Translocal Communities Research Articles

Itinerários de esperanca; construção da comunidade translocal

Migration has reshaped social practices, the sense of belonging has been rethought, and the membership is renegotiated and contended; this is why strategies for their sustainability have been generated. The translocal community operates through multilocated relationships that reveal the ways in which migrants are adapting to the new demands of the community. We emphasize the emotional impulse of nostalgia as one of the vehicles of sustainability for the community. The community is redefined and understood in a set of socio-cultural relationships its members generate, and where the locality is not central, but the connection. A new dimension of the social community space is not just the community gathered in a specific place, but also that agreements, commitments, and acknowledgments are exhibited and settled in the cyberspace; this cyberspace gives cohesion and brings a dynamic element to preserve the community, despite the fact that it is even less concrete than the spatial notion of territory. Facebook, YouTube and a blog are the web platforms of the virtual space where "neighbors, compatriots and citizens" (categories of ascription from the migration) get together, where there is a reproduction of social practices (even the most ancient and fundamental ones), to give a new dimension to a translocal, multilocated and ciberlocated community.

Aiming for transitional justice? Diaspora mobilisation for youth and education in Bosnia and Herzegovina

ABSTRACTEducation is acknowledged as a component of transitional justice processes, yet details about how to implement education reform in postconflict societies are underexplored and politicized [King, Elisabeth. 2014. From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda. New York: Cambridge University Press]. Local and international actors often neglect the complicated nature of education reform in postconflict societies undergoing transitional justice processes [Jones, Briony. 2015. "Educating Citizens in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Experiences and Contradictions in Post-war Education Reform." In Transitional Justice and Reconciliation: Lessons from the Balkans, edited by Martina Fischer, and Olivera Simic, 193–208. New York: Routledge. Transitional Justice]. The role of the diaspora in transitional justice has been increasingly explored as a participatory transnational actor with influence and knowledge about local dynamics [Roht-Arriaza, Naomi. 2006. The Pinochet Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age of Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; Haider, Huma. 2008. “(Re)Imagining Coexistence: Striving for Sustainable Return, Reintegration and Reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. ”International Journal of Transitional Justice 3 (1): 91–113; Young, Laura, and Rosalyn Park. 2009.“ Engaging Diasporas in Truth Commissions: Lessons from the Liberia Truth and Reconciliation Commission Diaspora Project.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 3 (3): 341–361; Koinova, Maria, and Dženeta Karabegović. 2017.“ Diasporas and Transitional Justice: Transnational Activism from Local to Global Levels of Engagement.” Global Networks 17 (2): 212–233]. This article bridges academic literature about diaspora engagement and transitional justice, and education and transitional justice by incorporating the role of diaspora actors in post-conflict processes. Using empirical data from multi-sited field work in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Switzerland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and France, it examines diaspora initiatives which aim to influence local transitional justice processes through translocal community involvement in education and youth policy. It argues that diaspora initiatives can provide alternative and intermediate solutions to the status quo in their homeland, with some potential for contributing to transitional justice and reconciliation processes. Ultimately, diaspora initiatives need support from homeland institutions in order to forward transitional justice agendas in post-conflict societies.

Geographies of indigeneity: Indigenous migrant women’s organizing and translocal politics of place

Proposing a Critical Latinx Indigeneities framework to understand Latin American Indigenous migration and the possible relationships and responsibilities arriving to new Indigenous territories entails, the article analyzes how mobility is creating translocal Indigenous social worlds and transregional ways of being by exploring how socio-spatial relations are being reorganized in relation to indigeneity, gender, and migration. Based on long-term collaborative research with the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales (FIOB), this article examines translocal community formation and political organizing among the Latin American Indigenous diaspora in Los Angeles. It explores the geographies of indigeneity produced through the production of sacred geographies, mobile circuits of labor, and spatial projects created by women’s collective organizing and the emergence of Oaxacan Indigenous culinary and musical landscapes.

