Multiple Diasporas: Jews in Cuba, Cuban Jews in Miami (A Forum) [1]

This flyer is the first of two flyers that promote the event "Multiple Diasporas: Jews in Cuba, Cuban Jews in Miami (A Forum)" FlU's Ruth K. and Shepard Broad Distinguished Lecture Series, Latin American and Caribbean Center, Department of Religious Studies, Jewish Studies Initiatives, and Jewish Museum of Florida-FlU.

Multiple Diasporas: Jews in Cuba, Cuban Jews in Miami (A Forum) [2]

This flyer is the second of two flyers that promote the event "Multiple Diasporas: Jews in Cuba, Cuban Jews in Miami (A Forum)".

9th Conference on Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, Dispersed Peoples: The Cuban and Other Diasporas [Call for Papers and Panels]

This is the call for papers and panels for the 9th Conference on Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, Dispersed Peoples: The Cuban and Other Diasporas.

Franchise nations : the future of nations?

In this paper, I extend the notion of franchise nations, borrowed from Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk novel Snow Crash (1993), in order to employ it as a device for thinking about the future of the nation. I argue the concept to be particularly well suited for such contemplation because of its sound grounding in the historical intermesh of economic, political and cultural motivations intrinsic to the concept as well as lived experience of the nation. I illustrate this very briefly by casting (mainland) China as the master franchisor and the overseas Chinese as franchisees. Specifically, I discuss the media events concerning China that took place during 2008, such as the protests and counter-protests that occurred at various legs of the Olympic Torch Relay, the Sichuan earthquake of 12 May and the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics on 8 August, and reactions to these happenings from overseas Chinese located variously in Australia, Canada and the United States. I argue that employing the notion of franchise nations lays bare the commercial and political instrumentalism behind the promotion and courtship of diasporas by home nations but, crucially, also aids in the understanding of the reciprocal processes by which franchisees are fashioned out of these communities. Finally, I suggest that, aside from China, franchise nations may also be a useful approach for thinking about how nations like India and Singapore are expanded, exported and explained into the future.

Franchise nations : theorising diaspora from outside In(dia)

Research on diaspora has long been dominated by approaches that centre on displacement, relocation, mixed identities, cultural hybridity, loss, yearning and disaffection. In this paper, I outline a fresh conceptual framework, franchise nation, which approaches the study of diaspora from the perspective of the state. What this framework allows is the study of the processes that states employ to woo, nurture and engage their diasporas so as to extend their sovereignty extra-territorially, ie. statecraft. The franchise nation concept draws on the notion of cultural expediency and complements two approaches that dominate the study of statecraft today: soft power and nation branding. However, the point of this is not, to borrow Gayatri Spivak’s words, to be either pro or anti-sovereign but rather to stay awake to how sovereignty is “invoked, extended, deterritorialised, aggregated, [and] abrogated” (2007). Far from suggesting the imminent arrival of a post-national period, the intention with the franchise nation concept is to explicate and better understand the complexities that inhabit the terrain between diaspora, home and host nation that allow and accompany the exercise of sovereignty from afar.

Reorienting diaspora : China and India as franchise nations

In this paper, I outline a new approach towards media and diaspora using the concept of the ‘franchise nation’. It is my contention that current theories on migration, media and diaspora with their emphasis on exile, multiple belongings, hybrid identities and their representations are inadequate to the task of explaining the emergence of a new trend in diaspora, home and host nation relationship. This, I suggest, is a recent shift most notable in the attitudes of the Chinese and Indian governments toward their diasporas. From earlier eras where Chinese sojourners were regarded as disloyal and Indians overseas left to fend for themselves, Chinese and Indian migrants are today directly addressed and wooed by their nations of origin. This change is motivated in part by the realisation that diasporic populations are, in fact, resources that can bring significant influence to bear on home nation interests within host nations. Such sway in foreign lands gains greater importance as China and India are, by virtue of their economic rise and prominence on the world stage, subject to ever more intense international scrutiny. Members of these diasporas have willingly responded to these changes by claiming and cultivating pivotal roles for themselves within host nations as spokespersons, informants and representatives, trading on their assumed familiarity with home cultures, language and commerce. As a result, China and India have initiated a number of statecraft strategies in recent years to (re)engage their diasporas. Both nations have identified media as amongst the key instruments of their strategies. New media enhances the ability of all parties—home and host states, institutions and individuals—to participate, interact and reciprocate. While China’s centralised government has utilised the notion of soft power (ruan shili) to describe its practices, India’s efforts are diffused along the lines of nation branding via myriad labels like India Inc. and the Global Indian. To explain this emergent trend, I propose a new framework, franchise nation, defined as a reciprocal relationship between nation and diaspora that is characterised by mutual obligations and benefits. In appropriating this phrase from Stephenson, I liken contemporary statecraft operating in China and India to a business franchising system wherein benefits may be economic or cultural and; those thus connected signal their willingness for mutual exchange and concede a sense of obligation. As such, franchise nation is not concerned with remote, unidirectional interference in home nation affairs a la Anderson’s ‘long-distance nationalism’. Rather, it is a framework that seeks to reflect more closely the dynamism of the relationship between diaspora, home and host nations.

