Reading Migration and Culture


Book Description

This book uses the uniquely positioned culture of East African Asians to reflect upon the most vexing issues in postcolonial literary studies today. By examining the local histories and discourses that underpin East African Asian literature, it opens up and reflects upon issues of alienation, modernity, migration, diaspora, memory and nationalism.




Intercultural Church


Book Description

This volume is among if not the first to reflect on the contemporary phenomenon of migration from an ecclesiological perspective. It sets the context of migration and cultural encounters within a global capitalist economy and expounds on the concept of interculturality employing theoretical frameworks that evidently locate cultural practices in the context of power such as those of Stuart Hall and Pierre Bourdieu. Some essays describe and evaluate metaphors for the church and ecclesiological models which have emerged in response to various migration contexts. The intercultural church is proposed as a vision and direction toward which other churches can aspire, given the right conditions.




Wind Over Water


Book Description

Providing a comprehensive treatment of a full range of migrant destinies in East Asia by scholars from both Asia and North America, this volume captures the way migrants are changing the face of Asia, especially in cities, such as Beijing, Hong Kong, Hamamatsu, Osaka, Tokyo, and Singapore. It investigates how the crossing of geographical boundaries should also be recognized as a crossing of cultural and social categories that reveals the extraordinary variation in the migrants’ origins and trajectories. These migrants span the spectrum: from Korean bar hostesses in Osaka to African entrepreneurs in Hong Kong, from Vietnamese women seeking husbands across the Chinese border to Pakistani Muslim men marrying women in Japan, from short-term business travelers in China to long-term tourists from Japan who ultimately decide to retire overseas. Illuminating the ways in which an Asian-based analysis of migration can yield new data on global migration patterns, the contributors provide important new theoretical insights for a broader understanding of global migration, and innovative methodological approaches to the spatial and temporal complexity of human migration.




Migrants in Translation


Book Description

Migrants in Translation is an ethnographic reflection on foreign migration, mental health, and cultural translation in Italy. Its larger context is Europe and the rapid shifts in cultural and political identities that are negotiated between cultural affinity and a multicultural, multiracial Europe. The issue of migration and cultural difference figures as central in the process of forming diverse yet unified European identities. In this context, legal and illegal foreignersÑmostly from Eastern Europe and Northern and Sub-Saharan AfricaÑare often portrayed as a threat to national and supranational identities, security, cultural foundations, and religious values. This book addresses the legal, therapeutic, and moral techniques of recognition and cultural translation that emerge in response to these social uncertainties. In particular, Migrants in Translation focuses on Italian ethno-psychiatry as an emerging technique that provides culturally appropriate therapeutic services exclusively to migrants, political refugees, and victims of torture and trafficking. Cristiana Giordano argues that ethno-psychiatryÕs focus on cultural identifications as therapeuticÑinasmuch as it complies with current political desires for diversity and multiculturalismÑalso provides a radical critique of psychiatric, legal, and moral categories of inclusion, and allows for a rethinking of the politics of recognition.




Cultures in Contact


Book Description

A landmark work on human migration around the globe, Cultures in Contact provides a history of the world told through the movements of its people. It is a broad, pioneering interpretation of the scope, patterns, and consequences of human migrations over the past ten centuries. In this magnum opus thirty years in the making, Dirk Hoerder reconceptualizes the history of migration and immigration, establishing that societal transformation cannot be understood without taking into account the impact of migrations and, indeed, that mobility is more characteristic of human behavior than is stasis. Signaling a major paradigm shift, Cultures in Contact creates an English-language map of human movement that is not Atlantic Ocean-based. Hoerder describes the origins, causes, and extent of migrations around the globe and analyzes the cultural interactions they have triggered. He pays particular attention to the consequences of immigration within the receiving countries. His work sweeps from the eleventh century forward through the end of the twentieth, when migration patterns shifted to include transpacific migration, return migrations from former colonies, refugee migrations, and distinct regional labor migrations in the developing world. Hoerder demonstrates that as we enter the third millennium, regional and intercontinental migration patterns no longer resemble those of previous centuries. They have been transformed by new communications systems and other forces of globalization and transnationalism.




