Transnational Context Research Articles

Implications of the Science of Learning and Development for the Field of Literacy

In this chapter, I consider how research in the field of literacy illuminates convergences of understandings about how people learn culled from the fields of biology, psychology, and neuroscience. I further consider how research in the field of literacy could be enhanced by drawing more deeply on state-of-the-art findings about how human learning unfolds. To support this discussion, I examine emerging understandings about literacy learning and development in the areas of reading and multiliteracies and across transnational contexts. I conclude by suggesting an equity-oriented agenda for literacy research and practice that leverages and advances existing knowledge about how people learn.

Speaking “broken” English: linguistic minorities building cross-cultural alliances in US higher education

We draw on our lived experiences as faculty of communication studies from Asia, living and working in the United States, to explore how U.S. higher education constituted our identity as linguistic minorities. We also draw on tenets of collaborative autoethnography, producing insight on three levels of linguistic discrimination against non-standard English accents: institutional quality control of our accents/dialects, disciplinary requirements for publishing in English, and everyday communication with locals. The article highlights the value of collaborative autoethnography as a method of inquiry and reflection in a transnational context, providing a rare account of the ways in which international faculty members’ experience resonates with and transforms local-born Southerners who also face discrimination for their stigmatized dialects. We critique the blind spot that privileges hegemonic English in our scholarly communication and propose listening-oriented communication pedagogy to empower voices from the margins within the academia.

Transnational ambivalence: incorporation after forced and compelled return to Mexico

ABSTRACT Drawing on interview data with individuals who grew up in the US and returned to Mexico as young adults, this study examines how young returnees who were deported or compelled to leave the US navigate incorporation in Mexico. We find that labor market mobility does not automatically facilitate a sense of belonging. Participation in niche labor markets catering to native English speakers, however, facilitates social incorporation into communities of returnees. Our data suggest that social incorporation and evolving memories of the US powerfully influence returnees’ sense of belonging in Mexico. Even years after return, young return migrants’ incorporation journeys continue to be shaped by constant comparisons between the US and Mexico and a dual ambivalence toward both countries. Within transnational contexts of exclusion, young returnees’ rely on each other to create communities of belonging.

Transnational sensemaking narratives of highly skilled Canadian immigrants' career change

PurposeThe authors answer calls for research on the experiences of international professionals' career transitions by investigating how highly skilled immigrants make sense of their career changes in the host country's labor market.Design/methodology/approachThe authors report on a qualitative, inductive and elaborative study, drawing on sensemaking theories and career transitions literature and nine semi-structured reflective interviews with highly skilled Canadian immigrants.FindingsThe authors identified four career change narratives: mourning the past, accepting the present, recreating the past and starting fresh. These narratives are made sense of in a transnational context: participants contended with tensions between past, present and future careers and between relevant home and host country factors affecting their career decisions. Participants who were mourning the past or recreating the past identified more strongly with their home country professions and struggled to find resources in Canada. In accepting the present and starting fresh, participants leveraged host country networks to find career opportunities and establish themselves and their families in the new environment.Originality/valueA transnational ontology emphasizes that immigrants' lives are multifaceted and span multiple national contexts. The authors highlight how the tensions between the home and host country career contexts shape immigrants' sensemaking narratives of their international career change. The authors encourage scholars and practitioners to take a transnational contextual approach (spatial and temporal) to guide immigrants' career transitions and integration into the new social environment.

Multiple interfaces

AbstractIn India and its diaspora in the UK, online activities of various sorts—tweeting, blogging, messaging, trolling, and tagging—have become central to tensions surrounding religion's presence in public life and the stakes of belonging to the nation. Three clusters of social media practices undergird these digital mediations: piety, surveillance, and fun. Such practices reveal how internet‐enabled mediations reenergize religion as a political category of difference under majoritarian right‐wing regimes and the transnational context of Islamophobia, while also offering distinct possibilities for imagining politics through the pleasures, visibilities, and reflections induced by digital circulations. Rather than approaching the internet as an abstract technological context or discrete channels for communication, this analysis theoretically positions it as an arena of “multiple interfaces.” It signals contiguities and collisions that digital practice has opened up among the very real communities and structures of authority, under conditions shaped by longer colonial histories.

