Transnational migrants challenge meanings of home, belonging, and citizenship because they exercise their right to mobility and form multiple allegiances abroad, all while negotiating different gender roles and new care deficits. In three parts, I explore the meanings of home and belonging for transnational women and seek to understand the gendered implications of their migration, especially how migrant women meet care needs and confront institutional exclusion. First, I explore how Global South women use transnational friendship networks to migrate and fill welfare-pitfalls in the US. Next, I argue that the concept of the ‘Third World Woman’ helps in understanding belonging and informal support networks both at work and in life. Finally, bringing citizenship, belonging, and care together through multiple meanings of home, I explore how multiple allegiances to multiple places form and how exclusion, inclusion, feelings of belonging, and citizenship shape transnational women’s experiences in and attachments to different places.

Transnational migrants challenge meanings of home, belonging, and citizenship because they exercise their right to mobility and form multiple allegiances abroad, all while negotiating different gender roles and new care deficits. In three parts, I explore the meanings of home and belonging for transnational women and seek to understand the gendered implications of their migration, especially how migrant women meet care needs and confront institutional exclusion. First, I explore how Global South women use transnational friendship networks to migrate and fill welfare-pitfalls in the US. Next, I argue that the concept of the ‘Third World Woman’ helps in understanding belonging and informal support networks both at work and in life. Finally, bringing citizenship, belonging, and care together through multiple meanings of home, I explore how multiple allegiances to multiple places form and how exclusion, inclusion, feelings of belonging, and citizenship shape transnational women’s experiences in and attachments to different places.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 135-143).

With the increase in International migration, migrants and diasporas contribution and engagement with their countries of origin has seen growing focus from academics, policymakers, governments and other stakeholders. This has been especially the case in the development sector where remittances form a sizeable percentage of some low-income country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Official remittances data suggest that in 2016, migrants sent an estimated US$441billion to developing countries, a figure three times the size of official development aid. Beyond remittances, there are numerous examples through which the linkage between diaspora and migrants and countries of origin contribute to poverty reduction and economic growth. With the proliferation of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools, there is a growing interest in how diasporas are utilising these tools to facilitate transnational knowledge transfer, skills, and social change. This paper examines the use of ICT tools by diaspora organisations in the United Kingdom to engage in international development or/and community development in the UK and discusses the incorporation of information and communication technologies, focusing on the potential of ICTs to assist development at a micro and macro-level, and the effectiveness of these approaches in realising the potential of information communications technology for development (ICT4D). In examining the role and importance of societal factors - specifically structure, agency and social capital- the research adopts Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice as the theoretical framework., building on the concepts of the duality of structure and agency. This study is situated between three themes that are emerging on their own right but rarely married in development literature- Diaspora, Transnationalism and ICT4D - the case-studies presented in this paper suggest that a range of limiting factors in both host country (i.e. funding, skills) and global South countries (local partners capacity, infrastructure, and affordability) leads to programmes and initiatives by diaspora organisations more often being limited by ICTs rather than being facilitated or driven by the technology itself.

Set against the backdrop of the Transatlantic slave trade, Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River can be read as a novel which explores severed family ties and the intertwined relationship between the dominant and the subdued within the African diaspora. Questions concerning “race”, identity and representation can be traced in all the narratives and are also the focus of this essay. Diasporic identities most often involve a double consciousness, seeing and/or identifying with different perspectives. All of the characters are clearly affected by slavery and/or racism directly or indirectly. This essay will argue that this is evident in all the narratives, using Paul Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic to illustrate this point. However, when it comes to representation and whose voice is heard, Phillips’s choices of focalization have adverse implications for the representation of Africa and Africans. Although the novel explores identities of people of the African diaspora and one of the narratives, “The Pagan Coast”, is set in Liberia, the country remains anonymous, and no African is awarded a voice in that narrative. In his attempt at capturing the essence of African diasporic identities, Phillips has neglected the influence of Africa and Africans.

In this thesis, I expand considerations of diaspora as not only a migration of people and cultures but a migration of thought. Specifically, I demonstrate that literary representations of diaspora produce what I consider to be an epistemological migration, challenging the idea that race and culture are stable and impermeable and offering instead racial and cultural fluidity. I assert that this causal relationship is best exemplified by narratives of racial passing written by diasporic writers. Using Homi Bhabha’s concepts of mimicry, hybridity, and ambivalence, I analyze Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird and Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, arguing that Boy, Snow, Bird’s narrative form is a form of mimicry that repeats European and African literary traditions and subverts Eurocentrism, while Playing in the Light is a “Third Space” in which to accept notions of the non-categorical fluidity of race. Through this analysis, I draw particular attention to Oyeyemi’s and Wicomb’s unique abilities to refract notions of race, rather than presumably reflect a system of strict categories, and, ultimately, I argue that these novels transcend the realm of literature, existing as empowering calls for society’s modifications of its racial perceptions.