Crossing Boundaries in Multi-Sited Ethnography

This paper draws upon several transnational theories from Glick Schiller, Wimmer, Faist, and Sassen and analyses the major theoretical and methodological shifts in migration studies. In response to such changes, multi-sited ethnography has been introduced as a main research method; it differs from the traditional way of doing migration research, where spatially-defined ethnic minority communities serve as the primary fieldwork sites; instead, moving between different sites allows researchers to follow individual migrants, whose social networks have become the main focus. Moreover, such a research method also redefines the traditional notion of “field”, which is now believed to be with blurred and softening boundaries. Through my research project, I have analysed how translocal communities constitute global diasporic networks; I have also come to the conclusion that transnational migrants themselves are involved in very fluid patterns and complex processes of identification and affiliation; their social networks, which consist of multiple relationships such as familial, economic, social, organisational, and political, are not geographically bounded, but these networks cross over and connect different types of social spaces in a wide variety of cultural, institutional, professional, and other kinds of context.

Mix En Meng It Op: Emile YX?'s Alternative Race and Language Politics in South African Hip-Hop

Mix En Meng It Op: Emile YX?'s Alternative Race and Language Politics in South African Hip-Hop

The Ambivalent Autonomy of Mobile “Pocăiți” between Vicovu de Sus, Romania and Turin, Italy after 1989

AbstractIntra-EU labour migration literature is fairly limited within migration studies and it has seldom considered migrants' embodied experiences and processes of subjectivation as a constitutive element of translocal economic transformations. The present paper focuses on the popular economies enacted by a segment of the migrant working class moving from Vicovu de Sus in Suceava district, Romania to Turin, Italy after 1989 as entangled in the production of “neoliberalism from below” (Gago, 2015). Mobilizing oral histories collected during an ethnographic fieldwork undertaken between 2012 and 2013, I will present some aspects related to the fields ofproductionandreproductionwithin the movements of migrants belonging to a pentecostal community affiliated to theCultul Penticostal – Biserica lui Dumnezeu Apostolică. Pentecostalism is here understood as a performative regime of truth and practices (Foucault, 1987; Marshall, 2009), through which migrant bodies perform processes of subjectivation to actively “inhabit” the borders of the State and Capital. Bukovinean pentecostal discourse, through an entrepreneurial drive, a cultural shift towards material prosperity and a strict gendered division of labour, seems to have fostered the creation of a self-organized translocal community whose economic practices obey/re-enact rather than escape/re-signify the dynamics of exploitation and dispossession proper of Romania's peripheral incorporation into contemporary global regimes of production, accumulation and division of labour.

Land in the Construction of Translocal Chinese Community: The Ideal-type of Land Attachment and Its Demonstration in the Case of Quemoy (土地在跨域華人社群中的地位：對土地依附之理念型及其在金門個案中的表現)

