The Construction of Turkey’s Circassians as a Docile Minority

The 2014 Sochi Olympic Winter Games revived memories related to the Circassians’ forced migration from their Caucasus homeland into the Ottoman Empire after 150 years. In that year, I conducted a considerable oral history project to understand the collective memories of Circassians in Turkey. The main focus of this study is, however, the social construction of the Circassian minority in Turkey. I examine their oral historical narratives related to their immigration, reception and resettlement, and instrumentalization. It is as important to place emphasis on the protected, multiplied and renewed sociocultural values of Circassians as it is to confront the history. I will examine the relationship between their diasporic identity and minority identity as well as their preferences in identity reproduction.

K.S. Maniam’s Bestiary: Reading Animality and Identity in Selected Stories

This essay scrutinises K.S.Maniam’s fictional animals by going beyond the confines of metaphor to interrogate the concept of animality and how animality impinges on diasporic identity. I examine the writer’s impulse to animalise the notion of national belonging especially though thestrategic deployment of the animal mask which reveals the shared domination of migrant and animal. I argue that Maniam’s critique of animality not only suggests that migrant and animal lives are interlinked but also informs his re-envisioning of the diasporic self. I positthat Maniam’s “new diaspora”advances the notion of diasporic self as ‘becoming-animal.’

Performance, Memory, and the Archive: A Conversation with Arsinée Khanjian

The notion of performance holds a profoundly polysemic nuance within the field of the humanities and the arts. For the present issue of the Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies, we challenge the traditional significance of perfoming arts by unveiling how artistic practices disclose important avenues for (re)thinking the question of memory and archive as well as Armenianness, cultural and diasporic identity, the female body, and political engagement. To reflect upon these various issues, we sat down with Arsinée Khanjian and shared our experiences of viewing artistic performances as well as our understanding of the significance of performance for Armenian studies.

Who is the Diaspora? The Negotiation of Diasporic Identities in the Romanian Online Political Discourse

Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework based on critical and pragmatic discourse analysis, this study investigates the way Romanian politicians negotiate the identity of the Romanian diaspora on their Facebook pages. It also points out to the way discourse is used to introduce and (de)legitimize political decisions and actions. The topic is analyzed in different political and social contexts: the presidential elections in 2014 and 2019, the Euro-parliamentary elections in 2019, and the crisis generated by the comeback of the Romanians abroad as a result of the corona-virus pandemics in 2020. The results of the study show that the diaspora is part of the political discourse as a topic mainly during electoral periods, which are more heavily stake driven. The subject of the diaspora was approached by political actors in a strategic manner, starting from their communication project and the political outcome they were aiming for. The paper contributes to the growing body of knowledge on strategies of constructing diasporic identities in the political discourse. The paper also illustrates spe-cific and emergent strategies of diasporic identity construction in different political and social contexts in a social media environment.

Reflexive Identity Construction in South Asian American Diaspora in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake

Cultural identity in contemporary diasporic communities is dynamic, multifaceted, and cyclical. In the age of reflexive modernity, it is imperative to think about new ways of conceptualizing the experience of individuals straddling multiple geographies. A model of identity for such individuals should not only explain the plurality of “being” but also the fluidity of “becoming.” In this article, the question of multiple and shifting identities of the four main characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s intergenerational novel, The Namesake, is explored using an interdisciplinary model from the field of business management based on Giddens’ theorization of reflexivity. The inward reflexive relationship between the “self” and the “other” through the discursive articulation of the ontological journey of the novel’s characters highlights the complex nature of diasporic identity construction.

Diaspora as Nation

This chapter traces the evolution of the so-called “Eastern” Sephardic diaspora in its Mediterranean context from 1492 to the late twentieth century. It looks at the way in which these exiles and their descendants forged a new diasporic identity characterized by sprawling mercantile networks that linked Jews and Conversos, new forms of Judeo-Spanish, and a nostalgia for medieval Spain. At first, the mutual sense of estrangement between the refugees and the native Jews among whom they came to settle reinforced communal solidarity among the Sephardim. From the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, the Mediterranean Sephardim adopted aspects of Ottoman, North African, and Italian culture, but succeeded in maintaining a distinct communal character amid a shifting set of political contexts and associations. During the twentieth century, the mass migration of Mediterranean Sephardim to the State of Israel helped recast them as “Eastern” Jews, or Mizrahim.