Browsing by Subject "Diaspora"

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Bittersweet Migrations: Type II Diabetes and Healing in the Hmong Diaspora
(2018-06) Thao, Mai
As the seventh leading killer in the United States, type II diabetes disproportionally burdens minorities and those of lower socioeconomic standing, especially immigrant and refugee communities. However, why might a segment of a refugee population engage in return migration to places of exile for healing? Examining disease as socially and physically produced, this project investigates the multiple meanings behind return migrations to Laos and Thailand for Hmong-Americans with type II diabetes and who are 50 years and older. Based on 30 months of multi-sited ethnography, conducted in the clinic setting of St. Paul, Minnesota and the sites of Hmong-American travel destinations in Laos and Thailand, this dissertations argues that diabetes management focuses on the discipline of the somatic body through glucose monitoring, diet, and exercise. Yet, Hmong-American patients surface the need for social care-to attend to the social chronicity of being displaced refugees. Feelings of bodily difference and displacement in diabetes narratives produce a fluid Hmong-American subjectivity that actively remembers the past and places of familiarity. Nostalgia, melancholy, return migration, reception and discourse by Hmong-Lao and Hmong-Thai, and the embodiment of place and herbs, creatively engages in social care, centered around social continuity of kinship and origin. Through the social fields of the diabetic body, Hmong-Americans, Hmong-Lao, and Hmong-Thai, that a (de)territorialization of the Homeland, a place of exile, is transformed for a Hmong-American belonging. Yet, paradoxically, discourse about a cure from diabetes and a true Hmong-American return migration is often spoken as through death. The claim to death restructures the social order of chronic disease management (where death is often displaced) and Hmong-American racial position in the U.S. Death as an ultimate form of cure and return is a political claim to an eternal Hmong body politic.
Capitalizing Race: Diasporic Narratives and Global Asia
(2019-08) Ding, Yuan
Since the 1970s, the focus of the field of Asian American Studies has gone through dramatic shifts, from its early archival efforts to preserve the immigrant experience, repudiate orientalist stereotypes and demand for civil liberties, to a more recent turn towards globalization and transnationalism. Since the 1965 immigration reform, which abolished the long-standing discriminatory national quota system limiting Asian immigration into the US, Asian Americans have surpassed Hispanics to become the fastest growing minority group in the US. This influx of Asian Americans in the last half of the 20th century coincides with the ascension of Asia in the global economy, and both developments anticipate the adoption of neoliberal multiculturalist policies within the US nation-state. These developments challenge Asian American Studies to shift away from cultural nationalist debates over representational authenticity vs. cultural hybridity towards a more self-reflective engagement with the demands of the neoliberal literary and cultural market. Addressing this change of direction in the field, my dissertation, “Capitalizing Race: Diasporic Narratives and Global Asia,” analyzes the ways in which race gets capitalized in the works by contemporary diasporic Asian writers, who deploy economic tropes and neoliberal logics to narrate the Asian diasporic identity and experience. In dialogue with other recent critical interventions that have sought to reframe the Asian American and Asian diasporic identity in relation to the proliferation of global capitalism such as Flexible Citizenship (1999), Economic Citizens (2007) and Liquidated (2009), “Capitalizing Race” argues that Asian diasporic agency is shaped by and in turn regulates the proliferation of flexible, transnational capital. Examining how contemporary fiction situates the Asian diaspora in the context of the global circulation of capital and mass media imaginaries, “Capitalizing Race” concludes that the rhetorical production of “ethnicity” is an economic process, governed by the neoliberal logic of the literary, cultural market. Delving into the ways in which human mobility is dictated by and signified through financial liquidity, “Capitalizing Race” illuminates the neoliberal multiculturalist aesthetics operating in some of the texts analyzed here. I’m weary of the uncritical celebration of their flexible accumulation of cultural capital, which, I argue, detracts from the Asian diasporic community’s effort to achieve greater political representation and equality.