Culture, Literature and Migration


Book Description

Culture, Literature and Migration gives us a unique insight into the emotional and physical experiences of immigrants. By shedding light on the challenges of the plight, the chapters in this book raise awareness of the global scale of the crisis and reduces hostility towards the displaced as a result of a better understanding of that which is often left unspoken of and unheard of. The distinctiveness of voluntary and involuntary immigration is brought forward and contextualized in order to emphasise the trauma of forced departure and the often forgotten psychological complications of the host nation. With such matters arising, there is an ultimate return to notions of hegemony, colonialism, otherness, hybridity and citizenship. New understandings of identity, nationalism and multiculturalism are explored in context of transnationalism and multiculturalism. Culture, Literature and Migration critically analyzes the transformation of the immigrant and highlights the importance of hope and the power of inclusiveness in a fragmented global environment. Content Introduction – Ali Tilbe and Rania M Rafik Khalil Chapter 1 – The Bildungsroman and Building a Hybrid Identity in the Postcolonial Context: Migration as Formative Experience in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane Petru Golban and Derya Benli Chapter 2 – The Migrant Female Writer, Originally from Muslim Country in the Literary Field: A Sociological Approach Francesco Bellinzis Chapter 3 – Migration, Integration and Power. The Image of “the Dumb Swede” in Swede Hollow and the Image of Contemporary New Swedes in One Eye Red and She Is Not Me Maria Bäcke Chapter 4 – Coerced Migration, Migrating Rhetoric: The ‘Forked Tongue’ of Native American Removal Policy in the Nineteenth-Century United States Estella Ciobanu Chapter 5 – The Migrant Hero’s Boundaries of Masculine Honour Code in Elif Shafak’s Honour Tatiana Golban Chapter 6 – Literary Representations of Progressive Era Lithuanian Immigrants in the United States and the Question of Genre: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) Cansu Özge Özmen Chapter 7 – Migration, Maturation and Identity Crisis in Abani’s Select Novels: A Postcolonial Reading Bernard Dickson and Chinyere Egbuta




Mobility and Migration in Indigenous Amazonia


Book Description

Contrary to ingrained academic and public assumptions, wherein indigenous lowland South American societies are viewed as the product of historical emplacement and spatial stasis, there is widespread evidence to suggest that migration and displacement have been the norm, and not the exception. This original and thought-provoking collection of case studies examines some of the ways in which migration, and the concomitant processes of ecological and social change, have shaped and continue to shape human-environment relations in Amazonia. Drawing on a wide range of historical time frames (from pre-conquest times to the present) and ethnographic contexts, different chapters examine the complex and important links between migration and the classification, management, and domestication of plants and landscapes, as well as the incorporation and transformation of environmental knowledge, practices, ideologies and identities.




U.S. Media and Migration


Book Description

Winner of the 2017 Outstanding Book Award from the National Communication Association's International and Intercultural Communication Division and the 2017 Sue DeWine Book Award from the NCA Applied Communication Division Using oral history, ethnography, and close readings of media, Sarah C. Bishop probes the myriad and sometimes conflicting ways refugees interpret and use mediated representations of life in the United States. Guided by 74 refugee narrators from Bhutan, Burma, Iraq, and Somalia, U.S. Media and Migration explores answers to questions such as: What does one learn from media about an unfamiliar place? How does media help or hinder refugees' sense of belonging after relocation? And how does the U.S. government use media to shape refugees' understanding of American norms, standards, and ideals? With insights from refugees and resettlement administrators throughout, Bishop provides a compelling and layered analysis of the interaction between refugees and U.S. media before, during, and long after resettlement.




Critical Reflections on Migration, 'Race' and Multiculturalism


Book Description

Migration and its associated social practices and consequences have been studied within a multitude of academic disciplines and in the context of policies at local, national and regional level. This edited collection provides an introduction and critical review of conceptual developments and policy contexts of migration scholarship within an Australian and global context, through: political economy analyses of migration and associated transformations; sociological analyses of ‘settling in’ processes; multi-disciplinary analyses of migrant work; a historical review of scholarship on refugees; a Southern theory approach to cultural diversity; sociological reflections on post-nationalism; Cultural Studies analyses of public culture and ‘second generation’ youth cultures; interdisciplinary and Critical Race analyses of ‘race’ and racism; feminist intersectional analyses of migration, belonging and representation; the theorising of cosmopolitanism; a transdisciplinary analysis of gender, transnational families and care; and a comparative, transcontextual analysis of hybridity. An essential contribution to the current mapping of migration studies, with a focus on Australian scholarship in its international context, this collection will be of interest to undergraduates and postgraduates interested in fields such as Sociology, Cultural Studies, Geography and Politics.




The Distance Between Us


Book Description

In this inspirational and unflinchingly honest memoir, acclaimed author Reyna Grande describes her childhood torn between the United States and Mexico, and shines a light on the experiences, fears, and hopes of those who choose to make the harrowing journey across the border. Reyna Grande vividly brings to life her tumultuous early years in this “compelling...unvarnished, resonant” (BookPage) story of a childhood spent torn between two parents and two countries. As her parents make the dangerous trek across the Mexican border to “El Otro Lado” (The Other Side) in pursuit of the American dream, Reyna and her siblings are forced into the already overburdened household of their stern grandmother. When their mother at last returns, Reyna prepares for her own journey to “El Otro Lado” to live with the man who has haunted her imagination for years, her long-absent father. Funny, heartbreaking, and lyrical, The Distance Between Us poignantly captures the confusion and contradictions of childhood, reminding us that the joys and sorrows we experience are imprinted on the heart forever, calling out to us of those places we first called home. Also available in Spanish as La distancia entre nosotros.