Diaspora and cultural heritage: the case of Indians in Canada

The present paper examines the historical and contemporary context of Indian communities in Canada from a cultural heritage perspective and analyses the processes of migration, settlement and cultural identity. It also examines the challenges of developing museum exhibits which depict the Indian diaspora in Canada. Despite its colourful history and its growing size and prominence in Canadian society, the Indian diaspora has not been the subject of much interest by Canadian museums. While recognising the necessity of working with local communities and thereby reflecting local concerns, it is submitted that any museum exhibit attempting to portray the complex set of experiences of the Indian diaspora in Canada should include some portrayal of the highly marginalised position which the Indian community faced when it first established themselves in the early 1900s. In addition to this historical focus, any attempt to portray the contemporary Indian diaspora needs to portray its growing diversity and its efforts to maintain, and in many cases modify and ‘hybridise’, cultural practices. Such a display would also have to reflect the influence of transnational forces on the contemporary Indian diaspora. Ultimately, efforts by museums to develop exhibits reflecting the Indian presence in Canada will only further the aims of its widely praised state policy of multiculturalism.     

South African Indian migration in the twenty-first century: towards a theory of ‘triple identity’

This paper is inspired by three issues, namely ongoing research on South Africans of Indian origin, the anecdotal evidence that accumulates through ongoing discussions on a casual level with such people and the increasing interest among researchers about how globalization and transnational movements are impacting upon identity formation among minorities who are seeking employment or a new life in the developed economies of the ‘big five’ English-speaking countries, i.e. the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. It is in countries such as these that a third identity emerges and develops to instill a sense of triple identity. The information here suggests that, when people of Indian origin migrate to one of these countries, they continue to cling to South Africa because it is their country of birth, as well as to India, more for sentimental rather than practical reasons. The topic of this paper reflects a contemporary phenomenon not just among the Indians in South Africa, but also among other diasporas such as Chinese in Latin America, whose new and final emigration destination always seems to be the US. In addition, people of Chinese origin in the countries of Indochina, such as Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, experienced similar patterns of becoming diasporas in Europe, North America and Oceania in the 1970s. However, migration implores them to renegotiate their identities in order to adapt and settle in accordance with their newly adopted host territories. This gives rise to an identity that straddles three countries, which induces the need to examine new ways of identity building in a global transnational economy.     

Political origin and persistence of industrial policy in Africa

ABSTRACT

The literature on industrial policy in Africa has generally explained its political origins in terms of ruling elites’ distribution of benefits to their supporters. However, in competitive political contexts in which policies are deeply political and designed to satisfy clients, such as policies that support party donors, the problem of policy discontinuity is bound to arise because a change in ruling party is bound to alter the direction of distributional policies. The current paper uses Nigeria’s backward integration policy (BIP), an industrial policy on cement production, to sharpen the analytical distinction between the origins and persistence. Although the ruling elites’ political quest for survival explains the origin of Nigeria’s industrial policy on cement (ruling elites were in search of re-election funds and teamed up with domestic capitalists for donations, who in turn influenced the political elites to create policies in their area of business), it does not explain the continuation.     

Gandhian fictions: rereading Satyagraha in South Africa

From 1923–24, Mahatma Gandhi wrote his recollections of South Africa from a prison cell in India. This text, Satyagraha in South Africa, was intended to be ‘helpful in our present struggle’ to liberate India, as well as ‘a guide to any regular historian who may arise in the future.’ An emphatically transnational text, Satyagraha in South Africa relies upon the mode of allegory to place South Africa and India in relation to each other. As it encourages comparison, however, it discourages common cause. Gandhi places Africans as the anterior sign in a larger system of signification: South African politics prefigures Indian anti-colonial victory to come, but the African native also represents the innocent natives of India writ large.

Without the political didactics of Hind Swaraj, the journalistic interventions of Indian Opinion or even the philosophical aspirations of My Experiments with Truth, this fictionalised history has rarely been the centre of attention. Satyagraha in South Africa, however, reveals Gandhi’s understanding of imperial geography, as he places South Africa and India in a single frame but fails to imagine them as inhabiting the same historical present. This understanding is reflected in his political decisions, as he fails to connect Indian anti-colonial agitation with struggles elsewhere.     