Dos eygene Daytshland: Anthologizing Jewish Multilingualism in and beyond the Habsburg Empire
(2022-05) Weinshel, Meyer
For the past century, anthologies containing German poetic texts in Yiddish translation have appeared in and beyond the former Habsburg Empire. Broadly conceiving translations as a series of “unfinished” published and unpublished texts that appeared before and after the Second World War, this dissertation traces the circulation in and beyond Central Europe of German-language poetry in Yiddish, and points to a relatedness between two seemingly disparate Jewish language groups that fell victim to marginalization, genocide, and displacement. In so doing, this dissertation maps contiguities “between” the languages used by Yiddish readers, writers, and translators. Furthermore, these contiguities destabilize traditional definitions of Ashkenazi Yiddish-Hebrew bi-/multilingualism within Eastern European Jewry, by noting the prolonged engagement with German and German Jewish culture across space and time. What emerges instead, is a longer, still-unfolding history of multilingual, communal, Jewish textual memory (i.e., translation). Often overlooked in the monolingual environs of North America and Israel, these texts have the ability to challenge English- and Hebrew-language hegemony that continues to render encounters with Yiddish and other languages obsolete, to instead provide resilient, multilingual, and diasporic Jewish cultural models.
Mobility, community and identity: Chinese student/professional migration to the United States since 1978 and transnational citizenship.
(2009-07) Liu, Lisong
Between 1978 and 2002, China sent 580,000 students and scholars to study abroad. About two thirds of these students and scholars adjusted their immigrant status and became permanent residents of their residing societies, especially the United States that has received around forty to fifty percent of Chinese students abroad. This dissertation focuses on Chinese student migrants as a case of contemporary international professional migration and studies their mobility, identities, and community formation from historical and transnational perspectives. It begins with 1978 when China began its open-door and reform policies and U.S.-China relations were normalized. It examines the changing Chinese policies on migration and the increasing attention China paid to student migrants, revealing how student migrants' transnational mobility was tied to China's political and economic reforms. It then discusses how the preference for skilled and professional migrants in U.S. immigration laws developed over time and what Chinese and Asian student and professional migration revealed about post-1965 U.S. national identity and international relations. It also examines how professional migrants, with better social mobility than past generations of migrants, faced both opportunities and challenges in forming their local communities in post-1965 U.S. society. This dissertation in the end looks at the return and circular migration of Chinese student and professional migrants. It revises the conventional framework of studying immigration as a linear process and argues that for a large number of returning Chinese student migrants, citizenship is not a signifier of assimilation or of permanent settlement but a status used for transnational mobility transcending the national boundaries which define and justify citizenship. This dissertation draws from sociological, anthropological, and political science studies of recent migrants while providing historical perspective on the recent past. Its analysis is based on a wide variety of written documents in both Chinese and English, including censuses, surveys, immigration policies and laws, congressional records, government publications, media reports, immigrant organization records, as well as migrants' online discussions. Another key source is fieldwork in both China and the United States, including visits to migrants-related organizations and sixty interviews with student migrants and returnees in the two countries.
Nouvelles dramaturgies africaines francophones du chaos
(2014-12) Ngilla, Sylvie Ndome
A new type of African Francophone theater has emerged since the 1990s, which announced a breaking point within the African literary landscape. This generation of contemporary writers from the African diaspora engages with notions of fragmentation, displacement, and instability that suggest a reconfiguration of chaos in Francophone African literary production since the Independences. The history of African literatures since 1960, when a large majority of former African colonies became independent, is marked by the theme of chaos with significant differences. Indeed, between 1960 and 1970, writers of the « disenchantment » denounce social and political chaos in Africa following the emergence of new dictatorships in the post-independence period. African theatrical aesthetics by the end of the 1970s and through the 1980s, on the contrary, work on an exit out of the African chaos from the perspective of revalorization, providing modern contextualizations for African myths and traditions. Since the early 1990s a rupture is established within new African theater that creates a performative space of « chaos-monde », which manifests the hybrid reality of the African diaspora at local and global levels. By reading across theatrical works by this generation that include Caya Makélé (Congo), Koffi Kwahulé (Ivory Coast), Marcel Zang (Cameroon), José Pliya (Benin), Kossi Efoui (Togo), and Dieudonné Niangouna (Congo), I shed light on the new techniques and aesthetics of an energetic chaos. A close examination of these new settings of chaos allows for a better understanding of the diasporic nature and transnational perspective from contemporary African theater.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire: narrative past-time as a temporal site of racialized identity deconstruction
