Valorizing racial boundaries: Hegemony and conflict in the racialization of Filipino migrant labour in the United States

This article analyses the growth of a new revivalist, internationally orientated Islam in Tower Hamlets. It moves beyond discussions of identity to look at the roles of ideology and socio-economic background, and to assess the effect of the new identities and ideologies on social and political action. It looks at why young Bengalis are being increasingly attracted to Islam, and at how this can benefit both themselves and the wider Bengali community; and it also explores where the impact of the new Islam is less positive, ending with an examination of the limits of its power as a vehicle for radical change in a deprived area of London. The article is based on interviews carried out in 2000 and 2001 as part of a wider historical study of political mobilization of Jewish and Bengali immigrants in London's East End.     

‘Minority’ as a sociological concept

This article considers how a Muslim cultural discourse of ‘propriety’ has influenced Muslim Arab Sudanese ethnic identity in two locations and time periods in an expanding diaspora. Focusing in particular on women and their embodied practices of whitening and propriety in Egypt in the nineties and the United Kingdom a decade later, I argue that the recent turn towards Muslim expressions of Sudaneseness is a form of resistance to racial labelling. While Sudanese have rejected being labelled ‘black’ in Egypt and in the UK, their renegotiation of a Muslim religious identity in the diaspora nevertheless confirms a racialized Sudanese ethnicity. This study contributes to the rethinking of ethnicity in a transnational space where ethnic nationalism and globalized Islamic discourse intersect with local histories and hierarchies of race and gender.     

Diaspora and its discontents: A Caribbean fragment in Toronto in quest of cultural recognition and political empowerment

The essay examines the role of The Ontario Society for Services to the Indo-Caribbean Community [OSSICC], a historic organization that sought to assert the dignity and re-discover the identity of Indo-Caribbean persons as a fragment of the Caribbean diaspora in Toronto, Canada. While it points to the achievement in representing the interests of its members for symbolic cultural recognition, it underscored the limitations in the political arena for empowerment, power sharing, and equality in employment opportunities and for an equitable share of the resources of the state. Further, it describes how the ethnic conflict in the homeland persisted in the new site of the diaspora, about lost opportunities for healing, and about inter-generational discontinuities in the reconstruction of the Caribbean self. On a larger scale, the article is about membership and citizenship in the new homeland of the diaspora, its seductions and betrayals in the new frontier of Canadian multiculturalism.     

White cruelty or Republican sins? Competing frames of stigma reversal in French commemorations of slavery

Abstract

This paper explores how French activists use claims about the history and legacies of slavery to combat stigmas associated with their group membership. Using a case study of a French Caribbean association (CM98) and a pan-African association (COFFAD), I examine how two organizations produce competing models for challenging and reversing the stigma of slavery. Through a process of normative inversion, activists assert the moral inferiority of dominant groups. CM98 rejects both a racial and an African identity, and seeks recognition for ‘French descendants of slaves’, using the language of citizenship to criticize the French government. COFFAD, by contrast, asserts an Afro-centric black identity and stigmatizes white Europeans. I argue that both destigmatization strategies unwittingly reinforce the stigma of historical enslavement.     

Beyond the “The ‘diaspora’ diaspora”: a response to Rogers Brubaker

In this short reflection, I revisit Rogers Brubaker’s influential 2005 article on “The ‘diaspora’ diaspora”. I consider the key arguments of this important intervention, before addressing three key conceptual issues in diaspora studies: (i) the role of place, origin and scale; (ii) diaspora, race and difference; (iii) sociological and historical approaches to diaspora. In the concluding section, I briefly consider some new directions in diaspora studies.     

Re-imagining the Diaspora: History, Responsibility, and Commitment in an Age of Globalization

The past two decades have witnessed the intensification of globalization and the unprecedented exodus of Africans to developed countries. The two trends have profound implications for the North and South and also for Africans and their relationship to their homeland. This paper examines the relationship and explores the challenges of engaging, interrogating and re-imaging the notion of Diaspora. This paper is dedicated to the memory of Professor Michael C. Mbabuike, “Ugonabo” – an accomplished poet, a distinguished scholar, a most valued colleague, a brother in the truest sense of the word, a decent man – with whom I shared an immense love for our homeland, Igboland.     

