Transnational Identities Research Articles

Investment in transnational identity to become microcelebrities in China: on American uploaders’ success in a Chinese video-sharing website

ABSTRACT Based on Darvin & Norton’s (2015) model of investment, this study conducted a qualitative discourse analysis on 212 videos uploaded by three American microcelebrities on a Chinese video-sharing social media Bilibili. The study explored how the Americans invested in local language and cultural practices, elicited previously possessed affordances as sociocultural capital to enhance their transnational identities, and gained legitimate membership as microcelebrities in the Chinese digitalised third space. The findings may provide implications for intercultural communicators on how to incorporate linguistic, cultural, multimodal and other sociocultural resources to negotiate power to speak in host culture either online or offline. 基于Darvin 和Norton (2015)的投资理论，本文对中国社交媒体Bilibili上3名美国网红发布的212段视频进行了定性话语分析, 阐释其如何通过投资当地语言文化，调动已有社会文化资本强化自身跨国身份，进而获取在华网络第三空间的合法身份。

Construction of Jewish Women in Ihsan Abdel Quddous’s Fiction

The article examines Ihsan Abdel Quddous’s literary texts that deal with Egyptian Jewish women to explore how Egyptian Jewesses figure in these texts to disrupt, disturb, or offset prevailing historical and fictional discourses and explore his attitude toward Egyptian Jews in general and Jewish women in particular. Deploying post-colonial feminist theory, the article argues that in Quddous’ works, Jewish women represent a highly-educated and liberal community with fluid, transnational identities that serve to foil exclusionary discourses, and that Quddous increasingly has given Egyptian Jewish women, more than any other Arab writer of the period, a voice and an active role in his works. As a result, he has articulated their hopes, fears, and needs in a period dominated by political and social instability. The article aims at identifying and categorizing major tropes and characteristics pertaining to the portrayal of Jewish women in Ihsan Abdel Quddous’ fiction, and how these portrayals adhere to or play on the universal stereotypes of Jews.

“We Don’t Live In Jungles”: Mediating Africa as a Transnational Socio-Spatial Field

Background/Context: Amid rising immigration from the African continent to the United States, researchers have begun to explore the transnational identities and networks of African immigrants. There is a small body of literature about whether educational supports for immigrant youth are differentiated to address the particularities of African immigrant youth. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: Transnational theories presume that subjects use social networks to connect home and diaspora. They are encountering both perceived and lived social spaces to navigate belonging in and across space. This study asks, “How do youth from the African continent mediate transnational belonging in NYC?” Studying the experiences of youth has implications for the curricular and extracurricular spaces of schools wherein newcomer youth navigate how to belong in the diaspora. Population/Participants/Subjects: Research participants are 19 newcomer African youth from Centrafrique, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Guinea, Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal. Most of the youth are multilingual and speak French and English as third or fourth languages. Research Design: This qualitative study draws from participatory action research and visual methods. The study was conducted with Sankofa Club, a weekly afterschool student-led club. In the club, students responded to stereotypes by producing websites about the continent and carrying out research within the club to compare their homes and share their migration stories. Findings/Results: The article presents “Africa” as a Mediated Transnational Space, produced by hegemonic structures, that youth mediate as they connect homes. The study finds that youth wrestled with their identification as African. It reexamines transnationalism and positions Africa as a social field through which youth are produced (come to be) as African subjects, redress their belonging to that field by contributing their own symbols and experiences, and use it as they navigate an Africa-in-NYC that does not adhere to continental boundaries. Conclusions/Recommendations: Educators can support the belonging to home, Africa, and the United States by representing Africa as a generative space in curriculum and social practices.