(2013-05) Coleman, Taiyon Jeanette
My dissertation considers the structural displacement of linear time in four novels published during the 20th and 21st centuries by writers of the African Diaspora in the Americas. Through a theoretical framework of literary analysis that draws on post-structuralism and critical race theories, I argue that alterations of linear time in fiction breach the unity of narrative structures. These ruptures, which create what Jacques Derrida calls temporalization, allow characters and readers to consider how African identities, collective and individual, are produced and altered, and how these constructions affect ideas of present time and subjectivity in the texts. The Non-linear plots in these structural and metaphysical temporal sites deconstruct racialized and gendered identities; signs, symbols, and referents in the novels that are dismantled to reveal the arbitrary nature of time and its subsequent associations of meanings. These fictional configurations of time become politically and socially oppositional and help to recast Diaspora histories previously dominated by the West. The interdisciplinary aesthetics of the African and African American Diaspora has always disrupted constructions of identity, reality, and time, especially when dominant narratives of national identity have rendered Africans and African Americans historically invisible. For example, Du Bois' Black Reconstruction demonstrates the "race of time" and how "time is raced"; Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic posits from a look to the past that the Atlantic Ocean has been a breach that created a more representative African Diaspora identity; and Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother imagines back to the African Atlantic Slave Trade when all texts and persons to whom she could return to have been obliterated. My dissertation contributes to these discussions through contending that the formation of time is simultaneously a structural device for textual analysis and a methodology for comprehending marginalized identities and experiences, both inside and outside of literature. The dissertation uses different types of texts, in addition to literature, which expands the importance of reading past-time to critically illuminate the real, political and social realities, and discourses of African Diaspora peoples.
“Queering Borders”: War, Diaspora, Gender And Sexuality Among Afghans In The United States
(2019-08) Munhazim, Ahmad Qais
How did a nation known for a gender-neutral language and celebration of same-sex love through literature and poetry became a masculinist landscape as it learned to live through wars, and how do these wars continue in people’s lives thousands of miles away from their homeland? How was the sense of community and safety created by Afghans who settled in the United States during the political turmoil of the Cold War crushed by the US’s “War on Terror”? How did the lives of Afghans become engulfed by a continuous regime of surveillance that produces unsettling conditions; temporary and fragile homes marked by frequent violence; subjects defined by mistrust, anxieties and fears, and ultimately vigilant masculinities where the surveilled subjects surveil themselves? In this dissertation, I address these and many other entangled questions through stories of people who have lived through multiple wars and displacements, and who have actively refused imposed borders. Through these stories of lived experiences and border crossings, this work asks that we rethink rigid meanings of wars, diasporas and their complex relationships with gender and sexuality, while also complicating the imaginary borders between the researcher and research subjects. My particular contribution is a rich ethnographic study of gendered subjectivities among war diasporas. I argue that it is not possible to adequately understand the norms and performances of gender and sexuality and the profound ways in which they shape the lived experiences of diasporas, without first learning to listen carefully to the nuanced stories of these diasporic communities. These narratives offer complex ways to understand performances of gender and sexuality in the context of war and displacement. Grappling with these stories and narratives of many Afghans in diaspora, I use the pages of this dissertation to queer stable borders of nations, war, peace, gender and sexuality both methodologically and conceptually. Through a critical ethnography of war, diaspora and performances of gender and sexuality, this work strives to become deeply attentive to a wide variation of experiences and differences that accompany people’s lives as they become displaced, as they cross borders, and as they form a diaspora out of these ever-unfolding events and processes. I hope that this dissertation will help to strengthen the foundation for interdisciplinary scholars who are interested in advancing this critical and desperately needed research.