Governing Through Scalar Elasticity: An Analysis of the Accountability Gap in Migration Control in the Central Mediterranean

Accountability has become elusive in the context of migration control, especially at the external borders of the EU. In the Central Mediterranean, a regime of cooperative interdiction has developed since 2017 whereby migrants fleeing the North African shores by boat are intercepted and forcibly returned to Libya, without ever entering European jurisdiction. This article scrutinises practices of strategic litigation by Italian lawyers who have sought to destabilise this regime of externalised control, which emerged after the 2017 Libya–Italy Memorandum of Understanding. It outlines the difficulties of litigation seeking to challenge deterrence measures and shows the variety of actions lawyers have had to come up with to address Europe and Italy's role in this system. The analysis of this litigation sheds light on the dynamic shape that both sovereignty and migration control take on in transnational contexts of governance, and how legal scales become blurred across local, national, and international jurisdictions. I argue that accountability for migration control is rendered elusive by the fact that Europe's external maritime border is governed via scalar elasticity. In practice, this is a form of governance that takes place across a multiplicity of legal scales, whilst authoritatively referring to statist scalar visions

‘Ghanaian first’: Nationality, Race and the Slippery Side of Belonging for Mixed-Race Ghanaians

This article explores the multifaceted ways in which race impacts on processes of identification with the Ghanaian nation for mixed-race Ghanaians. Using a constructionist approach to identity, which highlights the agency of actors, the article underscores the shifting and racialising nature of national identity in transnational contexts. The article argues that whether they were born and raised in Ghana or they grew up in a Western country, mixed-race Ghanaians mainly identify as ‘Ghanaian first’. Their affiliation to Ghana stems both from growing up in the country and from being identified as black outsiders in countries of the white Western world. In both contexts, identifying as a Ghanaian is a source of pride and empowerment. However, their membership of the Ghanaian nation is often contested in their everyday life by the majority black-identified Ghanaian population, based on ethnoracial (non)authenticity premises. As such, mixed-race Ghanaian participants actively shape their Ghanaianness to justify their right to belong.

Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism: Complexities, Contradictions, and Controversies ed. by James Ryan and Susan Grant (review)

Reviewed by: Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism: Complexities, Contradictions, and Controversies ed. by James Ryan and Susan Grant Claire Knight Ryan, James and Grant, Susan (eds). Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism: Complexities, Contradictions, and Controversies. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2021. xiii + 250 pp. Notes. Select bibliography. Geoffrey Roberts select bibliography. Index. £90.00; £28.99; £26.09 (e-book). This volume accomplishes a rare feat: it combines fascinating new research with insightful stock-taking of the past several decades of Stalin-era political history scholarship, rendering it a worthy addition to the bookshelves of seasoned academics and fledgling students alike. The diverse chapters are united by a shared interest in themes of an international bent, showcasing the influence of transnationalism, postcolonialism and the modernity school on recent Soviet scholarship. The volume is divided into four sections, concentrating on Stalin as a leader, the cult of personality and the Cold War, with a final chapter on the afterlife of Stalinism in today's Russia. Part One is the most fully subscribed, opening with a chapter by Christopher Read on the recent explosion of scholarly biographies of Stalin, including his own, and offering a candid assessment of the value and limitations of the biography as a historical exercise. In chapter two, Peter Whitewood takes on misconceptions concerning the military purges in 1937, arguing convincingly that these developments were reactive rather than proactive, having more to do with the leadership's decades-long perception of the Red Army's vulnerability to enemy infiltration than Stalin's bid for power. In chapter three, Daniel Kowalsky offers a lively and comprehensive historiography of Soviet involvement in the Spanish Civil War, putting to rest 'the Orwellian [End Page 181] myth of swarms of Soviet illegals carrying out assassinations and sapping the Republic's moral[e]' (p. 62) once and for all. Chapter four by Chris Bellamy dovetails nicely with Whitewood's chapter, focusing on Stalin's capabilities as an intelligent, detail-oriented war leader and dispelling Khrushchev's tall tale of an isolated leader holed up in his dacha on the verge of nervous breakdown at the outbreak of the war: instead, Stalin was in his Kremlin office barely an hour after the first bombs were dropped on Crimea (p. 73). Part Two moves away from Stalin the man and onto the Stalin/Stalinist cult, with chapters by Judith Devlin, placing the cult in transnational context, and Balázs Apor, examining the Stalinist cult as but one in a series of leader cults that arose in twentieth-century Hungary. Both chapters abandon the well-trod path of Stalinist exceptionalism and underline instead the parallels and continuities between the Stalinist cult and other leader cults across space and time, making a valuable contribution to the broader, ongoing work on leader cults as a modern phenomenon. Part Three focuses on the Cold War, beginning with Caroline Kennedy-Pipe's enlightening historiography and thematic analysis of the conflict, in which she does not shy away from critiquing her own earlier work in a bid to provide a more global perspective on a topic that continues to be alarmingly relevant today. In contrast to the rest of the volume, chapter eight by Geoffrey Roberts concentrates on an aspect of Soviet policy in which Stalin had very little interest, namely, the peace movement. Roberts shows how the famed bureaucratism of the Stalinist system could prove advantageous at times, as it provided a mechanism by which those outside the inner circle might influence policy. Chapter nine by Molly Pucci steps outside the USSR and into the interrogation rooms of the Czechoslovak secret police, tracing the chilling way in which seemingly simple adjustments in the protocols for writing confessions served to Sovietize the Czechoslovak criminal justice system and systematize the fabrication of evidence in political cases. Finally, James Ryan's thorough, equable analysis of the seeming revival of Stalinism in state and society under Putin provides a fitting end to a volume dedicated to eschewing simplistic formulations and seductive myths in reconsidering the Stalin era. One of the key strengths of this collection lies in the wealth of historiographical analysis it provides both in the introduction, with its cogent, concise survey of...

