Contradictions in consciousness or variations in tradition: Hindu women in the South African diaspora

The introductory section of this paper reviews previous studies of the Indian diaspora to show their lack of attention to gender issues. While ideals of Hindu fundamentalism and social conditions imposed by caste are unlikely to be recreated in South Africa, it is proposed that Hindu women in South Africa are custodians of Hindu values. The paper goes on to present a brief history of middle and upper-class Hindu women in South Africa to place them within the context of the Indian diaspora. After describing the fieldwork and methodology (data were gathered from extensive interviews with 20 women representing the four major linguistic groups currently living in Durban), some of the distinctive characteristics of women's experiences and the problems these present because they are either contradictions or variations of conditions in India are discussed. The study then demonstrates that the individual choices made by the women are inconsistent with the apartheid notions of unambiguous social boundaries and also challenge the opposing Marxist perspective that ethnic consciousness is false. It is concluded that cultural adornments and self-imposed limitations on travel and socialization publicize status and ethnic identity and continuity with tradition. Hindu women in South Africa emphasize this continuity through personal beliefs or through the way they present themselves in public.     

Urbanised soundtracks: youth popular culture in the African city

This article interrogates the participation of youth in constructing and defining the African urban landscape. It seeks to examine youth popular culture and performance practices that combine indigenous sound aesthetics with enactments of cultural memory to construct the urban landscape of Botswana. Particularly, the article examines youth cultural and expressive forms such as hip-hop and Kwaito musical genres, popularised traditional music, and the satirical dramatic impersonations of radio personality Dignash Morapedi. These performances elaborate African syncretic formations that underscore the power of African popular culture to integrate, reinvigorate, and transform various social spaces and identities. Urban youths use these performance forms to demonstrate how innovative practices could be used to interrogate social realities such as unemployment, poverty, and HIV/AIDS. Using the notion of “urban noise,” the article teases out a strategy of critique that articulates the various ways that the youth acoustically construct, produce, and navigate the African city.     

Reflections on diaspora and soft power: community building among female US expats in Southern Europe

ABSTRACT

Illuminated by life stories of American women in Italy and Greece, our work examines a complex relationship between expatriate collectivity and soft power agency. The data were collected from in-depth interviews with 60 US nationals who live in Italy and Greece. Our findings show that these women shape as a strong diasporic collectivity through activities of ecological civic engagement, which, however, do not result in a successful exercise of soft power. The isolationist nature of their collectivity causes a number of diasporic mistakes and turns their chosen community project into a weak resource for soft power, a translation of which remains highly problematic. The basic mistakes that such expats make while exercising soft power are misunderstanding of the notions of community and its main building tool (civic engagement) as well as overall inability to learn the new culture quickly.     

Sociology: a view from the diaspora

From the vantage point of criminology, one of sociology's main export subject areas, the present and future of sociology appear a good deal more promising than John Holmwood's essay on the discipline's misfortune would suggest. Sociology remains in high demand by students and faculty hiring remains strong, even in its more critical sub-fields, such as race and ethnicity, sex and gender, and social inequality. Holmwood is correct that sociology is vulnerable to external pressures to demonstrate its relevance to social practice, but those pressures come from left-wing social movements as well as from centres of power. He is also correct that external pressures contribute to internal disagreement, but sociology has been at war with itself since the 1960s, with little evident decline in its academic standing or intellectual vitality. Those of us on the discipline's diaspora, who depend on sociology for both support and light, must remain hopeful about sociology's continued good fortune.     

Digitized diaspora governance during the COVID-19 pandemic: China's diaspora mobilization and Chinese migrant responses in Italy

We explore how the Chinese diaspora state during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 managed to transform a severe health crisis into a geo-political opportunity for transnational nation-building through diaspora governance based on extensive use of social media technologies. By adopting a multi-scalar perspective, we analyse the intertwined nature of top-down and bottom-up processes of the Chinese Party-state's diaspora mobilization. Based on discourse and ethnographic analysis, we argue that China's diaspora governance exposed a new and strong capacity for extra-territorial governance. We explore how discursive hegemony, social control and diaspora mobilization were achieved by widely employing the Chinese social media application, WeChat. We also contend that this was facilitated by the Italian government's and media's pro-China attitudes to emphasize the importance of considering transnational embeddedness when studying the implementation and impact of interactive online technology for diaspora governance in an illiberal political context.     

The Akan diaspora in the Americas

For generations, Mexicans and American Indians ritualistically and reciprocally took captives from one another's societies throughout what are today the US–Mexico borderlands. Many of these captivities originated on what had become US territory by 1848. Yet no law expressly duty-bound US officials to locate and liberate this class of captives. In this article, I argue that Article IX's liberty clause in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) could have been used by federal authorities as the basis for a territorial liberation program. I believe federal authorities were reluctant to make use of Article IX as a liberating tool because this type of program had political implications for black slavery in the South and because racial asymmetries in the enforcement process devalued non-white captives.     