This paper aims at illustrating that it is a critical moment for the translocal community of Quemoy for the reason that the price of land in their hometown has risen dramatically in the age of globalization. Land is like the Achilles heel for the construction of translocal community of overseas Quemoy immigrants. When land is well protected, the diasporic solidarity grows energetically, and nourishes the translocal community; when it is badly damaged, the translocal affections might wither, and lead their community to an end. After explaining the reason why the land stands as such an important role for the people of Quemoy at home and abroad, this paper will establish an ideal-type to explore the way people perceive their attachment to the land. This ideal-type of land attachment is constructed by two axes, which are Erich Fromm’s “to be” and “to have,” in conjunction with the “individual-community” metaphoric contrast. To be and to have being two essential forms of human bonding, the “individual-community” contrast refers to the civilizing process, and the tension of human bond with an “object.” Accordingly, land is represented as inspiring nostalgia, as a public sphere, as capital for speculation, and as communal property; these are the four ideal-types of attachment. This paper concludes that the form of land attachment has become more and more diversified since the end of martial law in Quemoy, and the study of the configuration of land attachment will provide an insight into the development of its translocal community. 《大學》中提到：「有德斯有人，有人斯有土，有土斯有財」。土地在華人社會中扮演著重要的角色，更是宗族中的經濟生養與社群凝聚的關鍵。在後冷戰的時期裡，土地價值在全球或多或少都出現了價格飆漲的現象，金門也不例外，甚至由於鄰近中國而更加激烈。有鑑於此，土地的商品化是否會衝擊跨域華人的社群凝聚，也就成為一個重要的課題。藉由金門的個案，本文首先指出追求土地的最高商品價格，並不是人們處理土地時的唯一邏輯，土地在商品化之外，還有其它的產權形式；其次，為能系統地理解土地之產權形式，本文透過了Erich Fromm所提出來之「存有—佔有」的對比，來掌握人與物之間的情感關係，並藉由Karl Polanyi所提到的雙重運動，發展出一組能夠表現現代經濟之緊張的二元架構，即「市場經濟—道德經濟」的隱喻。如此一來，也就能夠發展出四種「土地之情感依附的理念型」，即鄉愁、族產、剬共空間，與商品，據此說明現代人面對土地之情感依附的模式；再者，本文進一步指出，由於金門社會濃厚的宗族色彩，相對傳統的土地觀念卻在戰地政務解除之後，面對全球化的新自由主義及中國的經濟崛起，而呈現了「高強度的混雜現代性」，這不僅使得金門社會對於土地的情感更加複雜，也直接地影響了跨域的金門社群之認同的建構。本文指出，誠然土地會因為市場經濟的運作，而在商品化過程中消解了跨域金門社群內部的連帶，但土地仍可能組合了其它形式的理念型，像是剬共空間、鄉愁，及族產，而生成跨域金門人社群的凝聚，並從中建構社群身份的認同。 (This article is in English.)

Food, Morality and Identity: mobility, remittances and the translocal community in Paama, Vanuatu

ABSTRACTMigration and remittances characterise many small Pacific islands, where local livelihoods are limited, and the need for money has increased. A majority of Paamese have left the island of Paama, in the central island chain of Vanuatu, and more now live in the capital city, Port Vila, than on Paama. Remittances are bidirectional, between the island and Vila, a duality that has rarely been discussed in Melanesia. Almost every household on Paama and in Vila is involved in sending and receiving remittances. Remittances usually involve food: ‘modern’ foods (such as rice) flowing from Vila, and island foods (yams and laplap) travelling to Vila. While such transfers make little formal economic sense, they emphasise a constant process of negotiating and manipulating social relationships. Food, as an expression of identity and locality, is a powerful and repetitive reminder of moral obligations and rural–urban kinship connections. The material significance of exchange is thus less than its affective significance, within the field of reciprocity that structures kin relationships. Food and remittances have become metaphors for defining the experience of migration, as their meaning and function are more than to merely provide a source of nutrition. They have also become the means of structuring a translocal moral economy.

Europeans and Americans in Korea, 1882–1910: A Bourgeois and Translocal Community

This article deals with the European and American community in Korea between the conclusion of Korea’s first international treaties in the early 1880s and the country’s annexation by the Japanese Empire in 1910. It begins by presenting an overview of the community. Concentrated in Seoul and Chemulp’o, the Anglo-Saxon element dominated a community made up of diplomats, foreign experts in the service of the Korean government, merchants and missionaries. Next, the article describes two key characteristics of the European and American residents in Korea. First, they were individuals who defined themselves as bourgeois, or middle-class; second, the term “translocality” serves to bring together the multiple layers of border-crossing these individuals were involved in—as long-distance migrants between Europe or North America and East Asia, as migrants within East Asia, and as representatives of different European and American nationalities living together in Korea.