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

“Things Done and Undone”: Zora Neale Hurston’s Temporality of Refusal

ABSTRACT: This essay argues that temporality becomes inseparable from the intersectionality of race and gender in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God . By emphasizing the need to negotiate unequal, androcentric conventions, Hurston historicizes the experience of time as predetermined, restricting, and subjugating from the position of a Black female subjectivity. In response, Hurston develops a strange temporality necessitating refusal through successive negations that, paradoxically, advance this subject toward greater autonomy. Hurston combines linearity and non-linearity to capture this dialectical conflict, instantiating in novel form the autonomy and agency that Lindsey Stewart aligns with a “politics of Black joy.” This process defines what I call Hurston’s temporality of refusal , which renders the novel coextensive with a form of becoming that is otherwise unavailable across Hurston’s transnational contexts.

Revolutionary Refugee Policy: Salvadorans and Statecraft in Sandinista Nicaragua (1979–1990)

AbstractDuring the 1980s, more than 20,000 Salvadorans fleeing the violence of the Salvadoran Civil War entered the neighboring country of Nicaragua. Their flight was part of a larger multidirectional migration out of El Salvador in which Salvadorans sought refuge across Central and North America. In response to this unprecedented influx of Salvadoran refugee men, women, and children, the Nicaraguan government—newly under the control of the revolutionary Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN)—declared that all refugees would be permitted “the opportunity to survive and produce.” This article argues that the timing of the refugees’ arrival proved mutually beneficial for both the Salvadorans and the FSLN by illustrating how Sandinista officials sought to further agrarian reform projects via refugee integration into agricultural cooperatives. As such, Nicaraguan refugee policy functioned as an integral part of Sandinista statecraft. Through an analysis of refugee-produced sources, government and UNHCR documents, and news reports, this article sheds new light on the entwined histories of Salvadoran refugees and the Sandinista state in the transnational context of the late Cold War period in Central America.

Museo Nazionale dell'Emigrazione Italiana (MEI)

Museo Nazionale dell'Emigrazione Italiana (MEI)

Transnational Ethos in Adichie’s Americanah

This paper analyses Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah as a transnational fiction that shows how transnational identity is formulated in a liminal space. The issues like trans-nationality, globalization, and home are associated with the issue of identity. To carry out the analysis, we use theoretical insights from Transnational Studies which revolves around the life of people living in a globalized world: we are living in the world where there are no border restrictions and due to technological advancement, people can be present virtually in different places at the same time. This paper analyzes how Adichie’s Americanah redefines the notion of immigrant’s identity and explores transnational ethos in relation to the concepts of nationality, globalization, home, and culture through the portrayal of two Nigerian lovers Ifemelu and Obinze. Adichie portrays her Nigerian characters like Ifemelu in transnational context not only to critique Western multicultural ethos—policy to encourage transnational immigrants to assimilate to mainstream culture of the hostland—but also to valorize the role of transnational subjects like Ifemelu for the development of their homeland even in the age of ‘globalization’.

