Writing Imagined Diasporas Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of Writing Imagined Diasporas book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.
Joel Kuortti’s Writing Imagined Diasporas: South Asian Women Reshaping North American Identity is a study of diasporic South Asian women writers. It argues that the diasporic South Asians are not merely assimilating to their host cultures but they are also actively reshaping them through their own, new voices bringing new definitions of identity. As diaspora does not emerge as a mere sociological fact but it becomes what it is because it is said to be what it is, the writings of imagined diasporas challenge “national” discourses. Diaspora brings to mind various contested ideas and images. It can be a positive site for the affirmation of an identity, or, conversely, a negative site of fears of losing that identity. Diaspora signals an engagement with a matrix of diversity: of cultures, languages, histories, people, places, times. What distinguishes diaspora from some other types of travel is its centripetal dimension. It does not only mean that people are dispersed in different places but that they congregate in other places, forming new communities. In such gatherings, new allegiances are forged that supplant earlier commitments. New imagined communities arise that not simply substitute old ones but form a hybrid space in-between various identifications. This book looks into the ways in which diasporic Indian literature handles these issues. In the context of diaspora there is an imaginative construction of collective identity in the making, That a given diaspora comes to be seen as a community is the result of a process of imagining, at the same time creating new marginalities, hybridities and dependencies, resulting in multiple marginalizations, hyphenizations and demands for allegiance. The study concentrates on eleven contemporary women writers from the United States and Canada who write on South Asian diasporic experiences. The writers are Ramabai Espinet, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amulya Malladi, Sujata Massey, Bharati Mukherjee, Uma Parameswaran, Kirin Narayan, Anita Rau Badami, Robbie Clipper Sethi, Shauna Singh Baldwin, and Vineeta Vijayaraghavan.
Metaphor and Diaspora in Contemporary Writing by J. Sell Pdf
Choose ten major contemporary diasporic writers (from Abdulrazak to Zadie), ask ten leading authorities to write about their use of metaphor, and this is the result: a timely reassertion of metaphor's unrivalled capacity to encompass sameness and difference and create understanding and empathy across boundaries of nationality, race and ethnicity.
Home, Identity, and Mobility in Contemporary Diasporic Fiction by Jopi Nyman Pdf
This innovative volume discusses the significance of home and global mobility in contemporary diasporic fiction written in English. Through analyses of central diasporic and migrant writers in the United Kingdom and the United States, the timely volume exposes the importance of home and its reconstruction in diasporic literature in the era of globalization and increasing transnational mobility. Through wide-ranging case studies dealing with a variety of black British and ethnic American writers, Home, Identity, and Mobility in Contemporary Diasporic Fiction shows how new identities and homes are constructed in the migrants' new homelands. The volume examines how diasporic novels inscribe hybridity and multiplicity in formerly uniform spaces and subvert traditional understandings of nation, citizenship, and history. Particular emphasis is on the ways in which diasporic fictions appropriate and transform traditional literary genres such as the Bildungsroman and the picaresque to explore the questions of migration and transformation. The authors discussed include Caryl Phillips, Jamal Mahjoub, Mike Phillips, Hari Kunzru, Kamila Shamsie, Benjamin Zephaniah, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Cynthia Kadohata, Ana Castillo, Diana Abu-Jaber, and Bharati Mukherjee. The volume is of particular interest to all scholars and students of post-colonial and ethnic literatures in English.
Identity, Home and Writing Elsewhere in Contemporary Chinese Diaspora Poetry by Jennifer Wong Pdf
An exploration of the burgeoning field of Anglophone Asian diaspora poetry, this book draws on the thematic concerns of Hong Kong, Asian-American and British Asian poets from the wider Chinese or East Asian diasporic culture to offer a transnational understanding of the complex notions of home, displacement and race in a globalised world. Located within current discourse surrounding Asian poetry, postcolonial and migrant writing, and bridging the fields of literary and cultural criticism with author interviews, this book provides close readings on established and emerging Chinese diasporic poets' work by incorporating the writers' own reflections on their craft through interviews with some of those featured. In doing so, Jennifer Wong explores the usefulness and limitations of existing labels and categories in reading the works of selected poets from specific racial, socio-cultural, linguistic environments and gender backgrounds, including Bei Dao, Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, Hannah Lowe and Sarah Howe, Nina Mingya Powles and Mary Jean Chan. Incorporating scholarship from both the East and the West, Wong demonstrates how these poets' experimentation with poetic language and forms serve to challenge the changing notions of homeland, family, history and identity, offering new evaluations of contemporary diasporic voices.