After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory, edited by Janet Halley and Andrew Parker [Review]

In its earliest and simplest form queer theory proposes that sexual identity is not essential, but socially constructed, and understandings of identity, gender and sexuality are constructed differently at different times and in different places. Queer theory aims to challenge normative understandings of sex, sexuality and gender, and also normative concepts of knowledge and being. Since its inception, queer theory has been taken up by a number of disciplines as an analytical framework. These include cultural geography, education studies, film studies and sociology. In the last decade queer theory has been used to consider citizenship, diasporas and post colonial experiences. A queer theoretical perspective has also been used to analyse emotions, the Death Drive, phenomenology, and disability. As queer theory enters its third decade Janet Halley and Andrew Parker ask what is after sex? ‘What has queer theory become now that it has a past?’

The promise of Iceland

Memoir, 288 pages. An account of journeys made by the author from Australia to Iceland as a way of interrogating notions of cultural belonging, family, and homecoming. "In 1990, Kári Gíslason travelled to Iceland to meet his father for the first time. What he finds is not what he expected. Born from a secret liaison between a British mother and an Icelandic father, Kári Gíslason was the subject of a promise – a promise elicited from his father to not reveal his identity. The Icelandic city of Reykjavík, where Kári was born, was also home to his father and his father’s wife and five children – none of whom knew of Kári’s existence. Moving regularly between Iceland and Australia, he grew up aware of his father’s identity, but understanding that it was the subject of a secret pact between his parents. At the age of 27, he makes a decision to break the pact and contacts his father’s other family. What follows, and what leads him there, makes for a riveting journey over landscapes, time and memory. Kári travels from the freezing cold winters of Iceland to the shark net at Sydney’s Balmoral, an unsettled life in the English countryside and the harsh yellow summer of Brisbane, and back again. He traces the steps of his mother who answered an ad in The Times for an English-speaking secretary in 1970 and found herself in Iceland among the ‘Army of Foreign Secretaries’, and in the arms of a secret lover. Iceland becomes the substitute for the father Kári never really knew as he discovers the meaning of ‘home’ and closes the circle of his own fatherless life."-- publisher website

Popular media as public 'Sphericules' for diasporic communities

The dynamics of 'diasporic' video, television, cinema, music and Internet use - where peoples displaced from homelands by migration, refugee status or business and economic imperative use media to negotiate new cultural identities - offer challenges for how media and culture are understood in our times. Drawing on research published in Floating Lives: The Media and Asian Diasporas, on dynamics that are industrial (the pathways by which these media travel to their multifarious destinations), textual and audience-related (types of diasporic style and practice where popular culture debates and moral panics are played out in culturally divergent circumstances among communities marked by internal difference and external 'othering'), the article will interrogate further the nature of the public 'sphericules' formed around diasporic media.

Dreams in the Shadows : Vietnamese-Australian Lives in Transition

Explores the experiences of Vietnamese immigrants in Australia. Description What is it like to be a refugee in a country that has a completely different culture from your own, where you feel very different from those around you? With a fine eye for detail and keen empathy for her interviewees, Mandy Thomas explores the experiences of Vietnamese living in Australia. She examines displacement and loss, the ongoing effects of war trauma, and international and community politics. While reflecting on many of the contemporary debates on identity and communality, she explores the concrete realities of Vietnamese lives through their daily experiences. She discusses how Vietnamese families have adapted Western domestic architecture to create a more comfortable home environment, how traditional festivals now serve new purposes, and the changing nature of status and gender relations. She describes the reception of the Vietnamese by the wider Australian society and in the media, and she explores the ongoing ties that overseas Vietnamese have with their homeland. Dreams in the Shadows is a valuable resource for anyone working with immigrant communities, for readers interested in Vietnamese immigration to Western countries, and for researchers of migration and multiculturalism. 'Dreams in the Shadows is a wonderfully sensitive account of Vietnamese in Australia that provides insight into the worlds of Vietnamese immigrants and the often marginalizing orders of the host society.' Bruce Kapferer, Professor of Anthropology, James Cook University and University College London 'A perceptive, sensitive and culturally nuanced account of one of the most recently formed diasporas - that of Vietnamese in Sydney. Deserves to be widely read.' Pnina Werbner, Reader in Social Anthropology, Keele University

Vietnamese in Australia

Vietnamese-Australians live in Australia, a large island continent. The physical contrast between Vietnam and Australia is remarked upon by many Vietnamese in their migration stories. Whereas Vietnam is remembered as an interlinked sensual and social world, Australia is often viewed as a harsh, spacious, empty, dry continent. Australia is located in a regional Asian context, but this location has always been culturally and politically problematic, as it historically attempted to define itself as a "white" European nation in the Southern Hemisphere(Ang, 2000, p. xiii; McNamara & Coughlan, 1997, p. 1). During the Gold Rush period in the late 1800s, when there was widespread opposition to Chinese labor, Australia implemented a "White Australia" policy, although there were historically a significant number of Australians of Asian background. This exclusionary immigration policy was effectively overturned in the 1970s with the acceptance of a large number of refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in 1975. Vietnamese-Australians live predominantly in urban areas with over three quarters living in Sydney and Melbourne, the two largest cities. Within these two cities they are also highly concentrated in ethnically diverse suburbs, most living in areas with more than 1,000 residents born in Vietnam (Viviani, 1996, p. 49). However, Jupp (Jupp et al., 1990; Jupp, 1993) has argued that these areas are also zones of transition, with much movement in and out...