The diasporic pursuit of home and identity: dynamic Punjabi transnationalism

This paper examines the pursuit of home within a diasporic British Indian Punjabi community. It is argued that the British Asian transnational pursuit of home is significantly shaped by the dynamic social context of South Asia as well as social processes within Britain and across the South Asian diaspora. Drawing upon a decade of original, transnational, ethnographic research within the UK and India, I analyse the rapidly changing social context of Punjab, India, and the impact of this upon the diasporic Punjabi pursuit of home. I particularly argue that increasing divisions between the UK diasporic group studied and the non‐migrant permanent residents of Punjab, which are intrinsically related to processes of inclusion and exclusion within Punjab, especially the changing role and significance of land ownership and changing consumption practices therein, in turn connected to the increasing influence of economic neoliberalization and global consumer culture within India, significantly shapes the (re)production of home and identity amongst the Punjabi diaspora. Recent manifestations of these social processes within Punjab are threatening the very lived Indian home of some diasporic Punjabis, their Indian ‘roots’.     

‘Entering the territory of incitement’: oppositionality and Africa South

Africa South was an anti‐apartheid journal edited by Ronald Segal which was published in South Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This article explores the historical and political significance of Africa South and considers its implications for an understanding of ‘oppositionality’ in the post‐apartheid present. The central challenge which Africa South offered to its own context was its transnational perspective. Africa South was an important meeting place in the global routes of the developing pan‐African movement. It is also noteworthy for its effort to bring disparate areas of history and experience – both within the African continent and across the African diaspora – into revealing alignment with one another. The principle of conjuncture, I argue, initiated an important analytical move: the opportunity for illuminating comparison, the re‐conceptualisation of an often fragmented political and social landscape and an unusual glimpse of the whole. In tension with this totalising vision is the journal’s generic eclecticism, its flexible political identity and its collaborative construction. In both its unity and its fragmentation, Africa South offers an important point of departure for activist journalism and oppositional intellectual endeavours in the present.     

Privilege and precarity: public scripts and self-censorship in shaping South African social science

South African social science’s close relationship with politics and policy have long provided a source of vitality and intellectual direction. Although one of the field’s greatest strengths, intimacy with socio-political and economic transformations engenders solipsism and stagnation. Ironically, it also compromises scholars’ political autonomy and intellectual ethics by blinding analysts to the emerging socio-political formations which will shape the country’s future. As demands for decolonisation and academic transformation continue, the pressures for political alignment will only grow. Drawing on over a decade of inquiry into the formal and informal governance of human mobility into and within South Africa, this article reveals the contours of such isolation and conceptual complacency. From this we can find direction for satisfying the “dual imperative:” contributing to progressive policy while maintaining scholarly autonomy. While not disengaging from politics, we must work to destabilise the language of it even where it means potential isolation from officials, peers, and personal profits. Doing so can protect social science’s autonomy while opening new opportunities for understanding the world in which we live and new tools for challenging those who seek to describe, theorise and change it. Doing otherwise risks converting the South African academic project into a policy think tank or self-referential echo chamber.     

Immigrant Economic Integration: A Prospective Analysis over Ten Years of Settlement

The growing diaspora in migration has prompted Western countries in recent years to examine the factors contributing to the economic integration of newcomers. If their integration is unsuccessful, it could create economic inequalities and be burdensome to the host society. The inequalities experienced by working immigrants have often been examined through cross‐sectional data describing the situation at a specific moment in time, with limited consideration of the complexity of the immigrant's settlement experience. This paper examines the economic integration of new immigrants through prospective analysis and considers multiple factors concurrently in an effort to address some of this complexity. The current study focuses on employment disparities across source regions. The analyses are taken from a ten‐year longitudinal survey describing the socio‐economic experience of 429 new immigrants settled in the Montreal metropolitan area. Over time, wage and occupational mobility increase, although it appears stagnant for different groups of respondents from specific regions such as East Asia, North Africa and the Middle East. Also, like respondents from sub‐Saharan Africa, these respondents face difficulties sustaining a position in the labour market.     

Translating Tradition: The Poetics and Politics of Diasporic Media

This essay argues that the recent academic interest in diaspora, the media and the research that it has engendered have provided unique insights into the media’s role in the creation and maintenance of an alternative public sphere. Despite this however, the difficulties in defining ‘diaspora’ as a concept, and the attempts, by both academics and diasporic cultural elites, to propose a degree of homogeneity within diaspora communities undermines the politics that is inherent in diasporic media representation and consumption. The essay makes a plea for conceptual clarity and the recognition of power within the diaspora communities, both of which are crucial for future research in the media and diasporas.     

