Diaspora And Cultural Negotiations

African Diaspora Identities provides insights into the complex transnational processes involved in shaping the migratory identities of African immigrants. It seeks to understand the durability of these African transnational migrant identities and their impact on inter-minority group relationships. John A. Arthur demonstrates that the identities African immigrants construct often transcends country-specific cultures and normative belief systems. He illuminates the fact that these transnational migrant identities are an amalgamation of multiple identities formed in varied social transnational settings. The United States has become a site for the cultural formations, manifestations, and contestations of the newer identities that these immigrants seek to depict in cross-cultural and global settings. Relying mostly on their strong human capital resources (education and family), Africans are devising creative, encompassing, and robust ways to position and reposition their new identities. In combining their African cultural forms and identities with new roles, norms, and beliefs that they imbibe in the United States and everywhere else they have settled, Africans are redefining what it means to be black in a race-, ethnicity-, and color-conscious American society.

Diaspora and Cultural Negotiations: The Films of Gurinder Chadha explores critical and theoretical conceptualizations of identity, globalization, intersectionality, and diaspora, among other topics, in the films of Gurinder Chadha. This book argues that Chadha’s work offers relevant and sensitive portrayals of the members of the diaspora community that make these films of contemporary and enduring value, highlighting their challenges in hybridization and acculturation in the societies they migrate to and the historical and political exigencies that influence their everyday existence. Contributors analyze Chadha’s films in the context of cultural milieus including multiculturalism, narration and representation, ethnicity, literary adaptation, and intercultural negotiations, while also exploring Chadha’s own role as an auteur. Scholars of film studies, Indian cinema, diaspora studies, sociology, and cultural studies will find this book particularly useful.

Diaspora & Hybridity deals with those theoretical issues which concern social theory and social change in the new millennium. The volume provides a refreshing, critical and illuminating analysis of concepts of diaspora and hybridity and their impact on multi-ethnic and multi-cultural societies’ - Dr Rohit Barot, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol What do we mean by 'diaspora' and 'hybridity'? Why are they pivotal concepts in contemporary debates on race, culture and society? This book is an exhaustive, politically inflected, assessment of the key debates on diaspora and hybridity. It relates the topics to contemporary social struggles and cultural contexts, providing the reader with a framework to evaluate and displace the key ideological arguments, theories and narratives deployed in culturalist academic circles today. The authors demonstrate how diaspora and hybridity serve as problematic tools, cutting across traditional boundaries of nations and groups, where trans-national spaces for a range of contested cultural, political and economic outcomes might arise. Wide ranging, richly illustrated and challenging, it will be of interest to students of cultural studies, sociology, ethnicity and nationalism.

Framed in relation to diaspora this collection engages with the subject of how cultural difference is lived and how complex and shifting identities shape and respond to spatial politics of belonging. Diaspora is understood in a variety of ways, which makes this an eclectic collection of papers. Authors use various theoretical frameworks to explore diverse groups of people with a variety of experiences in a wide range of settings. They are making sense of the experiences of women and men from a range of ethnic backgrounds, negotiating identities through family, work and education. The micro dynamics of the everyday offer an evocative 'bottom up' means of understanding the tensions implicit in living multiple belongings. The common thread for the collection comes from the glimpses these authors provide into the remaking of our globalized world. The aim is to shed light on racism, dislocation and alienation on the one hand, and on the other hand, to consider how the complex power relations within the everyday mediate a sense of resistance and hope. The papers are arranged around four themes; 1. Multiple Belongings, 2. Representing a Way of Being, 3. Sexualised Identifications and 4. Marriage and Family.

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2013. This volume examines the complex and inter-disciplinary issue of diaspora in the context of globalisation and contributing social, historical and cultural factors of the modern world. Each chapter offers a distinct point of view and a particular way of understanding diasporas in numerous cultures and societies in different parts of the globe. The collection consists of a series of detailed analyses of aspects ranging from diasporic representations in the cinema, literature and poetry to diasporic projections in current socio-political and international matters. Each chapter provides an individual examination of a particular aspect of diaspora in order to frame a bigger picture of modern diasporic choices.

Migrant, Multicultural and Diasporic Heritage explores the role heritage has played in representing, contesting and negotiating the history and politics of ethnic, migrant, multicultural, diasporic or ‘other’ heritages in, within, between and beyond nations and national boundaries. Containing contributions from academics and professionals working across a range of fields, this volume contends that, in the face of various global ‘crises’, the role of heritage is especially important: it is a stage for the negotiation of shifting identities and for the rewriting of traditions and historical narratives of belonging and becoming. As a whole, the book connects and further develops methodological and theoretical discourses that can fuel and inform practice and social outcomes. It also examines the unique opportunities, challenges and limitations that various actors encounter in their efforts to preserve, identify, assess, manage, interpret and promote heritage pertaining to the experience and history of migration and migrant groups. Bringing together diverse case studies of migration and migrants in cultural heritage practice, Migrant, Multicultural and Diasporic Heritage will be of great interest to academics and students engaged in the study of heritage and museums, as well as those working in the fields of memory studies, public history, anthropology, archaeology, tourism and cultural studies.

The movement and dispersion of African ascendant peoples around the globe has been historically rooted in struggle and oppression. The issues that arise include naming, African identities, cultural memory, and what methodologies best serve the work we do on behalf of African people. (Im)migrations, Relations, and Identities thoughtfully researches and discusses these issues.

Diasporas, Cultures and Identities brings together a range of original research papers from Ethnic and Racial Studies that are concerned with the question of the role of diasporic ties and the social, cultural and political processes that are engendered by the changing experiences of these communities. Chapters cover a range of geopolitical and empirical contexts and serve to highlight the diverse theoretical and empirical questions that have become an integral part of the study of race and ethnicity in the contemporary environment. The study of the role of diasporas in modern societies has proceeded apace over the past two decades. Although the role of diasporic communities has been the subject of historical reflection for some time, it is only now that the concept of diaspora has become a core theme in the social sciences and humanities. We have seen an ongoing discussion about notions such as diaspora, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism and their appropriateness as conceptual frames of reference for analyzing the diverse experiences of communities that have become dispersed across the globe. This collection makes an important contribution to this body of scholarship and research. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Asian diasporas are all too often seen in terms of settlement problems in a host nation, where the focus is on issues of crime, housing, employment, racism and related concerns. The essays in this volume view Asian diasporic movements in the context of globalization and global citizenship, in which multiple cultural allegiances, influences and claims together create complex negotiations of identity.Examining a range of cultural documents through which such negotiations are conducted — literature and other forms of writing, media, popular culture, urban spaces, military inscriptions, and so on — the essays in this volume explore the meanings and experiences involved in the two major Asian diasporic movements, those of South and East Asia.

This is an examination of media and communication within disaporic ethnic communities in Australia: the Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese and Thai communities. The study explores the ethnic community as a force in negotiating new hybrid identities and experiences common to disaporic groups worldwide.