Community as network: exploring a relational approach to social resilience in coastal Indonesia

The concept of social resilience thrives in studies and policies of fisheries and marine conservation. Associated with the ability of communities to adapt to change, it has spurred debates on social organisation for resilience. Considering its proliferation in maritime studies, the concept of social resilience requires a critical reflection on the ontological assumptions of ‘social’ and ‘community’ that undergirds the concept, in particular the idea that communities are place-based. Following a relational ontological approach, this article proposes to explore community as performative network of human and non-human relations acted out in practice. Drawing on insights from ethnographic research in a coastal region in Indonesia, I illustrate the performance of community networks beyond the local scale and how they sustain through the association of social and material elements. These trans-local communities have resisted conservationists’ attempts to create resilient (place-based) fishing communities in the region to impede illegal fishing. The case illustrates how a relational approach helps to illuminate what social resilience in a maritime context means in practice. The article aims to contribute to critical social resilience scholarship in maritime studies by drawing out how we may think and explore ‘social’ and ‘community’ otherwise and the implications this has for how we look for resilience.

Translocal Ethics: Hizmet Teachers and the Formation of Gülen-inspired Schools in Urban Tanzania

The Gülen Movement (GM) is one of the most dynamic religiously inspired movements in the world today. Constituting a globally active, translocal community with a strong center in Turkey, GM-affiliated actors are primary players in shaping the educational landscapes of countries around the world. The emergence of Gülen-inspired schools (GISs) in urban Tanzania is reflective of the GM’s global reach. Different from other faith-based educational institutions, GISs like Feza Schools in Dar es Salaam do not explicitly promote Islam. However, an Islamic belief and conduct is the base on which actors of the Gülen Movement shape their lives as teachers or administrators in school, as well as the background for founding and supporting them. Hizmet teachers at the Feza Girls’ Secondary and High School (FGSHS) are translating the Islamic background of the GM’s educational engagement into a moral formation of the students that is framed in universal terms. Looking at the teachers’ translocal practices and motivations, it becomes clear that at GISs religion, ethics, and education are closely intertwined.

Political remittances, connectivity, and the trans-local politics of place: An alternative approach to the dominant narratives on ‘displacement’ in Colombia

This paper moves beyond the humanitarian perspective that tends to frame the understanding of the internal displacement in Colombia, which, by 2011, had affected between 8.5% and 11% of its national population. We investigate how outmigration creates connections between the rural place and its urban Colonias through social and political exchanges that configure a trans-local community bound by its struggle for the right to territory. By examining the case of the afrodescendant community of La Toma in Colombia, the paper aims to rethink contemporary dynamics of social governance in ethnic communities, whose building process binds socio-political spaces beyond de-territorialisation. In this respect, we argue that social and normative categories such as ‘displacement’ and ‘ethnic territories’ need to be reinterpreted to include the interactive political ideas and actions that connect societies forced into motion.

Friend or Freund: Social Media and Transnational Connections in Berlin

Transnational social media have become entwined in daily life in places like Berlin, articulating and facilitating social relationships at different geographic levels. As media technologies circulate transnationally, the relationship is changing between online communication practices and everyday experiences of place. This article contributes to transnational studies of HCI by rethinking how online practices shape geographic connections in contemporary Europe, especially regional German affiliations, local friendships, and translocal communities of interest. Drawing on ethnographic research with clusters of friends in Berlin and online, I examine how users participated in multiple networks in ways that transformed the meaning and experience of the local, regional, or transnational as spatial scales. This approach to transnational HCI calls attention to the uneven ways in which social media circulate according to implicitly American notions of friendship and sociality. German and other European users contended with Facebook categories that reflected culturally specific American interaction norms, often eliding or overlooking German language distinctions and understandings. The findings highlight how social media encode dominant cultural norms and reshape the experience of the local, global, and transnational in everyday life.