Virtualizing diaspora: new digital technologies in the emerging transnational space

Since new distributed ledger technologies hold out a promise to restructure cross‐border flows of people and material resources, they affect globalization and alter transnational spaces. Their capacity to facilitate secure and disintermediated value transfer through crypto‐code and smart contracts enables novel forms of remittance transfer, resource management and digital identity verification – and may also generate new vulnerabilities. In this article, we examine the use of emerging blockchain applications in various migration and diaspora related initiatives in the emerging economies of Africa, Asia and Europe. By building on existing social networks of mutual obligation and quasi‐ethnic affinities, blockchain technologies may facilitate the ability to enlarge the scope of diasporas and change the nature of belonging, sovereignty, migration and statehood. Through exploring the selective foregrounding of mutuality and materiality in such alternative value transfer systems, we seek to explain the dynamics of trust and agency that these networks generate to extend commitments and loyalties in the transnational space.     

Rethinking migration in the digital age: transglocalization and the Somali diaspora

In this study, we examine the transnational networks of the Somali diaspora online. We explore the claims that the web signifies a shift towards a de‐territorialized, transnational diaspora, which constructs its identity and engagement around a transnational imagined community. Based on a network and web content analysis, we assert that the claims about the transnational as the territorial locus of identity and engagement should be revisited. The analysis shows that the Somali diaspora's engagement has a specific multi‐territorial topology through which information and resources are exchanged and a hybrid identity is constructed. Somalis' online engagement, however, is mainly directed towards community‐based practices and social integration in their host‐land, as opposed to transnational advocacy for the homeland. We argue that web data show a particular territorial arrangement and engagement, which we conceptualize as transglocalization, meaning local, networked formations existing alongside the national and transnational, each operating with awareness of the other yet acting separately. The study demonstrates that online network analysis offers promising approaches to diasporic social integration, policy‐making and issue advocacy.     

Diaspora,cyberspace and political imagination: the Eritrean diaspora online

Abstract In this article I analyse the Eritrean diaspora and its use of cyberspace to theorize the ways transnationalism and new media are associated with the rise of new forms of community, public spheres and sites of cultural production. The struggle for national independence coincided with the rise of the Internet and the Eritrean diaspora has been actively involved in the new state. Eritreans abroad use the Internet as a transnational public sphere where they produce and debate narratives of history, culture, democracy and identity. Through the web the diaspora has mobilized demonstrators, amassed funds for war, debated the formulation of the constitution, and influenced the government of Eritrea. Through their web postings, ‘Internet intellectuals’ interpret national crises, rearticulate values and construct community. Thus, the Internet is not simply about information but is also an emotion‐laden and creative space. More than simply refugees or struggling workers, diasporas online may invent new forms of citizenship, community and political practices.     

The digitization of diaspora engagement: managing extraterritorial talent using the internet

In this article, I examine how the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) seeks to manage its skilled emigrants in the information age; I investigate the rationales, techniques and imageries underlying the use of the internet by the state. For the research, I used interviews, participant observation and documentary analysis to explore the case of London‐based Chinese professionals and their contacts with the PRC government. The findings demonstrate that two modes of internet use mainly manage these skilled emigrants. First, digitized diasporic associations play a key role in brokering the influences of the government among the diaspora. Second, the PRC government has set up websites to collect and manage information on skilled emigrants pertaining to their labour market potential. A nationalistic discourse of a caring and protective state of origin surround both governing practices. Nevertheless, some emigrants resist these internet‐mediated governing practices, through distrust and a calculated rationality underscored by a neoliberal logic.     

Human rights for women: battles of culture and power

In Africa, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) focussing on human rights have mushroomed during the past 10-15 years, and, with several of these organizations run by and for women, it is possible to find free legal aid for women in almost every capital city. The collapse of the extended family and, thus, the framework for customary law has meant that women are faced with problems of maintenance and widows with problems of inheritance. Customary law and the protection it afforded women and children has also been weakened by a poverty-driven shift in urban areas from a focus on community support to a focus on individual survival. The vacuum left by this change in legal and social structure is being filled by the human rights NGOs. Paradoxically, in the face of such change, a static, communal, and neutral concept of "culture" was held out by African state representatives at the 1993 UN Conference on Human Rights to justify their opposition to the acceptance of the crosscultural legitimacy of human rights, especially for women. While these arguments were being aired at the Conference, African NGOs were vigorously using examples of the marginalization of women to promote the opposite view. The most important aspect of these conflicting views is which group has the most power and resources to voice its interpretation of the situation. With most African countries governed by a dual system of laws, customary law and common or civil law (left over from colonialism), human rights groups are working to instill human rights principles into common law through the ratification of international conventions. Thus, persons in need could be viewed not as victims but as individuals entitled to enforceable and universal rights. Misuse of the term "culture" can marginalize women even as it is being promoted as a protective device for women. A more useful view of culture is as something which transcends traditional boundaries and locates people and institutions in the global community where they are protected by the acknowledgement of their human rights.