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.

This thesis explores the changing identity of Asian North American women in the past thirty years through the analysis of the work of three Asian North American female artists, Liu Hung (b.1948), Jin-me Yoon (b.1960), and Nikki S. Lee (b.1970). It argues that Asian North American female identity has evolved in three stages: firstly, it shows a close connection with a diasporic imagined community bound by ones cultural origin; secondly, it is rooted in a settled diasporic community, meanwhile remains tied to the original homeland as an imaginary political space for unification; lastly, the new transnational Asian female identity rejects classification based on race and gender and embraces an identity rooted in globalization. / History of Art, Design and Visual Culture

In this thesis I consider the role of music in the construction of identity among West African Canadians, focusing on musical taste and performance. Drawing on themes from participant narratives, I look at how music can maintain connections with or reference identities from home cultures. Focusing specifically on popular music, I suggest that identification with genres such as hip hop and reggae does not directly imply an identification with the African American or Afro-Caribbean cultures from which they originated, rather I point to how the music refers back to West Africa. I also look at the place of music and religious identity, discussing how performance of religious music embodies multiple registers of individual and communal identity. Traditional music and dance ensembles provide another focus, and I explore how musicians transmit cultural practices and use their profession to foreground West African elements of their identity in Canadas multicultural society.

Minority languages, bilingualism and linguistic integration among youth have gained a great dealof attention in research especially in times of migration, globalization and other activities crossingthe borders of nation-states. In this thesis the aim is to investigate different meanings associatedwith the mother tongue when this language is another than the majority language in the place ofresidence. This task is approached from a social geographical perspective. In the study, the termmother tongue is used in its widest sense, mostly defined by the choice of the informant. In the introduction the concept mother tongue is on the one hand, looked upon and discussedin terms of a minority language in regard to the nation state and on the other, seen as a bordercrossing transnational speech community. In this way, a wide range of meanings can be illuminated.The analytical framework is discourse analysis, inspired by the work of Potter and Wetherellamong others, in the field of discursive psychology. The empirical data is made up by the transcriptsof semi-structured interviews with 13 students at two schools in the area of Stockholm,Sweden. The result of the study is presented as five interpretative repertoires, showing the mother tongueas (1) belonging, (2) background, (3) heritage, (4) carrier and (5) everyday practice. The fiverepertoires are later analyzed for their spatial content in four spatial contexts: the national, themulticultural, the transnational and the diasporic context. They are defined and used as discursivelandscapes in which the different meanings of the repertoires are identified. The five repertoires areidentified in all spatial contexts except for the national context. The findings show that the different meanings of the mother tongue represented by a certainindividual are negotiated in sometimes quite contradictive pieces of discourse. One implication isthat a specific meaning of the language does not equal an individual’s personal attitude or belief.The students seem to be very flexible in the association of different meanings to their mother tongue.The result further shows the value of a multi-scalar approach to investigations of the socialgeography of language. The ignorance of one social or spatial context will lead to the loss of a vitalpart of the language. This is crucial when discussing the mother tongue as a minority language oras a transnational speech community. Finally, there are reasons to be attentive of putting bilingualyouth in any social or spatial trap: national, multicultural, transnational or diasporic.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This study considers the situation of a group of East Timorese exiles living in Melbourne, Australia, who left East Timor or were born in exile from the time of the 1975 civil war up to the end of the Indonesian occupation of the territory in 1999. During the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, diasporic groups played a central role in the campaign for self-determination. Throughout the occupation, East Timorese in Australia maintained a strong sense of long-distance nationalism, which drove, directly or indirectly, communal cultural and social activities. The fight to free East Timor was at the core of the exiles’ collective imagination, defining them as a largely homeland focused community. However, in the aftermath of independence, many have struggled to find their place and role in relation to the independent nation. Personal experiences upon return, perceptions of political, cultural, economic and social development (or lack thereof), and political unrest and communal violence have led to renewed questioning of identity and belonging. The thesis explores this new questioning of identity and belonging and, through ethnographic field research with East Timorese living in Melbourne, it explores how the exiles experience and respond to the social and political changes in their country of origin. The research for the thesis was conducted during a period of conflict and national upheaval in East Timor, and the dissertation pays particular attention to how violence and unrest at home manifest in the exiles’ lives and affect their experience of self, community and nation. The thesis explores how past socialisation and practice within social fields that are characterised by an emphasis on communalism, morality and reciprocity form part of present agency. It considers how potential contradictions between past imaginaries and lived realities can lead to intensely felt emotions, which may further advance the process of negotiation and transformation of identity and boundaries of belonging. Through an analysis of linked conceptualisations of self, emotions and national narratives, the thesis seeks to shed light on the exiles’ engagement with and relationship to independent East Timor. It aims to inform contemporary understandings of the processes of change that occur within diasporic communities at times of radical political change in the exiles’ home countries.

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The thesis examines the literary archive of the Japanese diaspora in North America and uncovers evidence of an intergenerational transmission of trauma after the internment of all peoples of Japanese descent in America during World War Two. Their experience of migration, discrimination and displacement was exacerbated by the internment, the single most influential episode in their history which had a profound effect on subsequent generations. It is argued the trauma of their experiences can be located in their writing and, drawing on the works of Freud and trauma theoreticians Cathy Caruth and Ruth Leys in particular, the thesis constructs a theoretical framework which may be applied to post-internment Japanese diasporic writing to reveal the traces of trauma in all generations, traces that are linked to what Freud referred to as a posterior moment that triggered an earlier trauma which the subject may not have experienced personally but which may be lodged in her / her psyche. An examination of the literature of the Japanese diaspora shows that trauma is carried in the language itself and impacted upon the collective psyche of the entire community. The theoretical model is used to read the tanka poetry written by the immigrant generation, a range of texts by the first American-born generation (including an in-depth analysis of four texts spanning several decades) and the texts written by the third-generation, many of whom did not experience the internment themselves so their motivation and the influence of the internment differed greatly from earlier generations. The thesis concludes with an analysis of David Mura's identification of the link between identity, sexuality and the influence of the internment experience as transmitted by his parents. The future of the Japanese American community and their relationship with their past traumatic experience also makes its way into the conclusion.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2006. / Title from title page screen, viewed on January 18, 2008. Dissertation Committee: Kristin Dykstra (chair), Christopher Breu, Christopher DeSantis. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 220-237) and abstract. Also available in print.

Zugl.: Heidelberg, Univ., Diss., 2004

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Canterbury, 2006. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (p. 184-194). Also available via the World Wide Web.