The past of others: Korean memorials in New York’s suburbia

Since the first decade of this century, public monuments to the memory of “comfort women” – women and girls forced into sexual service from the 1930s through 1945, by the Japanese Imperial Army – have been established in the United States by the Korean diaspora. This paper analyses recent memorials in the suburbs of New York that have experienced rapid immigration from Korea since the 1990s. The memorials met local resistance due to perceptions of unrelatedness to the American land. Such immigrant initiatives, however, have been supported by municipal governance. The project of inscribing a passage from East Asian history in the American context may be considered symptomatic of wider cognitive and social shifts in immigrant adaptation. Assimilation through the inclusion of immigrant heritage, along with an increasing sense of entitlement in being both “ethnic” and “American”, have been integral to this contest regarding collective memory.     

Routes into education and employment for young Pakistani and Bangladeshi women in the UK

The article examines the educational and employment experiences and aspirations of young Pakistani and Bangladeshi people living in Oldham, in Great Manchester. Many young people demonstrated high aspirations and high levels of participation, particularly in relation to the educational and occupational level of their parents. Explanatory factors include the cultural value of education among Asian groups, the desire by parents to ensure success for their children and the ethnic penalty which these young people incur in the labour market. However, not all Pakistani and Bangladeshi young people have these aspirations. Girls who wished to continue their education faced a more complex situation than boys; for girls it was important to avoid jeopardizing the family honour. Nonetheless, national statistics show a marked increase in the numbers of young Pakistani and Bangladeshi women in full-time undergraduate courses in recent years. Women with degree level qualifications showed considerable determination to combine paid employment with family life.     

‘It's not how it was’: the Chilean diaspora's changing landscape of belonging

Abstract

The increasingly diverse character of London's multicultural landscape has shaped how migrants interact with(in) the different spaces of the city. This process entails both settled and incoming migrants' participation in place-making; a mutual imbrication that might promote the long-settled migrants' evocation of a lost terrain. This article unpacks that process by looking at the Latin American social football scene of South London, specifically a space known as la cancha (the pitch). This was founded by Chilean political refugees during the 1970s and it has incorporated Latin American ‘economic’ migrants and ‘local’ Britons through time. Starting from the evocation of a lost ‘golden age’ of la cancha, the paper unpacks this space's contested, complex and changing nature. It presents diaspora space, community and belonging as lived processes. Through this depiction, the assumptions of homogeneous and isolated migrant communities are challenged, as are the diaspora's nostalgic claims that also emerge from them.     

African Ethnicity as Mirage? Historicizing the Essence of the Igbo in Africa and the Atlantic Diaspora

The enslavement of Africans, which gave birth to the African Diaspora in the Atlantic world, scattered people who shared the same cultural and linguistic affinity but often lumped them together in identifiable regional patterns. A significant consequence of the pattern of trade was the emergence of identifiable “ethnic” and cultural patterns in the diaspora. Attention, therefore, has for a long time focused on the pattern of dispersion and the impact of the Atlantic slave trade on the emergence of New World cultures. This paper addresses what I call the “question of Igbo history, ethnicity and identity,” with a view to presenting a synthesis and a framework for understanding the essence of ndiIgbo as flexible in both Africa and the Atlantic Diaspora. The case of the Igbo suggests that identities are multi-layered, self imposed, as well as ascribed by others and as such require a critical analysis to avoid the essentialism that have bedeviled much of the discourse on African identity in the diaspora     

Institutions,information exchange,and migrant social networks in Rome

While a considerable body of work examines immigrant networks, inadequate attention has been devoted to understanding how networks regulate the relationship between immigrants and host institutions. A rich immigrant process may reinforce current power structures by providing a convenient buffer between the elite and challengers. Conversely, immigration may challenge the status quo. I employ social network analysis to examine three understudied immigrant groups in Rome, Bangladeshis, Filipinos, and Peruvians. I find that they have developed systems of problem-solving and sense-making that often interrupt their interactions with host institutions. The state tolerates this because it situates immigrants’ concerns outside its sphere of responsibility.