THE MALAY WORLD, EXPANDED

Sri Lanka is a land of Asian crossings and contacts, epitomised in the history of the country's Malay community. Within that history the year 1869 was especially momentous. This was when the Suez Canal opened, significantly easing the hajj pilgrimage route from Southeast Asia and resulting in many a pilgrim ship docking at Sri Lanka's shores en route to Mecca. On another, no less revolutionary front, 1869 saw the publication in Colombo of the world's first Malay language newspaper, the Alamat Langkapuri. These developments transformed the relationships Sri Lankan Malays had with communities throughout Southeast Asia and beyond due to the flow – or crossing – of people and information brought about in their wake. Through an exploration of articles, essays and letters appearing in Alamat Langkapuri in 1869-70 I consider the ways ideas about, and attitudes towards travel, mobility, exchange, contact and distance were shifting at the time. Such an analysis opens a window to debates within a trans-local Muslim community whose changing lives were both shaped by the newspaper's introduction and reflected, debated and contested between its pages.

Remembering the city: translocality and the senses

This article explores how the postcolonial cities of Kolkata and London are remembered across space and time through the translocal memories of a religious minority, followers of the Hindu reform sect, known as the Brahmo Samaj. London Brahmos represent a miniscule translocal community, historically located in the urban culture of Kolkata and yet with a long tradition of travel and migration inside and outside India. Drawing on interviews with London Brahmos, who migrated to London from Kolkata from the 1950s onwards, the article focuses on the role of urban memory as a translocal and sensory practice, infused with enchantment. I start by considering how London and Kolkata are connected through translocal memories of mobility and dwelling. I then move on to contrast sensuous and sterile memories, which emplace translocal urban imaginaries of Kolkata and London and examine the limits of translocality to connect cities and lives through mapping a variety of situated urban sensescapes.

“Harlem, New York! Harlem, Detroit! Harlem, Birmingham!”: Liberator Magazine and the Chronicling of Translocal Activism

THE LIBERATOR MAGAZINE (not to be confused with the well-known abolitionist newpaper published by William Lloyd Garrison) was on the cutting edge of radical print culture in the 1960s. It was formed in direct response to the assassination of Congolese prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, in 1961. Though a relatively small organ, it attracted important writers and readers from a broad political landscape stretching from anti-colonial struggles in Africa and Asia, to militant Civil Rights struggle in the US This radical black nationalist magazine lasted from 1961 to 1971, and the years between 1963 and 1967 were a period of significant growth for the publication. It can be said that these were Liberator’s peak years. Dan Watts’s generous editorial policy allowed the journal to attract a new cadre of staff writers such as Askia Toure and Larry Neal to bolster the magazine’s circulation of black radical perspectives, which supplemented the writings of Harold Cruse, Carlos Russell, Selma Sparks and others. This essay argues 1) that the Liberator served as a critical space of translocal political activity, and 2) that its language/political rhetoric functioned dialogically, that is: the way Liberator communicated was as important as the ideological positions it expressed. Its translocality was demonstrated through formal and informal distribution networks connecting local struggles in New York to those in Birmingham, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Accra, Ghana, expanding the circles of activism it grew out of and establishing new connections of its own. In this way, Liberator’s translocalism facilitated its transnationalism. In addition to the numerous articles of political, social and aesthetic commentary by activists and artists published during its tenyear life, Liberator also frequently opened its pages to readers and subscribers from around the countr y, expanding political debate beyond core activists and writers on its editorial staff. In this way, the magazine’s format and its welcoming publishing policy gave voice to and participated in the building of community networks of criticism and activism. The magazine allowed a consistent level of fluid, on-going communication. Readers were introduced to newsworthy events as well as cutting edge political and cultural analysis. Liberator was one of several important publications alongside Freedomways, Correspondence, and Negro Digest/Black World disseminating radical black thought in a political context dominated by American liberalism. Drawing on published and unpublished sources and interviews this essay offers the Liberator magazine as a critical example in the shaping of a radical print culture in the 1960s. Rather than focus explicitly on the magazine’s contents, I am concerned here with how the periodical served and reflected the interests of a translocal political community in multiple political and social contexts. Indeed, how the Liberator communicated was as important as what they communicated. In this sense, I think of the physical space of the urban communities in which this publication was circulated as interwoven with its strategic use of language, which shaped Liberator’s radicalism in important ways.