The Posthuman and Irish Antigones: Rights, Revolt, Extinction

Antigone’s afterlives in Ireland have always enacted critical gestures of social protest and mourning that expose the fundamental fragility of human rights caught up in the symbolic conflict between oppressors and oppressed. This paper seeks to explore the scope of rereading certain Irish figurations of Antigone – the exemplary text of European humanism – through a posthumanist lens that unveils new and radical understandings of modern injustices, legal fissures, and capitalist insinuations of an “inhuman politics” against proletarian minorities in twentieth-century Irish society in transnational contexts. The possibilities of a posthumanist theorization of Antigone at the intersection with gender, class, and human rights, reflect the connecting threads, political, aesthetic, and critical, between two texts: an early twentieth-century anonymous poem titled “The Prison Graves” dedicated to Irish human rights activist and revolutionary Roger Casement and an unpublished play-version of Antigone by Aidan C. Mathews in 1984, dedicated to René Girard. Written and produced as a critique of systematic institutional violence and neoliberal capitalist oppression during the epoch of the anti-revolutionary zeitgeist, the myth of Antigone shifts its dialectic from the nationalist nostalgia of “The Prison Graves” to the play-version of the Cold War era to reciprocate a counter-protest against the passing of the Irish Justice Bill. Antigone is reimagined as a hypochondriac resident of the slums of the proletariat and a member of a degenerate acting troupe. Her classical (mythical), aristocratic (white, European, Western) figure has become a posthuman commodity: a proletarian actor now, she performs the same role for millennia in a post-nuclear contaminated prison state in Thebes/Dublin. Peteokles is a bourgeois-turned-rebel mediary; Polyneikes is remembered as a communist terrorist who has been airbrushed from the records of the police state; a bibliophile Ismene religiously reads Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, and the Chorus is the real state oppressor.

MEASURING A GOOD DEATH: AN ASSESSMENT ACROSS FOUR COUNTRIES

Abstract A good death is often viewed as a common goal in end-of-life care, yet our understanding of what qualifies as a good death is still under development. Previous studies have attempted to conceptualize our understanding of a good death and have highlighted the need to improve our measurement of this construct. The present study examines a measure of a good death across four countries. Data for this study were derived from the Four-Country Survey on Aging and End-of-Life Medical Care (2017), in which participants were sampled using a random digit dial method. The study relies on a sample of 4,239 participants from the US, Italy, Japan, and Brazil. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was employed to fit a measurement model to the full sample for a measure of the importance of a good death. Once model fit was deemed sufficient, a multi-group CFA was used to assess invariance across the four countries. Model fit was adequate at the configural and metric levels, highlighting that across the four countries importance of a good death was measured and understood the same. However, the model failed at the scalar level of invariance, implying that indicators for the importance of a good death are valued differently across the four countries. Further developing our understanding of a good death and how it is measured is essential for improving quality end-of-life care. This study identifies a quality measure of good death while simultaneously highlighting the limitations in using such a measure in a transnational context.

Black Women’s Mothering Practices in the Canadian Racial State: Reflections on Maternal Sufferation in the Afterlife of Slavery

This article foregrounds a Black feminist analysis of a bereaved Caribbean-Canadian mother, Cecile Case Holder, whose 24-year-old son, Andre Burnett, was murdered in Toronto on 10 September 2005. The article reframes her grief through the lens of maternal sufferation to explore a distinctly Jamaican reality in a transnational context. Burnett was one of 52 people who died by gun violence in what became known as “The Year of the Gun.” In an extensive interview with Holder about the life and death of her youngest child, Toronto Star reporter Jim Rankin addresses the forms of structural violence that contributed to the conditions that led to Burnett’s demise. Reading her narrative from a Black feminist perspective, the author explores the politics of Holder’s mothering practices to keep her children safe. Her narrative is located in the scholarship on Black motherhood in the African diaspora, focused on the exigencies of the afterlife of slavery. Cecile Holder’s reality is particular to her circumstances. Yet, her experience as a Black Jamaican mother in the Canadian racial state provides a snapshot of the quotidian navigations that frame women’s parenting practices at the nexus of structural violence and the demands of the global economy unique to African-Caribbean women.

The Making of American Catholicism: Regional Culture and the Catholic Experience

Michael J. Pfeifer highlights the importance of region to the history of American Catholicism in five compact parish histories, ranging from New Orleans to Los Angeles, and from Iowa to northeastern Wisconsin to New York City. The book elegantly elaborates the diversity of Catholic experience across the continent from the eighteenth into the twenty-first centuries while emphasizing its colonial origins and transnational contexts. The book opens with Our Lady of Lourdes, founded in 1905 in New Orleans as the city expanded into the Uptown neighborhood of Freret. Over the next century, this segregated white parish transformed into a Black-majority parish in 1970, practicing African-style liturgies led by Nigerian missionary priests before merging with another parish after Hurricane Katrina. The next two chapters examine Catholics in Iowa and Wisconsin. St. Mary's Parish in Iowa City was founded in 1840 to serve Irish, German, and Bohemian immigrants in a Protestant-majority region before splitting into three separate parishes along ethnic lines. Its sesquicentennial celebrations honored Korean, Chinese, and Mexican parishioners. Catholic culture in Wisconsin, by contrast, combined French Canadian, Belgian, Irish, Native American, and, later, eastern and southern European influences. Rural Wisconsin was especially fertile soil for Marian devotions: a series of Marian apparitions in the late 1850s received official sanction in 2010, the only American apparitions so designated, while a century later, a reported one hundred thousand pilgrims gathered in tiny Necedah to await an apparition of Mary who would offer a Cold War message. The village remains a place of pilgrimage.

