This collection of loosely-linked personal essays explores the fluid nature of individual and cultural identity. In the opening essay, "Midrash," I utilize my past and my ancestor's immigration story to explain my complicated identity as a Texan, Californian, New Yorker, twenty-something woman, and Jew. This is a recurring element in most of the essays in the collection. The settings and contexts of the essays often set the stage for a sense of Diaspora or loss within my own narrative world. I do not offer these moments in time to merely showcase confusion in one's sense of self, but rather to interrogate the complex and multidimensional identities that today's world forces each of us to inhabit. / Graduation date: 2012 / Access permanently restricted to the OSU Community at author's request.

Voyages en coolitude: une analyse comparative et textuelle de la mémoire créatrice et interculturelle des écrivaines descendantes de coolies. Il y a plus de 150 ans, des milliers de coolies (indiens sous contrat) étaient « importés » par les colons britanniques et français pour remplacer, dans leurs plantations, les esclaves récemment affranchis (principalement en Afrique du Sud, aux Antilles et à l'île Maurice). Un nouveau système oppressif était né, rappelant insidieusement l'esclavage. Même si des écrivains comme V. S. Naipaul ont été reconnus sur la scène mondiale littéraire, beaucoup d'entre eux ont été marginalisés. Les femmes écrivaines le furent encore plus par le système plantocrate et, plus tard, par des communautés indiennes patriarcales souvent fossilisées. Ce n'est que depuis quelques décennies que ces écrivaines ont pris la plume pour se lancer à la recherche d'une identité et d'un passé fondateurs. Cette quête créatrice mêle soulagement et souffrance en générant une remise en question des origines, de l'identité culturelle, de l'appartenance à une communauté où les femmes sont souvent enfermées dans des rôles définis et étouffants. Ce questionnement est prélude à un processus de métissage, de « massalafication » (mélange d'épices) des composantes culturelles et littéraires héritées. A la lumière du concept de coolitude développé par le poète mauricien Khal Torabully, notre étude est principalement une analyse comparative et textuelle d'une quinzaine d'ouvrages (prose, poésie) couvrant la période 1970-2002 et écrits par des femmes descendantes de travailleurs coolies. Ces écrivaines aux héritages multiples écrivent depuis des mégalopoles occidentales vers lesquelles elles ont entrepris une autre traversée. Notre travail met en exergue les thématiques, symboles, motifs et métaphores récurrents dans ces ouvrages et constitutifs de ce que nous appellerons « l'imaginaire coolie, » un imaginaire de la « cross-culturality, » de la rencontre de cultures. La traversée des Kala Pani (eaux noires car impures) est réexplorée et émerge comme un mythe des origines dans lequel le lien maternel devient mer amniotique, symbole d'identités plurielles. La traversée vers l'ailleurs, une traversée à la fois fondatrice, destructrice et créatrice, constitue le paradigme de notre étude. Si l'Inde reste présente, elle ne constitue plus une mère patrie mais un chaudron de valeurs, de rituels, de recettes dans lequel de nombreuses écrivaines puisent les éléments dont elles ont besoin afin de comprendre et constituer leur identité. A côté de cette traversée transocéanique, le passage du village (lui-même revisité et mythifié) à la métropole dévorante, ainsi que le paysage de l'île (source de nombreuses images) constituent des thématiques récurrentes. Le village qui représente la naissance de la communauté coolie et sa disparition, symbolise également le rapprochement à d'autres communautés. Une analyse de l'attitude des personnages vis-à-vis de leur culture d'origine et de celle du colonisateur révèle l'important itinéraire des générations. Ce sont probablement les métaphores culinaires qui caractérisent le mieux les écrits de ces femmes. La « massalafication » identitaire rend compte d'un processus de construction culturelle à la fois dynamique et unique. Cette massalafication se retrouve aussi dans les choix formels et génériques de ces auteurs: des écrits qui font dialoguer genres, sous-genres, modes, focalisation interne et narration polyphonique. La coolitude, d'après la présente étude, émerge non seulement comme une prise de conscience identitaire liée au coolie trade et à la diaspora, mais aussi, de manière plus générale, comme une affirmation d'une identité plurielle et en devenir, entre l'Inde et l'Ailleurs, entre l'Ailleurs et l'Occident, entre l'Occident et les « patries imaginaires » sans cesse réinventées par les ouvrages littéraires en question.

