Identidades na Roda: diálogos com a Capoeira Angola e com as narrativas de suas/seus praticantes

Este trabalho tem como proposta pensar os processos identitários da afrodiáspora, a partir dos diálogos com a Capoeira Angola e as narrativas de suas/seus praticantes. Apresentamos a Capoeira Angola como prática cultural de matriz africana, significada por um processo histórico de luta e resistência das populações negras na diáspora. Procuramos discutir quais identidades são reivindicadas, tecidas e enunciadas nessa prática, com especial atenção às identidades angoleiras, às identidades negras e ao pertencimento etnicorracial enunciado por suas/seus praticantes. O processo histórico de escravização das populações negras no Brasil resultou na discriminação racial de mulheres e homens negras/os e na visibilização estereotipada das suas práticas e epistemologias, produzindo diferenciações hierárquicas. A cultura como enunciação e diferença permite através do ato enunciativo, a produção de novos sentidos e significados para as populações negras, que ressignificam suas identidades e tensionam às lógicas e racionalidades hegemônicas. As identidades são compreendidas como processos de identificação, permitidos pelo dinamismo da cultura e pelas práticas discursivas. O agenciamento coletivo reivindica outras identificações, de modo que o ato enunciativo pode produzir novos sentidos para às significações atribuídas às populações negras, sendo a linguagem um importante mecanismo de circulação da palavra e o indicador mais sensível de transformações sociais.

Local studies collections online: an investigation in Irish public libraries

Barry, L., Tedd, L.A. (2008). Local studies collections online: an investigation in Irish public libraries. Program: electronic library and information systems, 42(2), 163-186.

The Jews in the Modern World : A History Since 1750

Rubinstein, William, et al., The Jews in the Modern World: A History Since 1750 (London: Hodder and Arnold, 2002), pp.xiv+449 RAE2008

Polskie tradycje muzyczne na południowo-wschodniej Syberii i ich rola w kształtowaniu tożsamości narodowo-etnicznej

Wydział Historyczny: Katedra Muzykologii

El retorno de la diáspora artística latinoamericana/La acción diferida del desplazamiento

Tendemos ha hablar del término diáspora como el lugar del desprendimiento, del desplazamiento hacia otros territorios de existencia, sin embargo la realización de ello indica la contaminación y generación de nuevos lenguajes, que en el arte latinoamericano manifiestan un continuo retorno. Un ir y venir que puede ser inscrito por medio de la acción diferida establecida en el momento en el cual el hecho diaspórico es registrado por otro capacitado de recodificarlo al historizar la realidad fundante del desplazamiento artístico como perturbación del orden simbólico y a su vez enunciar la relectura de las diásporas artísticas latinoamericanas, desde las vanguardias hasta la contemporaneidad como medio de reinscripción del movimiento en cuanto a espacio primordial de sus representaciones. La premisa central de este estudio es la de visualizar cómo el desplazamiento de distintas diásporas artísticas latinoamericanas han trasformado el lenguaje del arte de nuestro territorio, dentro del permanente ir y venir de una acción diferida que las hace eficaces a través de nuestro posicionamiento al releer el presente de nuestras diásporas y cómo los actos del desplazamiento sólo pueden aparecer en la historización de su continuo retorno. There is a tendency to treat the term diaspora as the place of detachment, of the displacement toward other territories of existence; however, its fulfilment implies the contamination and the generation of other languages which in Latin American Art involves a continuous return. A Come and Go inscribed by means of the deferred action, established in the moment in which the diasporic fact is registered by another one capable of recoding through history-making in the funding reality of the artistic displacement as a disturbance of the symbolic order and simultaneously enunciating the re-reading of the Latin American artistic diaporas, from the vanguards to contemporaneity as the means of re-inscription of the movement as the primary space of its representations. The central premise of this study is that of visualising how the displacement of different Latin American artistic disporas have transformed the art language of our territories, within the permanent Come and Go of a deferred action that works efficiently through our positioning in re-reading the present of our diasporas and how the displacement acts only can appear in the history-making of its continuous return.

