films and documentaries are taken as more or less equivalent in terms of what they can tell us about the nature of contemporary France. The mixture of genres, however, sometimes leads to strange bedfellows, such as in Chapter 2, which analyses Samir Abdallah's La Ballade des sans-papiers (1997) alongside Michael Haneke's Code inconnu (2000). Understandably, there is little work here on formal and aesthetic issues, such as the nature of documentary filmmaking. Among the handful of fiction films, apart from Code inconnu, we find, predictably, La Haine and Ma 6-T va crack-er (Jean-François Richet, 1997), but, less predictably, films that others have explored in some detail from very different perspectives, such as L'Esquive (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2004) and Bled Number One (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2006). The majority of the films discussed are documentaries, many of them relatively unknown (such as On n'est pas des marques de vélos (Jean-Pierre Thorn, 2002)), which makes this book a valuable resource. After the introductory first chapter, four major chapters each deal with a key theme. Chapter 2 rightly foregrounds one of the significant issues of the mid-1990s, the sans-papiers. Chapter 3 focuses on films that defend foreign nationals subject to the double peine. Chapter 4 is concerned with representations of the banlieues. The final chapter, which in many ways is the most interesting, shows how certain films shy away from the sensational in their representations of ordinary life in the banlieues. Ervine references the twists and turns of government policy, such as the Loi Pasqua, which led to the criminalization of hardworking individuals; one particularly striking phrase intentionally echoes Simone de Beauvoir, suggesting that ‘on ne naît pas sans-papiers, on le devient’ (p. 37). Underpinning the whole book is the simple question: what is the relevance of republicanism in an increasingly multicultural society? Ervine points out that the reality of daily life in France has less to do with government rhetoric about republican values and national identity than with participation and an acceptance of hybridity.

Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga

Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga is an artist and professor living in Brooklyn, NY and teaching at The College of New Jersey. His artwork employs a wide range of methods, including the use of software tools such as Macromedia Flash and Adobe Illustrator. But unlike many who work with the same technology, Ricardo elevates content and meaning over technical virtuosity and the prepackaged effects associated with new software releases. Through his artwork, Ricardo effectively asks his audience to reconsider their current positions on sociopolitical events by creatively revealing a critical perspective on issues such as: the history of U.S. involvement in Central America, the plight of immigrants into the United States, and the ill effects of unmitigated globalization.

Ethnopsychiatry: Counselling immigrants in France

The plight of immigrants in France and the United States bear a striking similarity. This article highlights the struggle of immigrants in the French society and the discrimination they face. A French academic discipline calledethnopsychiatry has arisen to help immigrants in France. It appears to be very similar in purpose to cross-cultural counselling, but draws more heavily in practice from traditional healing techniques used in Africa. The pioneeringstrides of ethnopsychiatry in the cross-cultural counselling paradigm are discussed.

American Public Opinion and U.S. Immigration Policy

American attitudes toward both legal and illegal immigration tended to be highly restrictionist during the first half of the twentieth century. Both legislative and executive-branch policy supported this restrictionist outlook up until the 1940s, when a gradual liberalization of immigration policy toward refugees began to occur because of foreign policy requirements and the onset of the cold war. Although only a very small percentage of Americans have advocated increasing the number of immigrants, the percentage who felt that the numbers should be decreased began to decline during the 1950s and 1960s. Liberalization of public opinion and governmental policy occurred. During the past 15 years, however, public opinion and government policy began to diverge. Because of economic and other problems, Americans became more restrictionist toward immigrants, at least when surveyed by public opinion polls. But the government has difficulty implementing a more restrictionist policy for a variety of reasons, among them the strong lobbying efforts of pro-alien activist groups combined with American ambivalence toward the plight of immigrants as individuals.