scholarly journals ‘There’s No Return Route, Is There?’: Conor O’Callaghan’s After-Irish Diasporic Aesthetic

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 8
Author(s):  
Alexander Wortley

In this article, I examine Conor O’Callaghan’s poetry in the context of post- or after-Irishness and migration. The idea of a traditional Irish national literature has diminished in importance and relevance in recent years. Irish writers are now more sensitized to alternative modes of identification, unbound by the constraints of a singular concept of ‘Irishness’. This is especially significant for migrant writers, who are geographically removed from Ireland. O’Callaghan (born 1968) is himself a migrant: having lived in America, he now lives in England. Drawn from his experiences of transnational migration, O’Callaghan explores the different locales that he has known. He also feels free to write about suburban life, love, and the internet in an often quick-witted vernacular. What then is O’Callaghan’s aesthetic response to the experience of migrancy? Does O’Callaghan’s poetry exhibit an after-Irish diasporic aesthetic? Although O’Callaghan’s poetry is imbued with a diasporic multi-locatedness, both intellectual and geographical, his sense of Irish identity remains strong, and his poetry also often expresses a desire for rootedness.

2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shizhan Zhu ◽  
Juan Chen

Using data from a national survey with 1,288 respondents, this study investigates the socio-demographic determinants of the first-order digital divide (access to the Internet) and the second-order digital divide (e-commerce use) in China. The survey employed spatial probability sampling technology so it would encompass migrants as well as registered residents. Multiple logistic regressions were applied to model the associations between access to the Internet/e-commerce use and demographic characteristics, socio-economic attributes, and migration and residency status. The results demonstrate the significant effects of rural-urban inequality and socio-economic divisions in Internet access. Age, gender, education, and residency were identified as significant predictors for individual e-commerce use. The findings provide helpful information for enterprises wishing to broaden their business horizons. The research can also be used in designing effective policies to reduce China’s digital inequality.


Author(s):  
Tan Meng Yoe

This chapter features the case study of a Malaysian-Chinese blogger, Stark, who after migrating, blogged about her spiritual experiences back in Malaysia, including her conversion to Christianity and the subsequent estrangement from her parents. Through analysing this intersection of religion, the internet, and migration, the notion of authenticity in the practice of online religion can be explored. Online authenticity is a difficult element to measure, and is made more complicated when applied to a subjective matter like spirituality. The case study will demonstrate that the act of blogging serves the purpose of heritaging, spiritual catharsis, and communication with her parents, and thus infer a genuine spiritual activity that contributes to her still-developing religious identity.


2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (8) ◽  
pp. 1713-1738 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDERS NÆSS ◽  
BJØRG MOEN

ABSTRACTThis article is about dementia disease in the context of transnational migration. Focusing on the example of Pakistani immigrants in Norway, the article explores response processes surrounding signs and symptoms of dementia. Particular attention is lent to understanding how Norwegian-Pakistani families ‘negotiate dementia’ in the space between their own imported, culturally defined system of cure and care, and the Norwegian health-care culture, which is characterised by an inclination towards public care and biomedical intervention. Based on field observations and in-depth interviews with Norwegian-Pakistani families and hospital professionals working with dementia, we show that the centrality of the traditional family in Norwegian-Pakistanis' identity claims has significant implications for how Norwegian-Pakistanis relate to the Norwegian health-care culture, and for how signs and symptoms of cognitive decline are read and responded to in a migratory context.


Sociology ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 608-625 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Siebers

Transnational migration flows have revitalised the interest in ethnicity in social sciences. The ethnic boundary approach (Barth, Wimmer) argues for a non-essentialist understanding of ethnicity and calls for detecting the factors that turn migrants into ethnic minorities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Dutch police officers between 2008 and 2013, this article presents three factors that together constitute a structural framework that produces events of ethnic boundary construction (salient ethnic identity plus ethnic closure) between migrant and non-migrant officers: (1) ethnicised precarity; (2) ethnic conflicts triggered by the ethnicising discourse in Dutch media and politics on migrants and migration; and (3) the quasi-therapeutic management style applied in the police organisation. It further calls for a differentiated understanding of migrants’ precarity, questions explanations of ethnic closure in terms of stereotypes and critically scrutinises socio-psychological approaches of ethnicity and diversity management.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 128-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kassahun Kebede

This study of Ethiopian immigrants in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area suggests that the continued involvement of immigrants with their place of origin is significantly shaped by pre-immigration and migration experiences. From my historically informed ethnographic work as well as the analysis of my informants’ pre-migration class and political backgrounds and the reasons why they left Ethiopia since the 1960s, three generations emerge: the Royalists, the Revolutionaries, and the DVs (Diversity Visa immigrants). In this article I explore the multiple and often contradictory narratives and discourses that characterize these generations. I also explore the ways in which the heterogeneity between the generations is manifested in their way of experiencing the United States, in their relationship with the homeland, and in the inter-generational interactions that bind them to one another. I use this case study to argue that attending to pre-migration intra- as well as inter-generational differences in immigrants’ experiences and views of their home and receiving countries will yield a fuller and more accurate picture of transnational migration.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cord Pagenstecher

AbstractThis paper studies the transformative character of tourism and travel for a small, but multi-facetted example: Kosovo is a post-socialist transformation society and a post-war country in the process of nation building, a developing country within Europe and a transnational migration society. With quantitative data being unreliable in such contexts, an exemplary, biographical study allows an analysis of cross-system transformations and continuities. Based on narrative interviews, the paper studies travel patterns and narratives of an Albanian woman (anonymized here as Zana Bajrami) from socialist rural Yugoslavia in the 1970s to migratory Europe in the 2000s. After a general introduction, the paper considers public and private tourism in Yugoslavia first, before focusing on the impact of migration on tourist behavior. In trying to contextualize an individual example, it also explores the potential of a biographical approach in tourism research.