Women's Life Writing and Imagined Communities by Cynthia Anne Huff Pdf
Recognising the great legacy of women's life writings, this book draws on a wealth of sources to critically examine the impact of these writings on our communities.
Writing the City in British Asian Diasporas by Sean McLoughlin,William Gould,Ananya Jahanara Kabir,Emma Tomalin Pdf
In 1962, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act hastened the process of South Asian migration to postcolonial Britain. Half a decade later, now is an opportune moment to revisit the accumulated writing about the diasporas formed through subsequent settlement, and to probe the ways in which the South Asian diaspora can be re-conceptualised. Writing the City in British Asian Diasporas takes a fresh look at such matters and will have multi-disciplinary resonance worldwide. The meaning and importance of local, multi-local and trans-local dynamics is explored through a devolved and regionally-accented comparison of five British Asian cities: Bradford, the East End of London, Manchester, Leicester and Birmingham. Analysing the ‘writing’ of these differently configured cities since the 1960s, its main focus is the significant discrepancies in representation between differently-positioned texts reflecting both dominant institutional discourses and everyday lived experiences of a locality. Part I offers a comprehensive, yet still highly contested, reading of each city’s archives. Part II examines how the arts and humanities fields of History, Religion, Gender and Literary/Cultural Studies have all written British Asian diasporas, and how their perspectives might complement the better-established agendas of the social sciences. Providing an innovative analysis of South Asian communities and their multi-local identities in Britain today, this interdisciplinary book will be of interest to scholars of South Asian Studies, Migration, Ethnic and Diaspora Studies, as well as Sociology, Anthropology, and Geography.
In this fascinating and erudite book, Bryan Cheyette throws new light on a wide range of modern and contemporary writers—some at the heart of the canon, others more marginal—to explore the power and limitations of the diasporic imagination after the Second World War. Moving from early responses to the death camps and decolonization, through internationally prominent literature after the Second World War, the book culminates in fresh engagements with contemporary Jewish, post-ethnic, and postcolonial writers.div /DIVdivCheyette regards many of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century luminaries he examines—among them Hannah Arendt, Anita Desai, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Primo Levi, Caryl Phillips, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, Zadie Smith, and Muriel Spark—as critical exemplars of the diasporic imagination. Against the discrete disciplinary thinking of the academy, he elaborates and argues for a new comparative approach across Jewish and postcolonial histories and literatures. And in so doing, Cheyette illuminates the ways in which histories and cultures can be imagined across national and communal boundaries./DIV
Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora by Claire Chambers,Caroline Herbert Pdf
Literary, cinematic and media representations of the disputed category of the ‘South Asian Muslim’ have undergone substantial change in the last few decades and particularly since the events of September 11, 2001. Here we find the first book-length critical analysis of these representations of Muslims from South Asia and its diaspora in literature, the media, culture and cinema. Contributors contextualize these depictions against the burgeoning post-9/11 artistic interest in Islam, and also against cultural responses to earlier crises on the subcontinent such as Partition (1947), the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war and secession of Bangladesh, the 1992 Ayodhya riots , the 2002 Gujarat genocide and the Kashmir conflict. Offering a comparative approach, the book explores connections between artists’ generic experimentalism and their interpretations of life as Muslims in South Asia and its diaspora, exploring literary and popular fiction, memoir, poetry, news media, and film. The collection highlights the diversity of representations of Muslims and the range of approaches to questions of Muslim religious and cultural identity, as well as secular discourse. Essays by leading scholars in the field highlight the significant role that literature, film, and other cultural products such as music can play in opening up space for complex reflections on Muslim identities and cultures, and how such imaginative cultural forms can enable us to rethink secularism and religion. Surveying a broad range of up-to-date writing and cultural production, this concise and pioneering critical analysis of representations of South Asian Muslims will be of interest to students and academics of a variety of subjects including Asian Studies, Literary Studies, Media Studies, Women’s Studies, Contemporary Politics, Migration History, Film studies, and Cultural Studies.