The new abnormal: Identifying and ranking anomalies in the land trade market.

Large-scale national and transnational commercial land transactions, or Large-Scale Land Acquisitions (LSLAs), have been gaining a lot of academic attention since the late 2000s and since the reported rush for land, resulting in turn from an increase in demand for arable land. If many data exist to characterize land deals, the analysis of investment networks remain limited and predominantly portrays power asymmetries between countries from the Global North investing in the Global South. The aim of this work is to perform a deeper investigation on the land trade market, specifically focusing on cases that do not follow such narratives. For instance, almost 25% of the countries included in the transnational land trade network do not follow a strict investor/target dichotomy, thus being characterized by a double role, i.e., they both acquire and cede land in the transnational context. In order to globally acknowledge for what was currently considered as abnormal cases, we model open access data about LSLAs extracted from the Land Matrix Initiative (LMI) open-access database into a network graph, and adapt an eigenvector based centrality method originally conceived for online social networks, namely LurkerRank, to identify and rank anomalous profiles in the land trade market. We take into account three different network snapshots: a multi-sector network (including all the transnational deals in the LMI database), and three networks referring to specific investment sectors (agriculture,mines and biofuels). Experimental results show that emerging economies (e.g., China and Malaysia) play a central role in the land trade market, by creating alternative dynamics that escape the classic North/South one. Our analyses also show how African countries that are often seen as targets of land trade transactions in a specific sector, may often acquire foreign land in the context of investments in the same sector (i.e., Zimbabwe for biofuels and the Democratic Republic of Congo for the mining sector).

Imperial Gothic, Gender Relationship, and Transnational Contexts in Louisa May Alcott’s A Long Fatal Love Chase

Louisa May Alcott’s dexterity of writing gothic fiction has not obtained full attention. In general, her stories delve into the Victorian domesticity in the nineteenth century. Despite the success of Little Women (1869), which culminated in Alcott’s career as a domestic writer, she also had keen perceptions of the globalized world in her time. Interestingly, she used her “left hand” to write gothic stories. As she experienced severe poverty due to her father’s inability to take care of his family financially, Alcott had to write and earn the money to support her family. Her personal adversity reversely sparked her passion and talents to write gothic thrillers. Along with companionship with literary scholars such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, she acutely understood her then-contemporary political and cultural issues along with her trips in Europe. Especially, Alcott’s A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866) delved into the social aspects of America’s growth, women’s elevated position after the Civil War, and her transnational view of the world are portrayed in it. In the novel, she shows her knowledge of the classical and literary allusions by using the motifs of William Shakespeare’s Tempest, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, and, moreover, questions her view of gender equality and investigates the images of good and evil that represent the struggles in the Gothic tradition. Her concerns of domestic and international cultural and political affairs are fully reflected. Ultimately, A Long Fatal Love Chase addresses the national dynamics of cultural rivalry between America and countries in Europe in her then contemporary period.

The ruse of impurity: Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and the politics of hybridity

ABSTRACT Placing Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) within a larger historical and transnational context, this essay interrogates Gilroy’s uncritical deployment of mestizaje and hybridity to theorize Black subject formation and Black cultural productions. In doing so, it shows that the exclusion of Afro-Latin America and the Hispanophone Caribbean has crucial consequences for the work’s conceptualization of the Black Atlantic and its broader racial politics. While Gilroy seeks to repudiate what he calls ‘the dangerous obsessions with ‘racial’ purity which are circulating inside and outside black politics,’ I argue that the obsession with hybridity that animates Gilroy’s work is no less dangerous. Contrary to Gilroy’s assumption, ‘creolisation, métissage, mestizaje, and hybridity’ do not ‘exceed racial discourse,’ but are rather embedded in the history and logics of the Latin American eugenics movement. As it fails to contend with the material histories of racial mixture as a white supremacist technology, The Black Atlantic echoes some of these eugenicist logics, colluding with the anti-Black agenda that it seeks to contest. In the process, the book prefigures the racial disavowal of Gilroy's later work and leaves us with inadequate tools for understanding the workings of racial power.