Palestinian perceptions of home and belonging in Britain: negotiating between rootedness and mobility

In this article based on ethnographic research among Palestinians in Britain, I argue that applying a ‘decentred’ conception of diaspora provides an understanding of the complexity of Palestinian identity-making in Britain. After a critical review of theorizations of the notion of diaspora and its relevance to this case study, I discuss ethnographic data to illustrate how processes of rooting and mobility are linked together in various contexts in which personal migration trajectories and positionalities play an important part. I demonstrate that, for Palestinians in Britain, diaspora relates to connections constructed both in relation to their homeland and other frames of reference: in relation to both roots and mobility.     

族群离散与文化离散研究的来龙去脉

离散(Diaspora),既是一个历史的现象,亦是当今存在的社会现象。二战后,离散这个词的词义发生变化,扩大了到对其他族群的离散经历的研究,与客居国的政治、经济、性别研究等等主题结合在一起。与国外的研究者相比,中国的离散研究还处于后来者的地位。离散族群概念的定义以及其衍生的内容,有助于我们去理解族群认同和文化认同的由来,以及这些认同在日常生活中的表征。     

The Lebanese diasporic field: the impact of sending and receiving states

What is a diaspora? Can it be distinguished from a ‘transnational community’? This paper discusses the Lebanese migrants abroad and their relationships with Lebanon by deploying the Bourdieusian concept of ‘field’. It argues that Bourdieu’s concept of field helps to capture the dynamic character of diasporic relations and the power relations that underpin them. It also enables the researcher to better delineate the boundary of a diasporic community and at the same time to treat this boundary as flexible enough to identify the specific terms for entering and exiting the ‘diasporic field’. It also argues that at a time when diasporic relations are cross-national, that specifically revolve around a real or imaginary ‘homeland’, they encompass individual, group and institutional actors that belong with varying degrees to the country of origin and the countries of settlement. Finally, the paper concludes that the ‘diasporic field’ is a useful analytical tool to capture the complexities of increasingly ubiquitous diasporic relations.     

论美国印裔族群在印度经济发展中的地位

内部构成整体上的精英特性与和睦团结很大程度上确保了美国印裔族群在较好地融入到美国主流社会的同时,还取得了令人瞩目的重大成就。随着印度国内改革的日益深入和海外移民政策的不断调整,在强烈的文化认同和情感联系的推动下,美国印裔族群以其强劲的实力,通过各种方式为祖籍国经济的恢复与发展作出了卓著的贡献,并起到了其他任何海外印裔族群所不可替代的重要作用,其地位不容撼动。     

‘Coming Down to the Shop’: Trajectories of Hadhrami Women into Indonesian Public Realms

This article is concerned with the trajectories of Indonesian women of Hadhrami-Arab descent into public realms. It enquires how their agency has developed out of a particular diasporic tradition that has brought a gender order to colonial Indonesia characterised by a rigid division of public and domestic domains. In Indonesia, Hadhrami concepts of the public and domestic encountered local and governmental gender regimes and experienced considerable transformations in recent decades. The article shows how Hadhrami women coped with this dynamic and manifold field of gender relations and examines the expansion of their agency into Indonesian public realms paying particular attention to their economic activities, their public roles as skilled employees and professionals, and their engagement in the women's wings of Hadhrami-Islamic organisations. The article concludes that their deployment of particular Islamic discourses stressing piousness through the construction of a gendered hierarchy in the domestic but not in the public sphere underpins their agency in today's Indonesia which witnesses a general trend towards the appearance of self-consciously pious Muslim women.     

Transnationalism and Relationships with ‘Home’ among Women in the East Timorese Community in Melbourne

This article focuses on transnationalism and long distance nationalism among East Timorese women in Melbourne, Australia, in the post independence period. It explores the relationships these women have with East Timor and how they engage in transnational practices. It examines the community's self-perception as East Timorese in Australia and their engagement with East Timor, particularly during the 2006 unrest there. Despite being in a liminal position living between two cultures, their country of origin and the country they reside in, most women (even those who rarely visit East Timor) still identify as ‘East Timorese’. I discuss the challenges with returning ‘home’, and how this affects the community's ‘imaginings’ of East Timor. The community retains a predominantly idealistic view of East Timor, but this is increasingly complemented by a nuanced understanding of the challenges faced by their presence ‘at home’.     

Music and digital media across the lao diaspora

Since the late 1990s a transnational Lao music industry, driven by the explosion of digital media technologies, has emerged across the communities of the Lao diaspora. These migrant Lao communities, which are dispersed across, and within, the United States of America, Australia, France and Canada, are undergoing internal changes as their younger, bi-cultural, generations reach adulthood. Using Lao music and its associated technoculture as a focal point, this article explores some of the ways Lao identity is being reconfigured and reconstructed as young migrant Lao come to terms with their cross-cultural status.     

流散文学与文化身份认同

进入全球化时代以来,比较文学和文化研究领域内出现了一个新的文化现象:流散现象以及伴随而来的流散写作。造成前者的动因是始于19世纪后半叶的全球范围的大规模移民,而造成后一种现象的则是流落异国他乡的移民们所从事的文学创作。从西方文学史的发展演变来看,流散写作有其先声:早先的流浪汉小说以及20世纪20年代欧洲的流浪者写作。他们都在文学创作上取得了令人瞩目的成就。而从当代文学创作的实践来看,近几十年来的不少诺贝尔文学奖获得者都是流散作家,他们的创作不仅受到他们所出生的国家的批评家和研究者的关注,同时也对居住国的文学产生了一定的影响。