A Fractured Transnational Diaspora: The Case of Zimbabweans in Britain

Millions of Zimbabweans living abroad have been described as an emerging diaspora. However, there has been little attempt to question their designation as a diaspora, or indeed, to engage with the more theoretically informed and conceptually rich literature on diaspora. The assumption in this categorisation relies heavily upon popular usage of the term diaspora among Zimbabweans themselves both abroad and in the homeland. However, instead of suppressing discussion by simply pronouncing them “a diaspora”, it is important to examine whether or not they constitute a diaspora. Drawing on the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism and on the author’s multi‐sited ethnographic research in the United Kingdom (hereafter, “Britain”), the article examines how the diaspora was dispersed, how it is constituted in the hostland and how it maintains connections with the homeland. What factors influenced people’s decisions to migrate into the diaspora and how can these phases be classified? What types of migration patterns characterise Zimbabweans’ migration to Britain? The study explores the origin, formation and articulation of the Zimbabwean diaspora in Britain, providing a conceptual and theoretical interpretation of the social formation vis‐à‐vis other accounts of global diasporas. The findings of this study suggest that Zimbabweans abroad are a fractured transnational diaspora. The scattering of Zimbabweans evinces some of the features commonly ascribed to a diaspora such as involuntary and voluntary dispersion of the population from the homeland; settlement in foreign territories and uneasy relationship with the hostland; strong attachment and connection to the original homeland; and the maintenance of diverse diasporic identities. The study represents a contribution to our knowledge of the Zimbabwean diaspora in particular and to the field of diaspora and transnational studies in general.     

The demobilization of diaspora: history,memory and ‘latent identity’

In the context of sustained interest in the mobilization of diasporic identities, I consider how and why diasporic identities might be demobilized over time. I use the case of an Indian Pakistani community in the UK and the USA (sometimes referred to as ‘Bihari’) to examine how historical memories of conflict are narrated in diaspora and the impact this has on the presence or absence of ‘diasporic consciousness'. The significance of memory in diasporic and transnational communities has been neglected, especially where the narration of historical events is concerned. The impact of forgetting has received particularly scant attention. I argue that, in the absence of this story, important lessons about the role of history in the formation of community are obscured. In this example, the ‘latent’ identities created on diaspora's demobilization help us to unpick the dyadic relations of ‘home’ and ‘away’ at the heart of essentialist conceptualizations of the concept.     

Home,city and diaspora: Anglo–Indian and Chinese attachments to Calcutta

This article is about the city as home for people living in diaspora. We develop two key areas of debate. First, in contrast to research that explores diasporic homes in relation to domestic homemaking and/or the nation as home or ‘homeland’, we consider the city as home in diaspora. Second, building on research on transnational urbanism, translocality and the importance of the ‘city scale’ in migration studies, we argue that the city is a distinctive location of diasporic dwelling, belonging and attachment. Drawing on interviews with Anglo–Indian and Chinese Calcuttans who live in London and Toronto, we develop the idea of ‘diaspora cities’ to explore the importance of the city as home rather than the nation as ‘homeland’ for many people living in diaspora. This leads to an understanding of the importance of migration and diaspora within cities of departure as well as resettlement, and contributes a distinctively diasporic focus to broader work on comparative urbanism.     

土耳其对非洲地区的经贸合作

土非经贸合作近年发展迅速,引起国际社会广泛关注。这在很大程度上源于土耳其自1998年以来的一系列政策改革和相应的机制平台建设。但需要指出的是,尽管土非贸易、投资和援助都增长迅速,但土耳其对非政策改革和机制平台建设的政策效果尚未完全显现,主要因为土非经贸合作起点较低,量的增长并未导致质的变化,特别是土非贸易在土耳其对外贸易中所占的比重变化不大。因此,未来的土非经贸合作还有很大的提升空间,尽管土耳其对非政策的内部逻辑尚有待完善。     

Piketty comes to South Africa

One of the most valuable features of Capital and Ideology is its concern to take history seriously and consider how the emergence of different political and economic regimes relate to discourses about fairness and justice across time. This paper pushes this agenda further by acknowledging that the experience of a few developed nations should not be taken as the template for the generalized study of inequality dynamics across time and space. In this paper, we interrogate Piketty's analysis and policy proposals against specificities that are central to understanding the production and reproduction of inequalities within South Africa. We reflect on the South African case, the structure of inequality and its changes since 1994. We review a battery of policy interventions that have been implemented to address inequality in the last 25 years. We emphasize that the long shadow cast by centuries of colonialism and various forms of apartheid strongly affirm Piketty's emphasis on understanding history. But this is both affirmation and critique given the foundational, imbedded impact that this specific legacy has had on post‐apartheid society and its policies. Piketty is aware that the levels of inequality in South Africa are so high that this is “unknown territory.” We map out some of this territory to reveal how these extreme initial wealth and racial inequities inform the reproduction of inequalities in all dimensions and undermine well intentioned policies. We claim that understanding extractive histories, imbedded wealth inequalities, and complex social and political institutions allows us to understand and confront some of the reasons why even in light of progressive policies, many of which are in line with the proposals from Piketty, government interventions have thus far failed to reduce inequality.     