Claude McKay and the transnational novel

This thesis considers the three works of fiction of the Jamaican author Claude McKay (1889-1948) as a coherent transnational trilogy which dramatises the semi-autobiographical complexities of diasporic exile and return in the period of the 1920s and 1930s. Chapter One explores McKay’s urban North American novel, Home to Harlem (1928). I suggest that we need to ‘reworld’ conceptions of McKay’s writing in order to release him from his canonical confinement in the Harlem Renaissance. Querying the problematics of the city space, of sexuality and of race as they emerge in the novel, this chapter considers McKay’s percipient understanding of the need to reconfigure diasporic identity beyond the limits set by American nationalism. Chapter Two engages with McKay’s novel of portside Marseilles, Banjo (1929), and considers the homosocial interactions of the vagabond collective. A comparison of North America and France as supposed exemplars of individual liberty highlights the unsuitability of nationalistic prerogatives to an internally diverse black diaspora. Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic construct provides a suggestive space in which to re-imagine the possibilities of affiliation in the port. The latter section of the chapter examines McKay’s particular influence on, and relationship, to the Négritude movement and Pan-African philosophies. Chapter Three focuses on McKay’s third novel, Banana Bottom (1933). I suggest here that the three novels comprise a coherent New World Trilogy comparable to Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite’s trilogy, The Arrivants. This chapter considers both the Caribbean and the transnational dimensions to McKay’s work.

Migration: A Heideggerian analysis

The phenomenon of migration has been widely researched by the social sciences. Theories regarding the migrant have been developed in terms of the oppressive social context that is often encountered, proposing different alternatives to understand and overcome such oppression. Through the current project, an alternative view is presented that first, questions the accuracy of the social theories of migration and second, proposes an alternative understanding of this experience. Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology of Being offers a contextualized view of existence that nonetheless includes elements of our experience that are shared due to a common mode of being. I use Heidegger’s philosophy in order to broaden the understanding of the migrant’s experience analyzing those elements that he identifies as shared (for instance: human sociability, a desire for a home, the uncanny, etc.) and comparing them with common issues raised by migrants (identity, homesickness, belonging, etc.). In this way, I intend to present a more complete picture of the experience of migration that considers both empirical evidence of individual migrants and an existential analysis that incorporates the defining elements of our world and our existence as crucial means to understand any experience, including that of migration.

ARAB MUSICIANS IN WASHINGTON, D.C. AREA: ETHNICITY AND IDENTITY

Musicians living in the Arab Diaspora around the Washington, D.C. metro area are a small group of multi-faceted individuals with significant contributions and intentions to propagate and disseminate their music. Various levels of identity are discussed and analyzed, including self-identity, group/ collective identity, and Arab ethnic identity. The performance and negotiation of Arab ethnic identity is apparent in selected repertoire, instrumentation, musical style, technique and expression, shared conversations about music, worldview on Arabic music and its future. For some musicians, further evidence of self-construction of one's ethnic identity entails choice of name, costume, and venue. Research completed is based on fieldwork, observations, participant-observations, interviews, and communications by phone and email. This thesis introduces concepts of Arabic music, discusses recent literature, reveals findings from case studies on individual Arab musicians and venues, and analyzes Arab identity and ethnicity in relation to particular definitions of identity found in anthropological and ethnomusicological writings. Musical lyrics, translations, transcriptions, quotes, discussions, analyses, as well as charts and diagrams of self-identity analyses are provided as evidence of the performance and negotiation of Arab identity.