Rethinking Diasporas by Kevin Howard,Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh Pdf
Central to the aim of both this book is to rethink the concept of diaspora as it is used both academically and popularly at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It seeks to interrogate the notion of “diaspora” in an interdisciplinary way, and to explore the contradictions inherent in contemporary notions of place and identity. It presents explorations of both “traditional” diasporas, such as the Irish community in the United States and in Great Britain, as well as recently established diasporas being formed through new patterns of migration and resettlement. Traditional conceptions of diaspora focused on forced exile from the homeland and the adoption of conscious strategies of integration upon arrival in the new land. In the past, it was assumed that migrants would rapidly assimilate into their receiving societies. Alternatively, migrant workers were regarded by themselves and their host societies as “sojourners”: they were not expected to integrate precisely because their alien presence was perceived to be temporary. Two poles then framed the traditional interpretation of migration and settlement. On the one hand, migrants assimilated rapidly; on the other, migrants were temporarily in the host-land. Yet, the realisation both that the melting pot is a myth and that migrant workers do not, in the main, go home, has forced an increasing acceptance of ethnic diversity. This, combined with ongoing improvements in travel and communications technologies, facilitates today’s migrants in maintaining links with their home countries. The increased visibility of transnational ethnic communities and a resurgence in labour migration in the twenty-first century, have stimulated academic interest in both contemporary diasporas and in recovering the hidden narratives of earlier global migrations. The renewed interest in the formation and narrative of diasporas is evident across a range of disciplines. Moreover, the meaningful exploration of any aspect of the humanities and social sciences requires an inter-disciplinary approach. Thus is the aim of this volume. Contributors approach the issue of diaspora from a variety of academic backgrounds: sociology, politics, history, literature and the visual arts. Concomitantly, data sources are diverse, with contributors drawing on official government publications, literary sources and personal memoirs, paintings and photographs, popular culture and personal interviews. This diversity of data sources indicates the multifarious approaches to the exploration diaspora. More importantly, it highlights the critical role played by unofficial, and often hidden, narratives in representing the experiences of those who find themselves, through a variety of political, social and economic factors, displaced. "This edited collection is a timely and precocious answer to a gap in the literature of identities and nationhood. It is a response to the new challenges and opportunities facing diasporic communities and, what is more, sets out key pointers for rethinking diaspora in the twenty-first century. At a time when western states are facing the need to re-evaluate traditional responses to ethnic difference arising from migration in the mid-twentieth century, this book posits an important perspective on the multiculturalism debate. Contrary to previous political and scholarly assumptions, this book shows that the children and grandchildren of immigrants can continue to have an ambiguous relationship to the state in which they were born in part because of the very nature of diaspora. The enduringly complex and sometimes volatile insider/outsider relationship is explored in these chapters through analysis of various narratives, in textual, spoken and visual forms. Analysis of such ‘hidden narratives’ reveals that the meaning and pertinence of membership of a diasporic community is defined as much by the context of the host country as by the discourses of the homeland. Across their various sources and case studies, the authors demonstrate the power of the juncture between dominant national discourses of the host state and the identity of its immigrants. Each author notes how different the diasporic community in question would be – not to mention the impact on its relationship to the host state and the homeland – if some of narratives hidden over time were to be reclaimed. As one author puts it, flux in elements of identity-formation in postmodern society represents a chance to ‘engage in dialogue with our own diversity’. In constructing a coherent volume from such a diverse range of cases and disciplines, the editors successfully demonstrate the wide validity of their case for ‘rethinking diasporas’. Nonetheless, the specific origins of this book – a conference held in a border town in Ireland – are, it may be argued, uniquely significant. For the current process of change in Irish national identity is inseparable from central features of diaspora-formation that the authors highlight, including economic pressures. Moreover, just as the town of Dundalk has historically felt the effects of its proximity to Northern Ireland, so the ‘imagined borders’ of diaspora explored in this book are shown to be all the more powerful for the fact that their delineation is contested." —Katy Hayward (Institute for British-Irish Studies, UCD
Imagining the Filipino American Diaspora by Jonathan Y. Okamura Pdf
First published in 1998. The Philippines play a major role in expanding the international Filipino community through its promotion of international labor migration-Filipinos can currently be found in over 130 countries throughout the world. As the first major work to conceive of Filipino immigration as a diaspora, this study analyses the diasporic nature of Filipino relations, identities, and communities and shows how these transnational phenomena are socially constructed by the everyday actions and activities of Filipino Americans. Instead of focusing on an ethnic minority and its relation to its host society, a diasporic perspective places emphasis on the transnational relations created and maintained among that minority, its homeland, and other diasporic communities. Transnational ties are evident in the movement of people, money, consumer goods, information, and ideas. Diaspora represents a new and fluid conceptual image quite apart from the usual coordinates based on physical location, territory, and distance. Transnational relations and practices will continue to be an increasingly important dimension of the Filipino American community because of the ongoing family-based immigration from the Philippines, further technological advances in communication and transportation, the expansion of transnational capital, and continuing racism and discrimination, all of which have made it necessary for Filipinos in the United States, the Philippines, and throughout the world to create and maintain diasporic lives and culture.
