scholarly journals Rethinking Diaspora

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anjali Gera Roy

Diaspora, a term used to refer to the dispersal of Jewish people across the world, is now expanded to describe any deterritorialized or transnational population that lives in a land different from that of its origin and whose social, political and economic networks span the globe crossing national borders. Through comparing the Anglo-Indian, the Sikh and the IITian diasporas, this project proposes to deconstruct diaspora as a construct. How does the Anglo-Indian Diaspora formed by conquest and colonization compare with the Sikh diaspora created in the service of the Empire and the highly skilled IITian diaspora? What are the categories through which the three diasporas constitute themselves and how do they define the homeland? While the Anglo-Indian and the Sikh diasporas have a pre-national history originating in the Empire, the IITian diaspora is intertwined with the history of the Indian nation. The three display a wide divergence in their constitutive categories – race in Anglo-Indian, religion and ethnicity in Sikh and skills in IITian and also vary in their myths of origin. While the homeland is defined through the region and sacral place in Sikh diaspora, the IITian diaspora converges on the alma mater and nation. The constitution of the homeland is far more problematic in the case of the Anglo-Indian diaspora. While the Anglo-Indian and Sikh diasporic movements in the past were those of low-skilled workers characterized by traditional migration chain, the high-skilled IITian diaspora fits the open migration chain pattern. Yet the three diasporas intersect as communities formed through strong transnational networks that interrogate the link between space, place and identity in the imagined communities of the nation. I argue that both the mixed race Anglo-Indian narrative, the ‘pure’ discourse of the Sikh imaginary and the knowledge/skills based imagining of the IITian community compels us to rethink essential categories of belonging and identity such as race, nation, caste, ethnicity while intensifying or creating new boundaries that are mobilized in their self-fashioning.

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 275-296
Author(s):  
Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi

AbstractIn early colonial Lagos, struggles over race, place and identity were played out over ownership of land, and ended with the displacement of sections of the indigenous population. “Africa for the Africans” combines texts and maps to narrate the history of 1860s Lagos. This article demonstrates how, with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), European colonial maps can be used to analyze the significance of changing urban spatial relationships in 1860s Lagos. Though much of this analysis employs GIS, it also leans heavily on other tools for making timelines, story maps and vector diagrams. This process of creating digital representations of the past also has pedagogical applications, as these methods can be extended to the classroom for undergraduates learning about African history.


1996 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 208-218
Author(s):  
Ingrid Joubert

For the French speaking minorities of Manitoba, the struggle against oppression has often meshed with battles for justice and human rights waged by other Canadian minority groups. Over the past two decades, plays by English and French speaking playwrights have echoed theatrical themes of the nineteenth century by centring on the plight of the Métisse. Being of Amer-Indian and Franco-Canadian descent, the history of the Métisse offers a fascinating perspective on Anglo-French and Anglo-Indian relations. In many of the plays, much attention is paid to the legendary story of Louis Riel, a Métisse chief who led the fight against British expansion into Western Canada and who was executed by the Crown for the murder of Thomas Scott, a British officer. With Riel as an emblem, anglophone and francophone playwrights have forged new outlooks on the historical struggle for control of Western Canada. Furthermore, while investigating the past playwrights have uncovered ways in which conflicting interpretations of history throw light upon present-day Canadian cultural complexities.


Author(s):  
Shmuel Feiner

This chapter provides an overview of the Jewish Haskalah of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Jewish Haskalah is the first modern ideology in Jewish history, which appeared at the threshold of the modern era and was promulgated by the maskilim — the first Jews who were conscious of being modern, and who concluded that the modern age called for a comprehensive programme of change in both the cultural and the practical life of Jewish society. For years, historians of the Haskalah movement have almost completely ignored the attitude of the maskilim to history. However, the attraction felt by many maskilim to the biblical past of the Jewish people has not been overlooked by scholars. Nevertheless, new surveys of the history of Jewish historical writing and thought continue to minimize the contribution of the maskilim to this field, and repeat the claim that the Haskalah had but a vague sense of the importance of historical knowledge. This book explores a range of sources from the 100-year period of the Haskalah (1782–1881), which show not only that the maskilim displayed a great interest in history, but also that their attitude to the past was significant both for the Haskalah's ideology and for the development of Jewish historical consciousness.


2021 ◽  
pp. 52-84
Author(s):  
Jason Lustig

This chapter follows the history of the Jewish Historical General Archives in Jerusalem, founded in 1939 and opened in 1947, which in 1969 changed its name to the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People. This archive sought to bring Jewish archives from all over the world to Jerusalem under the banner of what they termed the “ingathering of the exiles of the past.” Its leaders, including Alex Bein and Daniel Cohen, who spearheaded the effort to gather materials from Europe, hoped to draw upon the legacy of European Jewry and thereby place Jews around the world within a sphere of Israeli cultural hegemony. In this archive, one finds an extension and intensification of the Gesamtarchiv’s dream of a total archive of Jewish life—and a powerful instance showing both its possibilities and the problems of fundamentally reframing the Jewish past.