Sejong Park's Birthday Boy and Korean-Australian encounters

This chapter focuses on some of the flows of film work between Australia and South Korea and some of the roles taken by Australians in the performance (and particularly the sound) of Koreanness in different film contexts. We explore Korean-Australian collaboration on film, through case studies of Sejong Park's Oscar nominated short animated film Birthday Boy (2004) and two Korean feature films - Musa (Kim Sung-su, 2001) and Shadowless Sword (Kim Young-jun, 2005) - for which Australian firms provided sound post-production services. We show how these films instanciate and expand Korean, Australian, diasporic and transnational filmmaking.

Living on the hyphen: diaspora, identity and memory in Jamaica Kincaids Annie John / Lucy and Esmeralda Santiagos When I was Puerto Rican / Almost a woman

Esta dissertação tem por objetivo investigar o desenvolvimento de identidades de sujeitos diaspóricos em formas de narrativas nas quais a memória tem um papel crucial. As autobiografias e os memoirs têm despertado a curiosidade de muitas pessoas interessadas nos processos de construção de identidade de indivíduos que vivem em realidades singulares e nos relatos que dão sobre suas próprias vidas. Assim, o crescente interesse em diásporas e nos decorrentes deslocamentos fragmentários, provocados pelo distanciamento de raízes individuais e pelo contato com diferentes códigos culturais, poderiam legitimar as narrativas autobiográficas como maneiras estratégicas de sintetizar os nichos de identificação de autores e autoras que experimentaram uma ruptura diaspórica. Desta forma, ao analisar estes tipos de narrativas, deve-se estar atento às especificidades de algumas escritoras que passaram por processos diaspóricos e a como elas recorreram as suas memórias pessoais para, em termos literários, expressar suas subjetividades. Considerando todas essas idéias, tenciono usar Annie John e Lucy, de Jamaica Kincaid e When I Was Puero Rican e Almost a Woman, de Esmeralda Santiago como fontes de análise e amostras do desenvolvimento de identidades diaspóricas em narrativas autobiográficas

Michelle Cliffs Abeng and No telephone to heaven: a call to resistance

Escritores/as pós-coloniais têm se engajado em denunciar o doloroso legado da escravidão e do colonialismo, através da recuperação de histórias previamente apropriadas e distorcidas por narrativas mestras. A investigação e a narrativização do passado esquecido de ex-colônias têm sido uma estratégia empregada no sentido de se reconstruir identidades que foram fragmentadas devido às múltiplas opressões sofridas ou testemunhadas por autores. Michelle Cliff é uma romancista, poeta, e ensaísta diaspórica, nascida na Jamaica e que vive nos Estados Unidos. Ela é uma das muitas vozes pós-coloniais comprometidas com uma literatura de resistência que luta pela descolonização cultural e encoraja o sentimento de pertencimento. O objetivo dessa dissertação é analisar os romances de cunho autobiográfico de Cliff, Abeng (1984) e No Telephone to Heaven (1987), que lidam com questões relacionadas às práticas coloniais e pós-coloniais. Os dois romances retratam a saga da protagonista Clare Savage, através da qual Cliff revela o impacto da colonização no Caribe, denuncia as configurações de poder geradas a partir dos imbricamentos entre raça, gênero e classe, e critica a maneira deturpada como a história da Jamaica é transmitida e disseminada através da educação colonial à qual os Jamaicanos são submetidos. A autora também explora os efeitos que as diásporas exercem no processo de construção identitária e o movimento de resgate e recriação de uma história própria por parte dos sujeitos diaspóricos

Going for the jugular : strategies of resistance in the fiction of Helena Maria Viramontes

O objetivo desta dissertação é analisar contos selecionados e o romance Under the Feet of Jesus da escritora chicana Helena María Viramontes, enfocando a apropriação de mitos astecas e lendas mexicanas protagonizados por figuras femininas, históricas ou míticas, como La Manlinche, La Llorona e The Hungry Woman. Esta re-visão crítica do passado tem um papel vital para as chicanas, reais e ficcionais, ao enfrentarem o domínio patriarcal, colonial e neocolonial. Devido à complexidade gerada pela ausência de linearidade narrativa, tanto nos contos como no romance, tornou-se necessária uma breve análise das estratégias narrativas a fim de ilustrar como tais estratégias estão intrinsecamente ligadas à apresentação fragmentada da vida dos trabalhadores migrantes. Foi igualmente indispensável examinar as demais práticas narrativas da autora tais como focalização, desconstrução, simultaneidade e justaposição, assim como o elo, por ela proposto em Under the Feet of Jesus, entre leitura, identidade, e engajamento com o mundo para promover a transformação social