Religious Fields and Subfields: Transnational Connections, Identities, and Reactive Transnationalism

The relationship between religion and transnationalism has only recently gained scholarly attention to document the influence religious organizations have on mediating transnational ties. While scholarship on second-generation transnationalism has gained interest, second-generation Arab Americans remain understudied. Yet, Arab Americans, especially Muslim Arab Americans, have been progressively encountering overt anti-Arab and Islamophobic sentiments for two decades, since 11 September. These experiences of discrimination are bound to affect their transnationalism. Based on 32 semi-structured interviews with children of Arab immigrants from Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, this study finds that religious organizations are important transnational social fields for the second generation, especially those who experienced discrimination. This study finds that for Muslim Arab Americans, mosques are important transnational social fields in which they engage in transnational ways of being and belonging that connect them to their parental homeland and transnational identity. Consistent with reactive transnationalism, when experiencing discrimination Muslim Arab Americans increased their participation within their mosques in two ways. First, mosques are places Muslim Arab Americans draw on the support of other Arab Americans who have experienced discrimination. Second, the social networks of Muslim Arabs provide important historical and cultural knowledge about their parental homeland; knowledge that Muslim Arab Americans would later use to advocate and educate others when/if they reencountered discrimination.

Language and identity of a Korean transnational youth in the U.S.

Abstract The importance of multilingual use for the overall personal and educational development of transnational population is well documented, and many scholars have supported that language relates to identity. Given that adolescence is a critical period of identity construction, it is crucial to understand how transnational youth construct their transnational identity in adolescence, bordering across multiple languages and cultures in their everyday lives. Therefore, the current study examines the language and identity of one Korean transnational adolescent who lives with her family in the U.S. The purpose of this study is to explore how one Korean-American transnational adolescent youth navigates her identities utilizing her diverse linguistic and cultural repertoires in a range of contextual spaces. This qualitative case study collected semi-structured interview data to explore the following research questions: 1) How does a second generation Korean American transnational adolescent self-identify? and 2) How is her identity interconnected with her linguistic and cultural investment? This current study found that the participant has sites of specific identities as Korean or American: three distinct contexts of family, school, and community. In addition, the findings showed that the participant’s identity is related to her linguistic and cultural investment in transnational contexts.

Dual identities? Transnational identities? Psychological acculturation research in dialogue with discursive approaches to the identity work of individuals with a migration background

ABSTRACT This article's key aim is to bring discursive insights on transnational identities together with the ‘identity strategies’-framework from psychological acculturation research. To do so, we discursively analyse the negotiation of identities in interviews of Belgian women with Turkish/Moroccan migration backgrounds. Our findings indicate that interviewees negotiate nuanced national and ethnic identities, highlighting the fluidity of identity often foregrounded in discursive research on transnational identities. We also propose adopting terminology from psychological acculturation research into discursive analyses as this might enable researchers to pinpoint the various shifts in discursive work that is now often covered by the term ‘transnational identities’.

Transnational Mexican Youth Negotiating Languages, Identities, and Cultures Online: A Chronotopic Lens

AbstractThis article presents a case study with two transnational Mexican youth that came from a larger study of the digital media practices of young people in an urban high school. Our study takes a chronotopic (Bakhtin, 1981) lens to understand the youths' accounts of their digital communication. Analysis of interviews and observations with the youth when they described their online activities show that the youth employed digital literacies to vicariously “live” experiences and keep up with life away from their families in Mexico. The youth situated their activities in three distinct but dialogical chronotopes (family, hometown, and transborder) to create transnational connections and make sense of who they are. They drew on digital artifacts to narrate themselves, developed familial, cultural, and political knowledge, and expanded their linguistic repertoires in the process. The findings have implications for TESOL classrooms that seek to build on the border‐crossing experiences and linguistic and multimodal resources of young people in their learning. We discuss how youths' digital practices and embedded artifacts serve to construct multiple contexts and vantage points for developing their transnational identities and knowledge, and how these practices could be recognized as agentic forms of narrative production and learning in the classroom.

The Eurospy boom and the evolution of Europe’s transnational identity

ABSTRACT This article discusses the role of the fictionalization of intelligence in the history of European transnationalism. It focuses on the boom of spy films co-produced in continental Europe in the 1960s, examining how their materialization implied large-scale transnational processes of production and distribution. It argues that, although this dimension shaped the films’ form and content, their plots continued to reproduce and reify notions of raison d’état, national security, and geopolitics. Yet, while cinema enacted enduring tensions between national and transnational identities, it framed such tensions as a displaced fantasy, thus conciliating them with the evolving political imagination of European integration.

