Watching soap opera in the diaspora: cultural proximity or critical proximity?

Abstract

This paper focused on an area of transnational Arabic television, which has attracted little scholarly attention: soap operas and their consumption among women in the Arab diaspora. Focus groups with Arab audiences in London revealed the significant role that soap operas play in sustaining a gendered critical and reflexive proximity to the Arab world. The paper shows that soap opera viewing provides female audiences in the diaspora with opportunities to reflect on their own gender identities as distant from hegemonic discourses of gender in their region of origin but as proximate to a moral set of values they associate with this same region. This was especially, but not exclusively, the case with young women born in the diaspora.     

Do Turkish women in the diaspora build social capital? Evidence from the Low countries

Abstract

Ever since Putnam (2000) made social capital a concept that should be mourned for its decline in the USA, researchers and policy makers in some western countries have adopted it as a solution to what they believe to be the failed practices of multiculturalism. Instead of preserving their individual cultures and traditions, critics would have them build social capital by bridging to people and institutions in their new countries and adopt the ‘shared values’ of the host countries and become ‘integrated’. This study, based on a study conducted in the Netherlands in 2006, and supplemented with survey findings from Flanders at the same time, examines whether this perspective is accurate, focusing on women migrants who live in the Low Countries (Netherlands and Flanders in Belgium), of the networks they have built or not and the reasons for that, and of the role of media and the internet in that process.     

Nationalism remixed? The politics of cultural flows between the South Asian diaspora and ‘homeland’

This article examines ‘Asian electronic music’, a generally progressive diasporic South Asian scene which fuses electronic dance music beats with instruments/sounds traditionally associated with the subcontinent, and how it became embedded into ‘majoritarian’ Indian nationalism. In India, the music's perceived ‘fusion’ aesthetic became emblematic of an emergent India which was economically prosperous while ‘respecting’ its cultural heritage. Using the case of an album which remixed India's national song, Vande Mataram, this article explores the convergences and divergences between Asian electronic musicians in Delhi and Hindu nationalists. The article concludes that the musicians in Delhi did not lend to Hindu nationalism. However, they perhaps gave secular Indian nationalism a ‘cool’ gloss. Ultimately, the production and consumption of Asian electronic music in Delhi raises significant questions regarding the scene's relationship to Indian nationalisms.     

Framing disputes and organizational legitimation: UK-based Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora groups' use of the ‘genocide’ frame since 2009

The ending of the war in Sri Lanka in 2009 led to significant changes in the political strategies pursued by Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora groups in the UK. One contentious feature of these groups' campaigns has been their use of the ‘genocide’ frame to describe the actions of the Sri Lankan state, which has been predominantly viewed either as a signal of these groups' strategic naivety or as a coded expression of a wider nationalist agenda. In this article I argue that its growing use in the post-war period is more complex and is best understood in relation to these organizations' strategies of legitimation. Deploying the genocide frame has served two key functions: to demonstrate groups' responsiveness to popular demands, and to challenge dominant international approaches to post-war Sri Lanka. Together these functions served to bolster groups' legitimacy in an environment characterized by political change and high levels of inter-organizational competition.     

The new Russian diaspora ‐ an identity of its own? Possible identity trajectories for Russians in the former Soviet republic

The collapse of the unitary Soviet state has plunged its former citizens into a profound identity crisis. Particularly hard hit are the twenty‐five million Russians living in the non‐Russian successor states. Formerly members of the dominant nationality of a multinational state they have been turned into a new Russian diaspora. Whether in time they should come to regard themselves as Latvians (Ukrainians, Georgians, etc.) of Russian extraction or as Russians who happen to be living in Latvia, Ukraine, Georgia, etc. will clearly influence political relations both within and among the Soviet successor states. Identity formation is a prolonged process and is influenced by a number of factors. The author attempts to outline a typology of possible identity trajectories of the Russian diaspora and discusses a number of influential factors which are deemed important to the identity formation. These factors work very differently in the various non‐Russian successor states, and there is therefore no reason to believe that all Russians living outside the Russian Federation will develop the same identity. There is, however, good reason to expect that in the final outcome a very large number of them will develop an identity which sets them apart from the Russian core group.