Identity, Migration, and the Arts: Three Case Studies of Translocal Communities

For marginalized populations separated from their homelands, the arts are one of the most effective ways by which groups negotiate their identities at the crossroads of various cultures and influences. Through both hybridized and traditional artistic presentations, translocal and transnational communities engage the issues of identity in ways that renegotiate, challenge, and define the unique characteristics that make them who they are. This article examines three distinct cases of translocal populations as well as the ways by which the groups’ artistic activities help to inform a larger reconstruction of community presence and solidarity. Specifically, these three models focus on theater performances by Sudanese “Lost Boys” living in Syracuse, New York; visual art representations by Cuban exiles in Miami; and flamenco musical initiatives by Gitanos in southern Spain. While such examples are not meant to provide a formula by which translocal populations adapt and engage artistic representations, they nonetheless serve to inform a critical discussion on the ways in which the arts—music, dance, theater, and visual arts—are inherently linked to conceptualizations and representations of ourselves and of others.

Motion/Emotion: Picturing Translocal Landscapes in the Nurturing Ecologies Research Project

In the Nurturing Ecologies research project the aim is to consider the emotional value of the Lake District landscape to mobile, translocal communities living in Lancashire and Cumbria. The research attempts to capture in the visual form of a set of paintings, the sensory responses to the English Lake District that these translocal communities have. The Lake District is a site where historically a singular narrative of English sensibility has been forged. This paper disrupts singular notions of ‘love’, ‘hate’ and ‘fear’, through the process of exploring issues of motion and emotion, power difference and identifications with cultures of landscape. Here, the translocal English participate in a visual methodology which makes tangible emotions figured through post‐colonial mobility, secured in a landscape of national sensibility.

Translocal Communities in Urban Settlements of Port Moresby. Notions of Space in the Formation of Ethnic Identities

Avtor v prispevku predstavlja urbano skupnost priseljencev iz Okape v Vzhodnem višavju, ki živijo v barakarskem naselju Two Mile v Port Moresbyju, glavnem mestu Papue Nove Gvineje. Obravnavano je razmerje med pojmovanjem prostora in nastankom translokalnih urbanih etničnih skupnosti.V kontekstu (post)kolonialne urbanizacije in migracij v mesta se priseljenci v urbane skupnosti povezujejo na podlagi predstav o skupnem izvirnem okolju ter ustvarjajo in rekonceptualizirajo svoje socialne mreže. Skupno izvirno okolje namreč v mestih postane tista kategorija, zaradi katere se posamezniki združujejo s sorodniki in rojaki, se naselijo v majhne zaselke in se povezujejo v širše urbane skupnosti. Njihove razpršene lokacije v urbanih naseljih Port Moresbyja so povezane v širšo socialno mrežo ali translokalno etnično skupnost. *** This paper presents an urban community of migrants from Okapa in Eastern Highlands that settled in an urban settlement (shantytown) Two Mile in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea. The author explores a connection between conceptualisation of space and creation of translocal urban ethnic communities. In the context of (post)colonial urbanization and rural-urban migration, city immigrants create and reconceptualize their social networks and identifications on the basis of their common origin. Common origin that also implies a possession of a common culture is a category, which in an urban context, allows a formation of a wantok sistem, a network of migrants, settled in various urban settlements. Although they live in small settlements at various locations, dispersed all over the city, Okapians are organized into a wider social network or translocal urban ethnic community.

Transnationalism, the State, and the Extraterritorial Citizen

Offering a political optic on transnationalism, this article shows how the Partido Acción Nacional from Guanajuato, Mexico, seeks to reconstitute Guanajuatense transnational migrants as clients and funders of state policies, as political subjects with “dual loyalty” but limited political autonomy. To co-opt migrants into development projects designed bythe state but financed bythe migrants, partyelites reconfigure the meanings of “migrant,” “region,” and “citizen.” This is contested by migrant leaders whose views of extraterritorial citizenship, translocal community, and partyloy alty differ from views of the partyelites. The migrants see the state as diverting their energies from true civil societyand local development initiatives across borders.