2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liam Lanigan

Oona Frawley's 2014 novel Flight interrogates Irish cultural responses to transnational labour since the 1990s. The novel's protagonist is a Zimbabwean refugee named Sandrine, whose pregnant body threatens an exclusionary, racial definition of Irish identity as it is legally codified by the 2004 ‘Citizenship Referendum’. The novel juxtaposes the contrasting experiences of transnational migration in the upper and lower circuits of global capital, and traces the emergence of Sandrine's voice as it develops and impinges on the narrative through solidarity with other transnational voices. Flight thus narrativizes the cultural and social processes by which transnational experience might re-narrate Ireland as a site of meaning.


Examining the ongoing processes of migration in Europe and beyond, this book deals with the ongoing processes of migration and boundary-(re)making in the world. It takes stock of recent and hitherto unpublished research on the refugee crisis in Europe, migration dynamics in the Middle East and migration flows in Africa and Latin America, specifically in relation to their political, social and cultural framing. In particular, chapters in this collection focus on newer cases of transnational migration, their socio-political implications that in turn affect identity-making. Alongside the refugee and migrant crisis in Europe, which can be viewed as one of the most divisive political issues in recent European history, new patterns of migration and re-bordering can also be seen across Europe, the Middle East and beyond. These include both the rise of anti-immigration populism within the nation-states as well as different attempts to control and regulate tangible and intangible borders of the nation state to discourage migration at the regional level such as the EU.


2018 ◽  
pp. 107
Author(s):  
Francisco-Javier Ogáyar-Marín ◽  
Vasile Muntean ◽  
Juan-Francisco Gamella-Mora

Resumen: En este artículo estudiamos la convergencia de la migración romá rumana posterior a 1989 con el desarrollo de las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación (TIC) a partir de ese mismo período. Para ello hemos partido del trabajo etnográfico previo realizado durante dos campañas entre 2003-2007 y 2013-2016 respectivamente con siete redes romá Korturare procedentes de las regiones rumanas de Transilvania y el Bánato, centrándonos en tres de ellas por su presencia en la ciudad de Granada. El rol de los recursos de polymedia, un entorno emergente de posibilidades comunicativas, facilita y alienta los desplazamientos migratorios al reducir incertidumbres y permitir experiencias de copresencia (digitalizada) en un contexto transnacional. Esta situación favorece dinámicas de reproducción y control cultural, pero a la vez habilita y permite usos diferenciados en polymedia que esbozan transformaciones en las costumbres romá.Abstract: In this paper we explore the convergence of two contemporary parallel processes: the post-1990 transnational migration of Roma groups from some Eastern European countries, particularly Romania to the West, and the growing use by these populations of the expanding social media derived from the revolutionary development of new ICT (information and communication technologies). We have followed some groups from Transylvania and Banat to their western diaspora in a long-term ethnographic work that started in 2003 and was retaken in a recent ethnographic project (2013-2017). We have studied primarily groups living in Andalusia, although their family networks are extended today over more than 30 localities in a dozen of European and North American countries. These networks of networks form a social space or commuinity or reference that is largely maintained through digital communication. The different social media and communication options (from Facebook to cheap phone calls) generate a new kind of virtual environment or polymedia (Madianou and Miller 2011, 2012). In this paper we explore the effects of this new social space of communication in three major aspects of Roma social life: 1)Its effects in facilitating, supporting and inducing mobility and migration; 2) In cultural reproduction and transformation through the maintenance of specific systems of family, marriage, gender and conflict resolution, including the online transmission of public trials and courts (kris), funerary rituals and elaborated marriage ceremonies, including betrothal (mangaimo) and weddings (abev); and 3)In new processes of social distinction and differentiation following fracture lines of class, gender and generation.


Author(s):  
Natalie Welfens ◽  
Saskia Bonjour

Abstract European resettlement programs prioritize the admission of refugee families. While this is seen as the “natural” thing to do, we argue that the mobilization of family norms is crucially political: in everyday bordering practices, interpretations of family norms are decisive for who is admitted to Europe. We study the selection of Syrian refugees in Turkey for humanitarian admission to Germany, which involves national governments, UNHCR, and NGOs. Fusing practice-theoretical approaches to humanitarianism and mobility governance on the one hand, with gender and sexuality scholarship on nationalism, empire, and migration on the other, we show how family norms configure discretionary power in transnational migration governance. First, family norms shape how power is exercised over refugees in vulnerability and assimilability assessments. Vulnerability assessments hinge on whether a family counts as protective and supportive, or deficient and threatening. Assimilability assessments scrutinize whether refugees do family “right”: in a way that will not disturb resettlement countries’ national (gender) order. Second, the mobilization of family norms reflects power disparities between actors. International and non-governmental actors strive to recognize plural family forms, but are disciplined into applying resettlement states’ more constraining family norms, thereby participating in the (re)production of the borders and boundaries of Europe.


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