TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY AND THE LIMITS OF COSMIC COLLABORATION

2021 ◽  
pp. 41-74
Author(s):  
Dale Hudson

This chapter compares two films that reinterpret Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula and its vampire in different ways. Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) parodies a nostalgic and orientalist perspective on debates about the place of the Middle East in the formation of US transnational identity and history, whereas Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) moves towards this history’s radical revision. Coppola imagines a “vampire ayatollah” during the first US invasion of Iran’s neighbor Iraq; Amirpour, as a feminist hijabi in the sonic space of Tehrangeles. The filmmakers’ familial trajectories underscore Hollywood’s transnational constitution as linked to US policy. The comparison develops a critical approach for how vampires serve as both object and mode of analysis throughout the book. Stoker’s tropes of blood, bodies, and borders map onto US laws concerning race, immigration, and assimilation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sunyoung Park ◽  
Lasse Gerrits

AbstractAlthough migration has long been an imperative topic in social sciences, there are still needs of study on migrants’ unique and dynamic transnational identity, which heavily influences the social integration in the host society. In Online Social Network (OSN), where the contemporary migrants actively communicate and share their stories the most, different challenges against migrants’ belonging and identity and how they cope or reconcile may evidently exist. This paper aims to scrutinise how migrants are manifesting their belonging and identity via different technological types of online social networks, to understand the relations between online social networks and migrants’ multi-faceted transnational identity. The research introduces a comparative case study on an online social movement led by Koreans in Germany via their online communities, triggered by a German TV advertisement considered as stereotyping East Asians given by white supremacy’s point of view. Starting with virtual ethnography on three OSNs representing each of internet generations (Web 1.0 ~ Web 3.0), two-step Qualitative Data Analysis is carried out to examine how Korean migrants manifest their belonging and identity via their views on “who we are” and “who are others”. The analysis reveals how Korean migrants’ transnational identities differ by their expectation on the audience and the members in each online social network, which indicates that the distinctive features of the online platform may encourage or discourage them in shaping transnational identity as a group identity. The paper concludes with the two main emphases: first, current OSNs comprising different generational technologies play a significant role in understanding the migrants’ dynamic social values, and particularly, transnational identities. Second, the dynamics of migrants’ transnational identity engages diverse social and situational contexts. (keywords: transnational identity, migrants’ online social networks, stereotyping migrants, technological evolution of online social network).


Author(s):  
Daiga Kamerāde ◽  
Ieva Skubiņa

Abstract As a result of the wide availability of social media, cheap flights and free intra-EU movement it has become considerably easier to maintain links with the country of origin than it was only a generation ago. Therefore, the language and identity formation among children of recent migrants might be significantly different from the experiences of children of the previous generations. The aim of this paper is to examine the perceptions of parents on the formation of national and transnational identity among the ‘1.5 generation migrant children’ – the children born in Latvia but growing up in England and the factors affecting them. In particular, this article seeks to understand whether 1.5 generation migrant children from Latvia construct strong transnational identities by maintaining equally strong ties with their country of origin and mother tongue and, at the same time, intensively creating networks, learning and using the language of the new home country. The results of 16 semi-structured in-depth interviews with the parents of these children reveal that the 1.5 generation Latvian migrants are on a path of becoming English-dominant bilinguals. So far there is little evidence of the development of a strong transnational identity among 1.5 generation migrant children from Latvia. Instead, this study observed a tendency towards an active integration and assimilation into the new host country facilitated by their parents or occurring despite their parents’ efforts to maintain ties with Latvia. These findings suggest that rather than the national identity of the country of origin being supplemented with a new additional national identity – that of the country of settlement – the identity of the country of origin becomes dominated by it instead.


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