Introduction: Diaspora, Performance, and National Affiliations in North America

2003 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
LOREN KRUGER

Although current theories of diaspora argue for a break between an older irrevocable migration from one nation to another and a new transnational movement between host country and birthplace, research on nineteenth- as well as twentieth-century North America demonstrates that earlier migration also had a transnational dimension. The cultural consequences of this two-way traffic include syncretic performance forms, institutions, and audiences, whose legitimacy depended on engagement with but not total assimilation in local conventions and on the mobilization of touristic nostalgia in, say, Cantonese opera in California or Bavarian-American musicals in New York, to appeal to nativist and immigrant consumers. Today, syncretic theatre of diaspora is complicated on the one hand by a theatre of diasporic residence, in which immigrants dramatize inherited conflicts in the host country, such as Québécois separatism in Canada, along with problems of migrants, among them South Asians, and on the other by a theatre of non-residence, touring companies bringing theatre from the home country, say India, to ‘non-resident Indians’ and local audiences in the United States.

1979 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 7-14
Author(s):  
Harry G. Johnson

The concept of “brain drain” is in its origins a nationalistic concept, by which is meant a concept that visualizes economic and cultural welfare in terms of the welfare of the residents of a national state or region, viewed as a totality, and excludes from consideration both the welfare of people born in that region who choose to leave it, and the welfare of the outside world in general. Moreover, though the available statistics are far from adequate on this point, there is generally assumed to be a net flow of trained professional people from the former colonial territories to the ex-imperial European nations, and from Europe and elsewhere to North America and particularly the United States. The concept thus lends itself easily to the expression of anti-colonial sentiments on the one hand, and anti-American sentiments on the other. The expression of such sentiments can be dignified by the presentation of brain drain as a serious economic and cultural problem, by relying on nationalistic sentiments and assumptions and ignoring the principles of economics—especially the principle that in every transaction there is both a demand and a supply—or by elevating certain theoretical economic possibilities into presumed hard facts.


2021 ◽  
pp. 158-184
Author(s):  
Elliott Young

Machado was just five years old in 1990 when she was brought to the United States by her mother, who was desperate to escape the civil war raging in their home country of El Salvador; she wanted a better life for her two young daughters. In 2015, she was picked up in a traffic stop in Arkansas which triggered her deportation based on a felony conviction from a decade earlier. Machado’s story reveals a radical shift that had been happening since the mid-1990s. Unprecedented numbers of immigrants were being caught in a system that penalized people with mandatory deportations for relatively low-level crimes. Machado does not fit easily into the Manichean distinction made by President Obama in 2014 between “felons” on the one hand and “families” on the other. Machado, like so many others, is both.


1948 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-362 ◽  
Author(s):  
José de Onís

In the Rich Collection of the New York Public Library there is a manuscript, Apuntes ligeros sobre los Estados Unidos de la América Septentrional, in which a Spanish diplomat and author, Valentín de Foronda, gives his impressions about the United States of America.We cannot say with certainty what the history of this manuscript is, but from the few scattered facts which we have we can come to certain conclusions. At the time when it was written, in 1804, there must have been more than one copy. The perfection of the manuscript and the fact that ft is not in Foronda’s handwriting, tends to indicate that it was recopied several times. It is probable that there were at least three sets of copies. The original he must have kept for himself. One, in all likelihood was given to his immediate superior, who at that time was Casa Irujo. A third set might have been sent to the Spanish Minister of State. It is my belief that the manuscript that has come down to us is the one he gave to the Ambassador Casa Irujo. The reason on which I base this, is that twenty years later, long after Foronda and Casa Irujo had died, Mrs. Casa Irujo became a personal friend of Obadiah Rich, the bibliographer, and used to be a frequent guest at his house in Madrid. Rich obtained the manuscript about this time and it is very probable that he got it from her. Where the other hypothetical copies are would be difficult to say. The set sent to the Spanish Minister of State must be buried in some Spanish archive. The other one which he kept for himself was more than likely confiscated by the Spanish authorities, along with his other papers, and was probably destroyed during Foronda’s trial of 1814.