The Tiananmen Diaspora: Student Migration and The Transpacific Remaking of Chinese America
(2021-07) Zhang, Lei
Although the 1989 Tiananmen Square Crackdown (Tiananmen hereafter) is known and studied worldwide as one of the most important Chinese events in the 20th century, its vital and enduring impact on Chinese America has hardly been explored. My dissertation uncovers and analyzes how Chinese immigrants’ diasporic activism, writings, and memories reveal the constant and contested impact of Tiananmen on Chinese American cultural politics. What I call the “Tiananmen diaspora” includes over 54,000 U.S.-based Chinese students who received lawful permanent resident status and became naturalized American citizens through the U.S.’s Chinese Student Protection Act of 1992, dozens of Tiananmen student leaders and intellectuals who resettled in the U.S. after 1989, and Chinese immigrant writers and artists whose works have engaged the memory of Tiananmen. Relying on archival sources, news reports, literary works, visual arts, and performance in both English and Chinese, I explore how the Tiananmen diaspora has generated new and often contentious racial, class, gender, postcolonial, and settler-colonial dynamics across the Pacific in their immigration, diasporic politics, and memory. While scholars and the general public consider Tiananmen as an incident within China that heightened the divide between the U.S. and China at the end of the Cold War, the formation of the Tiananmen diaspora proved to have penetrated and integrated the U.S. and China on economic, political, and cultural levels, shifting the dominant Cold War ideological binary to a shared interest in neoliberal capitalism. I argue that the Tiananmen diaspora has remade Chinese America from a U.S.-based ethnic community to a transnational cultural and political formation deeply entangled with both the protracted Cold War binaries and the dominant neoliberal capitalism across the Pacific. Reorienting American studies and Asian American studies through Chinese and the Chinese diasporic lenses, this dissertation shows that China and the Chinese diaspora have been active participants in the remaking of Chinese America. It demonstrates that studies of race and racialization must be reckoned with the mutual transformation between Asia and America beyond the commonly recognized pan-ethnic parameters in Asian American studies.
Unreading multilingualisms of the Korean diaspora
(2013-07) Kim, Eun Joo
This project critiques the impulse to read literature and culture of the Korean diaspora as representative of individual(s), culture(s), or community(ies), and the long-standing focus on what difference looks like. Each of my primary texts has been written or performed by Korean diasporic women in the past three decades. My primary materials also include both Korean and English, and most include a third or even a fourth language. While still attending to visual reading practices, my project privileges the sound of difference. I attend to how these different sounds are represented on the printed page, the cinematic screen, and the theatre stage. Each of these genres and media allows multilinguality to be expressed in different and very specific ways. My methodology consists of "unreading" contemporary texts. By unreading, I mean the practice of disrupting and deconstructing more dominant languages, vocabularies, and reading practices, guided by Rey Chow's discussion of "unlearning" and Kandice Chuh's work on deconstructing the "Asian American subject." With this approach, I investigate how relations of power are represented in cultural productions. I begin with a discussion of the modernization and democratization of the Korean language, particularly during the period of Japanese colonization. It is within this context that I read the historical traces that emerge in the language(s) of contemporary works. I then consider the grammatical, social, political, and cultural implications of eliciting a specific Western-derived first-person singular subject from a more (potentially deliberately) ambiguous Korean context. In the second half of this project, I turn to the media of film and television to argue that historical traces of the phenomena of early cinema, particularly during Korea's colonial period inform the translation and communication technologies featured in contemporary films of the Korean diaspora. The layering of subtitling in noraebang scenes enacts a doubling of both screens and subtitles, introducing rich layers of textuality while recalling the titles of early cinema. I conclude by considering the specific contributions of this project to the field of Asian American studies.
We Rock Long Distance
(2015) Schell, Justin
We Rock Long Distance: M.anifest and the circulations of diasporic hip-hop
(2013-04) Schell, Justin
We Rock Long Distance is about the life and music of the emerging diasporic Ghanaian hip-hop artist M.anifest. Tracing complex threads of geography and generation, home and family, I examine what it is like to make hip-hop from someone in M.anifest's position, but also what it's like to make a dissertation and documentary about someone in M.anifest's position. After outlining the major questions motivating the project, I articulate the distances crossed in music and life between Minnesota and Ghana, the methodological distances that inevitably arise in ethnography and documentary film, the digital distances crossed through new media and social networking sites, and the generational distances explored between M.anifest and his grandfather, J. H. Kwabena Nketia. To tell these stories, I use numerous pieces of embedded media (photos, audio, and video), positioning We Rock Long Distance at the intersection of textual and visual knowledge production as I explore the question of where M.anifest both comes from and where he's at.

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Browsing by Subject "Diaspora"