This book looks at the history of Indian migrants in Australia and New Zealand over a period of two and a half centuries. It looks at the history of their migration, settlement, and encounter with racism. Indians now constitute a significant ethnic minority in Australia and New Zealand. According to the most recent census figures, they number slightly more than half a million, but represent a successful ethnic community making significant contributions to their host societies and economies. The histories of their migration go back to the early colonial period, but rarely do they find any space in the global literature on Indian diaspora, probably because of their small numbers. This book covers their history over the past two and half centuries, covering both the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ diaspora; the ‘old’, consisting of the labourers who migrated under pressure of colonial capital, and the ‘new’ representing the post-war professional migrants. It also looks closely at the host societies which over this period have been receiving and interacting with the Indian migrants and the contributions of a few Antipodeans who travelled to India in the early twentieth century bringing their ideas and service. However, this book is not just about the diaspora; it is also about the circulation of ideas between the Antipodes and India and the contribution of this circulation to both the British Empire and the Commonwealth.


Author(s):  
Joseph P. Ansell

Artist and illustrator Arthur Szyk was a Polish Jew whose work was overwhelmingly Jewish in theme and content. The mission he set himself was to use his artistic talents to serve humanity and the Jewish people. His work as a political artist went well beyond a narrow definition of the Jewish cause. He is best known among Jews for his illustrated Haggadah, but the majority of his work deals with contemporary political themes and social causes. In Poland, Szyk promoted the causes of freedom, toleration, and human dignity. He believed that as a Jewish artist he had a responsibility to speak for all minorities. He worked for years on behalf of the Polish government in an effort to strengthen the Jews' position. Szyk left Europe in 1940 and arrived in the United States later the same year. Determined to use his art for political purposes, he crusaded against the Nazis. Convinced that Hitler would not stop with the Jews but would suppress all freedom-loving people, he supported the war effort through his striking propaganda images of the German and Japanese armies, to great effect. After the war he turned his efforts to promoting the idea of a Jewish homeland in Israel. In every phase of his career, one finds Szyk looking to the past but hoping for the future; he believed that art could make a difference in the world, politically and socially. This biography makes a singular contribution to the history of Jewish art and of Polish–Jewish relations in the first half of the twentieth century.


Author(s):  
Suddhabrata Deb Roy

Kalimpong Kids is a rare book. Written by historian, Jane McCabe, this book recounts the history of a scheme which managed the emigration of mixed-race children from Kalimpong and North-Eastern India to New Zealand. The scheme, which began in 1908 at the insistence of Dr John Anderson Graham, went on till 1939, the view across this time being that ‘mixed-race people ... were “undesirable”’. The plan, however, did not go on continuously and was halted from 1929-1938 due to numerous governmental and geo-political reasons. The Anglo-Indian children were shifted from St. Andrews Colonial Homes which was later renamed into Dr Graham’s Homes. The first two graduates who found their way to Dunedin were Leonard and Sydney Williams. Although Dr Graham’s initial wish was to settle these children across the British Empire, New Zealand proved to be the only country where the Kalimpong Kids could settle down. 


1961 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. W. Small

It is generally accepted that history is an element of culture and the historian a member of society, thus, in Croce's aphorism, that the only true history is contemporary history. It follows from this that when there occur great changes in the contemporary scene, there must also be great changes in historiography, that the vision not merely of the present but also of the past must change.


1962 ◽  
Vol 11 (02) ◽  
pp. 137-143
Author(s):  
M. Schwarzschild

It is perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the past decade in astronomy that the evolution of some major classes of astronomical objects has become accessible to detailed research. The theory of the evolution of individual stars has developed into a substantial body of quantitative investigations. The evolution of galaxies, particularly of our own, has clearly become a subject for serious research. Even the history of the solar system, this close-by intriguing puzzle, may soon make the transition from being a subject of speculation to being a subject of detailed study in view of the fast flow of new data obtained with new techniques, including space-craft.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence B. Leonard

Purpose The current “specific language impairment” and “developmental language disorder” discussion might lead to important changes in how we refer to children with language disorders of unknown origin. The field has seen other changes in terminology. This article reviews many of these changes. Method A literature review of previous clinical labels was conducted, and possible reasons for the changes in labels were identified. Results References to children with significant yet unexplained deficits in language ability have been part of the scientific literature since, at least, the early 1800s. Terms have changed from those with a neurological emphasis to those that do not imply a cause for the language disorder. Diagnostic criteria have become more explicit but have become, at certain points, too narrow to represent the wider range of children with language disorders of unknown origin. Conclusions The field was not well served by the many changes in terminology that have transpired in the past. A new label at this point must be accompanied by strong efforts to recruit its adoption by clinical speech-language pathologists and the general public.


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