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.     

The Indian diaspora in global advocacy

The activities of Indian diasporic activists in the subcontinent and North America are explored in order to question the simple dichotomies and categories through which advocacy networks are often understood. These dichotomies include West/non–West, violence/non–violence and local/global. The argument illuminates some of pressures, contradictions and fissures shaping the Indian diaspora’s involvement in advocacy issues. There are culturally specific spaces and strategies for advocacy practice, at the same time as advocacy issues acquire new meanings through involvement in more transnational networks.     

Examining the Interplay of Career,Migration and National Cultural Identity: The Case of Indian Scientists

In this paper, we examine individuals’ career migration across international borders. It is widely recognized that globalization has fundamental implications for the careers of people across geographical and cultural boundaries. However, our understanding of the interplay of migration, career development and national/cultural identities remains undeveloped within the extant literature. In this paper, we seek to offer insights into this relationship. Focusing on Indian scientists, an occupational group whose careers have long been associated with movement around the world, in this paper we examine these issues. Empirically, we examine three themes: why Indian scientists see international mobility as important in the development of their careers; continued links with India; and the interplay of national/cultural affiliation and respondents’ career experiences. In light of our findings, in the discussion section we argue that considering Indian scientists as a career diaspora highlights three important features that in the main have received only limited attention in the extant literature: career as a social form and process; the notion of the scientific career as a cultural product; and the interrelationship of career and national/cultural affiliation as ongoing facets of individuals’ identities as they develop diasporic careers.     

(Un)settled states: Indian Ocean passages,performative belonging and restless mobility in post‐apartheid South African fiction

A number of post‐apartheid literary works revisit nineteenth‐ to early twentieth‐century Indian Ocean passages. Bringing into visibility South Africa’s other ocean – until recently largely occluded by the conceptual bedazzlement of the black Atlantic – they unsettle some of the paradigms through which it has been imagined. This article explores five such novels, which articulate or critique various citizenship claims through a poetics of (un)settlement. One strand from this cluster employs rhetorical strategies such as an ‘Atlantic register’ to translate oceanic routes into territorial roots, mobility into autochthony; the other registers a more unsettled state as it scrutinises the gendered politics of home‐making and national belonging, and issues a retort to the multicultural imagination.     

‘Ways of Remembering’: Transatlantic Connections and African Diaspora's Homecoming in the Republic of Benin

Abstract

Since the seventeenth century, the Atlantic ‘perimeter’ has been characterised by exchanges of commodities, bodies and cultural productions. Within this space, West Africa has established itself as an ‘ancestral land’: a pivotal physical and imagined location for its diaspora. Exploring how a ‘homeland’ is constructed, the article analyses practices of homecoming in the contemporary Republic of Benin. It argues that the particular historical conjuncture of the early 1990s, mainly characterised by the democratic transition, has allowed the restoration of Atlantic connections. Aspiring to establish a vibrant tourism industry, the new government strongly encouraged African American homecomings, commemorating the slave trade and celebrating diasporic cultures. The Vodun religion, because of its propagation across the New World through the slave trade, became the core symbol of this reunion, the very evidence of the strength of ancestral linkages and a foundation for black commonality. Reframing notions of ancestry and transnational belongings, the article examines how the insertion of Benin into global, economic and cultural circuits has led to the emergence of new cultural practices, meanings and subjectivities, both related to national and diasporic spaces.     

The Indian Ocean travels of Sheikh Yusuf and Imam Ali Ali: literary representations in Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit

This article investigates the narrative function of prominent Muslim travellers (both historical and fictional) across the Indian Ocean to South Africa in the seventeenth and nineteenth century respectively. Ishtiyaq Shukri, author of The Silent Minaret, juxtaposes the figure of Sheikh Yusuf with the protagonist Issa Shamsuddin of the narrative present to critique contemporary politics, both in post-apartheid South Africa and in the global North and its ‘war on terror’. Similarly, Achmat Dangor’s novel Bitter Fruit sheds light on the difficult choices faced by the main protagonist, Michael Ali, by drawing on the migration narrative of the Sufi Imam Ali Ali from India to South Africa in the 1890s. Both authors highlight the continuous history of imperial pursuits in the Indian Ocean world and their devastating effects in the past and the narrative present.