Thesis--PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

This report focuses on the intersections between diaspora and indigeneity in the nation-state of Guyana. To illustrate this conflicting, yet overlapping relationship, I examine the nature of state indigenous governing policies by tracing the colonial genealogy of the current 2006 Amerindian Act. I draw on the analytics of settler-colonialism, specifically the “logic of elimination,” to analyze dominant representations of indigeneity in the legislation, which grants recognition of collective rights and ancestral lands while constructing a narrative of national unity and belonging. Ultimately, this report seeks to sheds new light on an indigenous identification as a rights-bearing subject and ultimately rethinks indigenous/non-indigenous social and political relations. / text

No description available.

Doctor of Philosophy / This work draws on the insights of an anthropology of transnationalism to explore an emergent field of translocal connections, practices and identifications between reformed Vietnam and the post-1975 Vietnamese diaspora in the West. In the post Cold War period, it is argued, we have witnessed a collapse of the geopolitics of exile that once divided diaspora and homeland. In this context, it is not appropriate for Vietnamese migration studies to speak of "two" discrete national and diasporic Vietnamese communities. Rather, the discipline is required to come to terms (theoretically and empirically) with a complex and contradictory field of transnational social relationships through which diaspora and homeland are co-constituted. The thesis charts this field via the study of phenomena such as: the explosion of mobility between Vietnam and diaspora· the emergence of a transnational Vietnamese language commercial music culture; the constitution of translocal Vietnamese urban spaces in the host nations; the enabling of symbolic and market citizenship in a Vietnamese "transnation"; and the flow of overseas Vietnamese "grey" and "green" matter (cultural and material capital) back into Vietnam. Exile and fleturn shows how the state in Vietnam, and elites in the diaspora, have responded to the advent of transnational flows between homeland and diasporic sites by authoring both traditional, border-enforcing and novel, borderexpanding strategies of imagining and governing the "national" community. It argues that overseas Vietnamese have made sense of their own transits to and engagements with Vietnam through a logic of' transnational exilic space" that variously resists and accommodates the claims of capital, the state and diasporic belonging.

This research is concerned with the problems and possibilities of combining diverse forms of peacebuilding in the same peacebuilding space. It analyses patterns of interaction between various forms of peacebuilding using a framework of hybridity. Within debates on peacebuilding hybridities, frictional encounters are situated between international peacebuilders and 'locals' who are predominantly conceptualised as domestic, indigenous and globally Southern. While enhancing understandings of local/international interactions, this conceptualisation excludes constituencies of locals who occupy global spaces - those in diaspora. Diaspora activists have been shown to ambivalently shape other processes of homeland change as either mediators or meddlers due to the opportunities and limitations arising from being in diaspora. In spite of this, an in-depth understanding of the roles of diaspora in hybrid peacebuilding debates is lacking. When diaspora activists have been analysed in relation to peacebuilding, it has been primarily outside of the framework of hybridity which - due to its roots in postcolonial theory - extolls resistance to international peacebuilding as having enormous peacebuilding potential. As such, diaspora who resist international peacebuilding processes have been consistently cast as peace-wreckers which belies the tolerance for resistance so central to hybrid analyses. In light of the potential for diaspora, and particularly those in opposition to formal peacebuilding, to transform, assuage or exacerbate patterns of interaction between locals and internationals, this research centralises diaspora opposition activism in a hybrid analysis of a peacebuilding space. It does this through a single case study of UK Sudanese activists and their contributions to Sudanese peacebuilding. Sudanese peacebuilding is characterised by its diversity: it combines international peace agreements, elite dialogues, top-down transitional justice with local-level community reconciliation and bottom-up political change movements. It therefore provides an exemplary case of a peacebuilding space in which multiple forms of peacebuilding with diverse, and often contradictory aims, coalesce and contend with one another. The study examines how Sudanese activists resident in the UK shape the patterns of interaction within Sudanese peacebuilding, and asks how various aspects of 'being in diaspora' make those contributions possible. In doing so, this research contributes to understandings of how, why and with what effects diverse actors, ideas and processes combine during peacebuilding.