Of Trustees and Offsprings: A Diasporic Trail of Parsi “Crisis” from Bombay to Hong Kong

This thesis examines the discourse(s) of crisis in the Parsi diaspora. Treating crisis as a common variable, rather than a singular and unique event across various Parsi communities, I investigate the dimensions of crisis that bind separated Parsi communities in anxiety through a shared language, cultural experience, and historical memory. Turning first to India and then Hong Kong as my case studies, I analyze “crisis,” that has often been identified in terms of demographic decay or postcolonial decline, in the context of more subtle debates around racial purity and trust funds. Crisis, for the Parsi diaspora, while indicating a critical moment in the present, also serves to reveal the underlying and pre-existing socio-economic and cultural tensions in the communities. Relying largely on life-story interviews, online blogs and articles, and archival work, I portray the crisis not as a unique and sporadic event, but rather as one of continuity and complexity, albeit manifesting each time in different and unique guises, that continues to disrupt as well as unite the Parsi diaspora today.

Longing and (un)belonging: desire and displacement in the cinematic city

This paper explores the spatial conceptualisation of the themes of diaspora, displacement and desire in cinema, particularly in the work of Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Uzak) , Fatih Akin (Gegen Die Wand) and Michael Winterbottom (Code 46). All three directors explore the imagined cinematic city as a site of multiple (un)belongings and interrogate how notions of identity are displaced and disrupted by geopolitics, by the city and by cinema itself. Both Ceylan and Akin’s visions of Istanbul are haunted by Beyoglu, both as the site of Istanbul’s contemporary cultural regeneration and by unspoken histories repressed by the Republic’s offical rhetoric of Turkish identity. In contrast Akin and Winterbottom’s heterotopias of the hotel and the hospital provide possible metaphors for these dislocated global identities. This paper will engage with a series of questions. What is the (imagined) place created between the viewer and the screen, or is it a non-place? Do the identities/ memories created there produce a ‘third space’? This paper uses Winnicot, Soja and Bhabha to ask what that third space might be and its consequences for a contemporary global Turkish identity. If these films depict a (Freudian) screen memory of dislocated subjectivities then what is being suppressed and sutured?

READING AND RESPONDING: FINDING AND MAKING MEANING IN THE LIFE WRITING OF DIASPORIC IRANIAN JEWISH WOMEN

This project investigates the English-language life writing of diasporic Iranian Jewish women. It examines how these women have differentially imagined their diasporic lives and travels, and how they have in turn been imagined and accepted or rejected by their audiences. In the first chapter, I use “home” as a lens for understanding three distinct life writing texts, showing how the authors write about what it means to have a home and to be at home in contrasting and even contradictory ways. I show how, despite potential hegemonic readings that perpetuate unequal relationships and a normative definition of the ideal home, the texts are open to multiple contestatory readings that create spaces for new formulations and understandings. In the second chapter, I look more closely at the intersections between trauma stories and the life writing of Iranian Jewish women, and I argue that readers use life writing texts about trauma to support an egocentric reconstruction of American democracy and dominance. I also show how a critical frame for understanding trauma can yield interpretations that highlight, rather than ignore, relationships of power and privilege. In the final chapter of the thesis, I present a case study of two online reading groups, and I show that communal reading environments, though they participate in dominant discourses, are also spaces where resistance and subversion can develop.

The Irish hospitals sweepstake in the United States of America, 1930-1939

The Irish hospitals sweepstake was established by statute in the Irish Free State in 1930 to fund the state’s hospital service. The vast majority of tickets were sold outside Ireland, particularly in countries where such gambling was illegal at the time. Initially the largest market was in the United Kingdom, but following the introduction of restrictive legislation there in 1934, the promoters of the sweepstake turned their attentions to North America and after 1936 the United States became the largest source of contributions to the Irish sweep. This article examines a number of factors concerning the relationship of the Irish sweep with the USA, including: an effort to estimate the amount of money contributed to the sweep by Americans; the role of the Irish diaspora and of prominent republicans, including Joseph McGarrity and Connie Neenan, in the illegal ticket distribution network; the efforts of American Federal agencies and government departments to disrupt the sweepstake organisation in America; how the sweep was used by those who sought to legalise gambling in the USA; the attitudes of both the Irish and American governments to the sweep’s activities in America; and how the legalisation of gambling in America brought about the demise of the Irish sweep.