In-between spaces in Klara du Plessis’s Ekke: Identity, language and art

In this review article, we focus on the depiction of the transnational and translingual as a state of being in-between in Klara du Plessis’s debut poetry collection, Ekke (2018). This in-between state has implications for how identity, place and visual art feature in the collection. Ekke contains fragments of German and French, but consists mainly of English interspersed with Afrikaans. The creation of meaning through this linguistic slippage reflects the idea of identity as always in-process that comes to the fore throughout the collection. Ekke also represents an intervention in South African urban literature, as Bloemfontein, a city not much featured in literature, is represented in several poems. In these poems, the poet/speaker struggles to situate Bloemfontein and its surrounding areas’ histories and symbolism in the transnational networks that she is a part of. The conception of identity and language being constantly in-progress is also conveyed in the collection’s poems about visual art. In these poems, meaning is created through the interaction of language with visual art, a process the poet calls ‘intervisuality’. Keywords: transnationalism, transnational identity, translingualism, multilingual poetry, Klara du Plessis, Bloemfontein in literature, ekphrasis.

Islamic Middle East: Characteristics and Some Features of Modern Transformations of Political Identity

The subject of the study is the modern transformation of political identity in the Middle Eastern states and communities that profess Islam. The author examines in detail the complex of identifications that exist in the Middle East region. Particular attention is paid to the interaction and harmonization of religious, imperial, national and ethno-cultural identities. Regional features of identification transformations are considered both in the context of transformations in the global system of international relations, and taking into account the regional specifics of political processes and the general originality of the socio-cultural space. The general tendencies typical for all communities of the region under consideration are analyzed, as well as particular features of identity transformations as a factor of state policy on the example of Turkey and Iran. The novelty of the study lies in the analysis of transnational identification transformations in the Middle East region in the context of global trends towards the growing role of transnational identity in international relations and world politics. The author's special contribution to the study of the topic is the combination of fundamental theoretical approaches to the study of identity with the methodology of system analysis, which allows to more accurately describe the complex multi-level structure of modern identities, based on the current works of Russian, Western and Middle Eastern researchers. The main results of the study are the determination of general and particular features of identification transformations in the Middle East region, as well as the definition of the functions of religious and imperial identities in the system of identifications.

Introduction

Abstract On June 3, 2015, thousands of people in Argentina gathered in the streets to protest the murder of fourteen-year-old Chiara Paez at the hands of her boyfriend. Following her brutal death, a wave of indignation spread on social media with the viral hashtags #NiUnaMenos and #VivasNosQueremos. What started as an act of public grief and defiance against patriarchy rapidly found an angry but also unexpectedly upbeat tone, a combination of collective fury and exhaustion expressed in highly theatrical and political performances of affection and resistance. “We are moved by desire” became one of the movement's taglines. María Pia López's Not One Less: Mourning, Disobedience, and Desire (2021), among the first English accounts from inside the movement, reflects on this phenomenon and serves as a practical tool in current feminist struggles, feeding the very same transnational, intersectional, transformative movement in which the author has participated as protagonist, connoisseur, and chronicler. López is one of the leading voices of the fourth wave of Latin American feminisms. This collection of commentaries is animated by the dialogical spirit of her book, addressing issues ranging from the transnational identity of feminist political activism; the connection between gender equality and class struggle; the movement's combination of mourning, ecstasy, and desire; and—arguably one of the most important achievements of NUM—feminism's ability to alter the political imagination and common sense.