Remittances to sub-Saharan Africa have steadily been on increase in recent decades. However, the full socio-economic benefits of remittances to some countries, such as Tanzania are far from clear. Consequently, the importance of this economic phenomenon in Tanzanian society is rather inconclusive, because their effects on poverty reduction and development in Tanzania are based largely on evidence from the regional area (i.e. sub-Saharan Africa) and from other developing countries. This study has examined the perceived and actual effects of remittances on poverty reduction and development in Tanzania from the viewpoint of Leicester-based Tanzanian diaspora and the remittance receivers’ in Tanzania. The study was, therefore, based in two places, Leicester (United Kingdom- UK) and Tanzania. It adopts an inductive approach to enquiry for which both qualitative and quantitative data were collect from the three case studies: The first case study is Leicester-based Tanzanian diaspora (the remittances senders), the second case study is remittance receivers in Tanzania (the remittances users), and third case study is Tanzanian government officials (i.e. researchers, policy makers and regulatory bodies). The significance of this study is that it is a two-way process conducted from the remittance senders’ (the Leicester-based Tanzanian diaspora) and remittance the receivers’ perspectives (the remittance users in Tanzania). The study, therefore, involve tracking of remittances from Leicester to Tanzania. The study provides better insight and understanding of the effects of remittances on poverty reduction and development in Tanzania. It help to understand how best to harness diaspora and remittances through the understanding of diaspora’s capabilities and interests, as well as types of remittances sent to Tanzania, channels of sending, and any obstacles that hamper the effectiveness of remittances on poverty reduction and development in Tanzania. The study also offers insight into why the Tanzanian diaspora continues to remit. Amongst other reasons, it includes the retained belief in the Ujamaa ideology (family-hood or brother-hood). In turn, this adds significant contributions on the theories of migration and development, and motives to remit. The overall finding of this study is that remittances remain important to Tanzanian society, because they help to increase the amount of disposable money for spending on education, health, consumption, business formation, and investments. Unlike other international aid, remittances go directly to receivers. Thus, remittances tend to have immediate and direct effects on the livelihoods of the receivers. Remittances received from Leicester, therefore, help to improve the quality of lives of the recipients. Hence, they help to reduce depth and severity of poverty on the receiving communities. Nevertheless, the findings of this study clearly show that from a developmental perspective, one of the major challenges to the effects of remittances on poverty reduction and development in Tanzania is to motivate the diaspora to conduct their remittance transfer operations through formal channels. This has remained a major challenge because of high fees associated with transfer of financial and material remittances, lack of formal channels in rural areas of Tanzania, and a total lack of appropriate formal channels for transmitting social remittances to Tanzania. The study recommends that policies on diaspora and remittances should be designed to encourage diaspora to send remittances through formal channels with low transaction costs. This is important because it will make easier to channel remittances into sustainable developmental projects that could fuel community and national development, thereby touching not only the direct recipients but also the general public. The study also recommends that both Tanzania and the UK government need to ensure social remittances (e.g. skills, technology-know-how, knowledge and experiences) are effectively being acquired, utilized and transmitted to Tanzania for the development of the country. This can be achieved by create a common platform for dialogue between diaspora, Tanzania and the UK governments, which will enable to understand local needs alongside the skills, knowledge, capacities and interests of the diaspora. The study concludes that in spite of other interventions and perhaps a lesser emphasis on social remittance sending to Tanzania nowadays, diaspora remittances remain a critical input into poverty reduction and development in Tanzania.

Globalisation has emphasised two forces in cross-cultural research – heterogenisation and homogenisation, which contribute to the increased power of diasporas and the emergence of a global consumer culture. Reverse acculturation is a recent phenomenon, describing the change in direction of the acculturation process, back towards the culture of origin. Within a global context, reverse acculturation is investigated to determine which globalisation force drives fully acculturated individuals to return to their roots. An exploratory qualitative study was conducted with five South African Chinese and five Anglo-Saxon individuals. The findings identified the need for an evolved acculturation process that recognises integration between homeland and hostland as non-temporary. The findings acknowledged the significance of diaspora research and the growing influence of China on global culture. This confirmed the need for a dynamic definition of acculturation with the factors of life events, life stages and family as significant to the process. The existence of a heterogeneous global culture was supported over a homogenous culture, requiring a cosmopolitan definition to update the current definition based on outdated Western logic. The main findings were applied to evolve the traditional framework towards a dynamic acculturation process driven by individual agency and influenced by a multi-layered construct of variables. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / zkgibs2014 / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / MBA / Unrestricted