1910 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 83-101
Author(s):  
John Nicum

During the first century of the occupation of Manhattan Island by Europeans we find there two settlements of Lutherans, the one of an earlier, the other of a later date. The earlier settlement was that of Dutch Lutherans, who came over from Holland with the first settlers, whilst some seventy-five years later German Lutherans began to arrive, at first in smaller and then in ever increasing numbers until many thousands had settled mainly along the Hudson and Mohawk rivers. It is now two hundred years ago that the first colony of German Lutherans arrived in the harbor of New York. They were the Palatinates who, in 1707, because of continued political and religious disturbances, had with their pastor, the Rev. Josua von Kocherthal, left the fatherland, and found a new home near where the city of Newburgh now stands. It goes without saying, that though most of them settled along the Hudson and Mohawk rivers, yet many of them remained on the Island of Manhattan. Whilst the immigration of Lutherans from Holland, after the middle of the eighteenth century practically ceased, that of the German Lutherans increased, and the Lutheran Church on Manhattan which at first was Dutch afterwards became German. And this first German Lutheran Church in the present city of New York had the good fortune to have among its pastors some of the most distinguished men and theologians of the eighteenth century, such as the patriarch of the Lutheran Church in this country, the Rev. Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, D.D., and his son, the Rev. Frederick Augustus Conrad Muhlenberg, a man of burning patriotism, who in time became speaker of the First and Third Congresses of the United States.


1948 ◽  
Vol 4 (03) ◽  
pp. 351-362
Author(s):  
José de Onís

In the Rich Collection of the New York Public Library there is a manuscript, Apuntes ligeros sobre los Estados Unidos de la América Septentrional, in which a Spanish diplomat and author, Valentín de Foronda, gives his impressions about the United States of America. We cannot say with certainty what the history of this manuscript is, but from the few scattered facts which we have we can come to certain conclusions. At the time when it was written, in 1804, there must have been more than one copy. The perfection of the manuscript and the fact that ft is not in Foronda’s handwriting, tends to indicate that it was recopied several times. It is probable that there were at least three sets of copies. The original he must have kept for himself. One, in all likelihood was given to his immediate superior, who at that time was Casa Irujo. A third set might have been sent to the Spanish Minister of State. It is my belief that the manuscript that has come down to us is the one he gave to the Ambassador Casa Irujo. The reason on which I base this, is that twenty years later, long after Foronda and Casa Irujo had died, Mrs. Casa Irujo became a personal friend of Obadiah Rich, the bibliographer, and used to be a frequent guest at his house in Madrid. Rich obtained the manuscript about this time and it is very probable that he got it from her. Where the other hypothetical copies are would be difficult to say. The set sent to the Spanish Minister of State must be buried in some Spanish archive. The other one which he kept for himself was more than likely confiscated by the Spanish authorities, along with his other papers, and was probably destroyed during Foronda’s trial of 1814.


Author(s):  
Socorro Herrera

Recent statistics indicate that more than 200 million people worldwide live in a country other than the one in which they were born, with more than a third having moved from an underdeveloped to a developed country and at least another third having moved from one developed nation to another. Although the United States is the world leader as a host country, Europe’s migrant population in 2005 exceeded that of North America by almost 50 percent and Western Asia’s share of the world’s migrants now exceeds 25 million (United Nations, 2011). Most pronounced is an unprecedented migration of persons to the developing world that is both a cause and a consequence of globalization.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Holslag

The chapter argues that India has a strong interest to balance China and that the two Asian giants will not be able grow together without conflict. However, India will not be able to balance China’s rise. The chapter argues that India remains stuck between nonalignment and nonperformance. On the one hand, it resists the prospect of a new coalition that balances China from the maritime fringes of Eurasia, especially if that coalition is led by the United States. On the other hand, it has failed to strengthen its own capabilities. Its military power lags behind China’s, its efforts to reach out to both East and Central Asia have ended in disappointment, and its economic reforms have gone nowhere. As a result of that economic underachievement, India finds itself also torn between emotional nationalism and paralyzing political fragmentation, which, in turn, will further complicate its role as a regional power.


2011 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Didier

ArgumentWhen the New Deal administration attained power in the United States, it was confronted with two different problems that could be linked to one another. On the one hand, there was a huge problem of unemployment, affecting everybody including the white-collar workers. And, on the other hand, the administration suffered from a very serious lack of data to illuminate its politics. One idea that came out of this situation was to use the abundant unemployed white-collar workers as enumerators of statistical studies. This paper describes this experiment, shows how it paradoxically affected the professionalization of statistics, and explains why it did not affect expert democracy despite its Deweysian participationist aspect.


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