The purpose of this unique critical ethnographic case study is to examine how the development of African Diaspora Literacy informed the African identity of students who identify as Black or African descendants and contribute to the journey toward complete liberation of African descendants worldwide by teaching Black students how to (re)member (Dillard, 2012). To address the problem of some Afro Caribbean American students holding negative, deficit perceptions of all associated with Africa including themselves, I posed the question: In what ways and to what extent does engagement in the Advanced Placement Seminar with African Diaspora Content influence five African-descended high school students’ perception of Africa, the African diaspora, and themselves as African descendants? Homogeneous, convenience sampling was used to identify five African-descended high school students enrolled in the AP Seminar at a College Board-certified predominantly Black high school in a major U.S. urban city. Qualitative data were collected through observations, student-created artifacts, an end-of-course survey, and semi-structured individual and group interviews between Fall 2017 and Spring 2019. African Diaspora Literacy served as the theoretical framework for analysis. Findings suggest that students’ perceptions of Africa, the African diaspora and themselves as African descendants were positively influenced by their 2-year participation in an AP Seminar implemented with a comprehensive, Sankofan, African-centered, pedagogical approach of (re)membering. This informed and strengthened students’ African identity to the extent that their intrinsic motivation to learn more about their African and diaspora heritage positively influenced some of their family members and schoolmates.

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This dissertation argues that Black mothering is the re-creation of Black sociability in the African Diaspora in the face of the ways in which genocide attempts to eliminate black existence. Therefore, I argue for an approach to African Diaspora as creating, nurturing, resisting, and recuperative acts as an alternative to genocidal practices, which constitutes black mothering. Concerning genocidal practices, this dissertation focuses mainly on anti-black violence, specifically male-on-male and state-sponsored violence; although with an understanding that genocide also manifests itself through many other ways. The choice to focus on male-on-male and state violence is because I understand them as being the ultimate alternative to put forward genocidal ideologies when others fail. Thus, understanding the violent killing of the black population as the most visible expression of genocide in the African Diaspora, I want to confront them with their alternative, which is the given social, cultural, and biological significance of motherhood, i.e., to generate and nurture life. Therefore, my ethnographic project explores Black mothers’ experiences of violence in Rio de Janeiro’s poorest areas. Their struggle to survive encompasses not only their own fight against poverty, racism, patriarchy, and gender discrimination but also entails the consequences of violent acts perpetrated or facilitated by the state upon their families. Engaging with the analytical concept of Outraged Mothering, this dissertation builds bridges between African Diaspora Studies and the Anthropology of Emotions by applying a Black Feminist perspective in order to perceive Black mothers’ social-political insertion in society as well as their pedagogies of resistance. My research methods include participant observation, semi-structured interviews, oral histories, and documentary photography conducted in an extended period of seventeen months of fieldwork research between 2011 and 2012. This project embraces activism as a learning experience in the collaboration with the mothers in struggle, and employs auto-ethnography as a way to think critically through the researcher’s emotions while conducting and writing the project. This project aims to enhance developing literature on Black motherhood in Brazil and explores Black lives in the African Diaspora through an analytical framework that presents emotion as a catalytic stimulus for the rise of radical political projects. / text

The aim of this essay is to explore motherhood in two postcolonial literary works by African American author Toni Morrison and British author Caryl Phillips, who was born in the Caribbean. The essay is based on Morrison’s award winning novel Beloved, which was published in 1987 and was inspired by the escaping African American slave Margareth Garner. It is set just after the American Civil War and the novels deals with the trauma of slavery from the perspective of Sethe, a slave who kills her own daughter to save her from slavery. The second novel on which this essay is based is Caryl Phillips’ novel Crossing the River, which was published 1993 and focused on the African diaspora from different perspectives. Crossing the River is a non-chronological narrative covering four different characters (three African American people and one white slave trader during the eighteenth century). This essay, however, only deals with the last of the four narratives depicting white British Joyce who mothers a child with African American soldier Travis. The hypothesis on which the essay is based is that the institution of American slavery has denied the female protagonists in the two novels, Sethe and Joyce, their maternal selves. The analysis revealed that both women suffer from racial domination, and race, or simply skin color, is what leads to the maternal loss of the two protagonists. Both authors depict the world of the colonizer and the colonized and they address the common pain and guilt shared by black as well as white people.