Searching for New Political Spaces: Negotiating Citizenship and Transnational Identities on Mongolia’s Mining Frontier

With two of the world’s largest mining projects, Mongolia has become one of Asia’s key mineral producers in the past 20 years. Mongolian pastoralist communities living in the South Gobi region in the vicinity of large-scale mining operations have recently turned to transnational dispute resolution arenas to lodge their grievances and seek redress. Notably, these pastoralists have sought to trigger international grievance mechanisms on the basis of being indigenous people, even though they are not recognised as such by their government. This article situates this contemporary mobilisation of pastoralist communities in relation to large-scale mining projects within a longer history of state (de)regulation of the pastoralist economy. It reflects on the role of non-state legal norms and mechanisms in introducing new forms of legal and political subjectivity into the milieu of discourses surrounding Mongolian pastoralist identity and livelihoods. The article reflects on the potential implications of extractive economy upon transnational identity formation, local/national political spaces, and strategic negotiations with state and corporate power.

Book Review: Transnational Identities and Practices in English Language Teaching: Critical Inquiries from Diverse Practitioners

Book Review: Transnational Identities and Practices in English Language Teaching: Critical Inquiries from Diverse Practitioners

From an Understanding to a Securitizing Discourse: The British Left’s Encounter with the Emergence of Political Islam, 1978–2001

The outburst of The Iranian Revolution in 1978 generated fear and hope at the same time for several political forces across the West and the East. The emergence of Islam as a political force came as a surprise across all political spectrums in Europe, even though religion was already at the time becoming a determining variable in the field of international relations. The echoes of The Iranian Revolution precipitated even further the making of several organizations of political Islam in the Middle East, forging transnational identities. Through primary and secondary sources drawn from mainly British leftist organizations, this study aims at examining the responses of the British Left towards Islamic revivalism. Thus, this article gives an historical outline of the intellectual production and the strategies of interpretation adopted by the British Left during the period of 1978–2001, by exploring the main historical events that involved (political) Islam, such as The Iranian Revolution, the Lebanese civil war, the Palestinian Intifada and The Algerian Civil War. The main argument postulated is that interpretation trajectories by the British Left were highly dependent on ideological and geostrategic lineages and respective synchronic political alliances, resulting in putting the centre of gravity sometimes on Islamic activism’s regressive nature and sometimes on its anti-imperialist perspectives.

“TWO IN ONE”: Transnational Inheritance and the Remaking of the Sinasite Houses as Shared Heritage Monuments

ABSTRACT This article examines debates between Greeks and Turks about how to preserve the architectural heritage left behind by the Greek Orthodox population exiled from Sinasos in the 1923 Greek‐Turkish Compulsory Population Exchange. The restoration of Sinasos as a kind of residential and commercial open‐air museum, through the transformation of ancestral homes into hotels, engendered new cooperative and competitive relationships between Greeks and Turks with legitimate claims to the site. Greeks and Turks are typically portrayed as antagonistic, but understanding the historic properties as a form of inheritance much like the estates fundamental to “house societies” described by Claude Lévi‐Strauss reveals a transnational community with shared concerns around memory, heritage preservation, transnational identity formation, and touristic enterprise. [heritage, inheritance, house, memory, Turkey]

Awarding Chinese-Language Cinemas: Imaginary Transnational Identities of the Golden Horse Awards

Frequently referred to as the “Chinese Oscars,” the Golden Horse Awards, held in Taiwan annually since 1962, accept submissions from various Chinese-speaking countries despite China’s suppression of Taiwan. This article reveals that the transnationalism of the Golden Horse Awards has been influenced by the cross-border tendency of early Chinese cinemas, the political turmoil of the past six decades in Taiwan, and the shifts in Chinese-language film industries in East and Southeast Asia under the influence of neoliberal globalization. It examines how the Golden Horse Awards have transformed from a tool of state ideology during the Cold War into an evaluating system that aims to promote both the global image of Taiwan and the artistic values of Chinese-language films in a broader sense. Drawing on theories from film festival and transnational cinema studies, this article further compares the Golden Horse Awards with the Cannes Film Festival to demonstrate the ways in which both festivals culturally legitimize local “national” cinema while aligning with transnational cinemas to counter larger film hegemonies. I bring the research up-to- date by examining the challenges the Golden Horse Awards have faced since China withdrew from the competition following political controversy at the 2018 ceremony. By focusing on how the Golden Horse Awards function both as a physical and an imaginary site that embodies the ambivalence of the umbrella term “Chinese-language cinemas,” this article sheds light on broader complex issues of national identities, globalization, and transnational cinemas in film awards studies.