Shifting Transnational Bonding in Indian Diaspora by Ruben Gowricharn Pdf
This volume examines Indian diasporic communities in various countries including the United Kingdom, Trinidad, Portugal, Netherlands, and Fiji, among others, and presents new perspectives on the shifting nature of Indian transnationalism. The book: Discusses how migrant communities reinforce the diaspora and retain a group identity, while at the same time maintaining a bond with their homelands; Highlights new tendencies in the configuration of Indian transnationalism, especially cultural entanglements with the host countries and the differentiation of homelands; Studies forces affecting bonding among these communities such as global and local encounters, glocalisation, as well as economic, political, and cultural changes within the Indian state and the wider Indian diaspora. Featuring a diverse collection of essays rooted in robust fieldwork, this volume will be of great importance for students and researchers of diaspora studies, globalization and transnational migration, cultural studies, minority studies, sociology, political studies, international relations, and South Asian studies.
Becoming Home: Diaspora and the Anglophone Transnational by Jude V. Nixon,Mariaconcetta Costantini Pdf
“Becoming Home: Diaspora and the Anglophone Transnational” is a collection of essays exploring national identity, migration, exile, colonialism, postcolonialism, slavery, race, and gender in the literature of the Anglophone world. The volume focuses on the dispersion or scattering of people in exile, and how those with an existing homeland and those displaced, without a politically recognized sovereign state, negotiate displacement and the experience of living at home-abroad. This group includes expatriate minority communities existing uneasily and nostalgically on the margins of their host country. The diaspora becomes an important cultural phenomenon in the formation of national identities and opposing attempts to transcend the idea of nationhood itself on its way to developing new forms of transnationalism. Chapters on the literature or national allegories of the diaspora and the transnational explore the diverse and geographically expansive ways in which Anglophone literature by colonized subjects and emigrants negotiates diasporic spaces to create imagined communities or a sense of home. Themes explored within these pages include restlessness, tensions, trauma, ambiguities, assimilation, estrangement, myth, nostalgia, sentimentality, homesickness, national schizophrenia, divided loyalties, intellectual capital, and geographical interstices. Special attention is paid to the complex ways identity is negotiated by immigrants to Anglophone countries writing in English about their home-abroad experience. The lived experiences of emigrants of the diaspora create a literature rife with tensions concerning identity, language, and belongingness in the struggle for home. Focusing on writers in particular geopolitical spaces, the essays in the collection offer an active conversation with leading theorizers of the diaspora and the transnational, including Edward Said, Bill Ashcroft, William Safran, Gabriel Sheffer, Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, and Benedict Anderson. This volume cuts across the broad geopolitical space of the Anglophone world of literature and cultural studies and will appeal to professors, scholars, graduate, and undergraduate students in English, comparative literature, history, ethnic and race studies, diaspora studies, migration, and transnational studies. The volume will also be an indispensable aid to public policy experts.
Diaspora Poetics in South Asian English Writings by Eeshan Ali,Md. Rakibul Islam Pdf
This volume brings together various discussions on various South Asian Diaspora writers of diverse sociopolitical backgrounds. It provides perspectives drawn from border studies, philosophical studies, and regional issues of South Asia.
At the beginning of a new writing project—whether it’s the first page of a new novel or a less ambitious project, writers often experience exhilaration, fear, or dread. For Kristjana Gunnars, the call of a new project is “like someone you don’t know knocking on your door—you either choose to let the person in or not. It’s both exciting and dangerous to start a new manuscript.” This book is an engagement with that “stranger” called writing. Creative or imaginative writing is a complex process that involves more than intellect alone. Writers make use of everything: their sensibilities, history, culture, knowledge, experience, education, and even their biology. These essays seek out, and gather into a discussion, what writers have said about their own experiences in writing. Although the writers are from around the world and of very different backgrounds, the commonality of their remarks brings home the realization that writers everywhere are grappling with similar problems—with the seemingly simple problems of when, where, why, and what to write, but also larger questions such as the relationship between writer and society, or issues of privacy, appropriation, or homelessness. While none of these questions can be definitively answered, they can be fruitfully discussed. Originating as questions posed in creative-writing seminars, these essays have grown into companion texts for both writers and readers who want to participate in a conversation about what writers do.