Transnational identities, being and belonging: the diverse home literacies of multilingual immigrant families

Abstract This paper uses a transnational lens to discuss findings from a longitudinal study of the home literacy practices of linguistically diverse immigrant families. The paper draws on the experiences of three families to show how literacy events and practices index and mediate immigrants’ identities as they settle into the host community. Observations, interviews, and family members’ own documentation of their home literacies revealed the richness and complexity of the families’ linguistic repertoires. Using Levitt and Schiller’s distinction between ways of being and ways of belonging, the paper focuses on the role of everyday literacies in the families’ lives and on how critical events at home and abroad shaped family members’ identities as they navigated their new lives. The paper offers insights into the role of multilingual literacies in the settlement process and draws attention to the significance of literacy practices in shaping immigrants’ transnationalism.

Women who watch and support English football in Zimbabwe: a transnational analysis of female fandoms

ABSTRACT In this paper, we explore the lived experiences of women who watch and support English football teams in Zimbabwe. We utilized a qualitative research approach that included in-depth interviews and football ethnographies in spaces where English football is consumed such as bars, betting halls, upmarket clubs, restaurants, hotels, and sports clubs. The paper provides a nuanced analysis of how women become part of and participate in transnational forms of cultural consumption, in this case, English football. Other major themes outlined in the paper include how and where women consume English football, performance and practices of female fans. Firstly, from our observation and fieldwork experiences in Zimbabwe men make up most transnational fans. Secondly, the spaces where football is consumed especially public spaces are male dominated. The paper concludes that transnational fan identities are gendered in multiple ways.

Diaspora activism and citizenship: Algerian community responses during the global pandemic

ABSTRACT Focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic, this article explores the Algerian diaspora’s impressive outpouring of collective solidarity in the UK and seeks to discover why and how a migrant community previously known for collective mistrust developed such forms of activism. It draws on concepts of diaspora philanthropy, activism and citizenship to understand, firstly, how diasporas might be enabled or hindered, in supporting their communities and then the wider impacts of their crisis responses on processes of social change. Drawing on participant observation, interviews and social media from charitable organisations and leading influencers from the Algerian community in the UK, it explores a wide range of remarkable initiatives to support vulnerable communities, predominantly in London during the pandemic. Motivations and facilitating factors of this solidarity included emerging trust in local elites and leaders, Islamic faith, effective engagement in online spaces and pride in a transnational Algerian identity. Seemingly apolitical towards the homeland, this activism is contributing to social transformation within this diasporic group, rebuilding fractured communities and creating new social identities, feelings of belonging and citizenship.

Examining Chinese peasants’ transnational communication patterns and identity negotiations on an Algerian construction site

An increasing number of Chinese peasants are employed in globalised Chinese enterprises’ overseas projects; African countries are among their destinations. In this study, a cohort of Chinese peasants were interviewed to gain their perspective on their communication experiences in their everyday working and leisure life on an Algerian construction site. These peasants’ reflections, complemented by the observations of their Chinese professional co-workers, reveal that they remained strongly attached to their Chinese identity during their sojourn in the host country, and hoped that their contribution as skilled workers would be recognised and accepted there. To some extent, these peasants’ everyday life experiences in the host country changed their identity and extended their professional repertoire of skills and communication patterns. When talking about their future, however, the peasants expressed a desire to return to their homeland, remaining attached to their Chinese culture and identity. Enriched by these experiences, their value as skilled workers should be recognised when they return to rural China. The paper explores the Chinese peasants’ transnational communication patterns and their identity negotiations and transformations, and contributes to research into peasants’ communication practices in the context of migration.