The Linguistic Coping Strategies of Three Netherlanders in England

Thousands of migrants left the Low Countries in the second half of the sixteenth century for religious, political, or economic reasons. They faced many difficulties as they attempted to rebuild their lives abroad, including linguistic obstacles. Many of them moved to England, but proficiency in English was rare among the Netherlandish community. Nevertheless, as this article argues, the language differences did not only pose problems, they also offered opportunities, especially to members of the higher echelons of the Dutch diasporic community. The inhabitants of the Low Countries were widely reputed to have excellent knowledge of languages, and for good reason. This article concentrates on the linguistic strategies of three multilingual individuals who moved across the North Sea: the nobleman Jan van der Noot, the painter Lucas d’Heere, and the merchant Johannes Radermacher. It studies the ways in which they used their proficiency in multiple languages as starting capital to build new social and professional lives for themselves. For example, they used their linguistic skills to appeal to the local aristocracy in order to ensure patronage, to expand social and professional networks by frequenting particular religious language communities, and to offer language instruction. This article therefore contributes to our understanding of linguistic encounters in the everyday lives and struggles of migrants in the sixteenth century.

'I Can Tell You This Is a Fine Country': Identity Construction in the British-New Zealand Imperial Diaspora

<p>This thesis uses diaspora theory to analyse late-nineteenth-century texts written by women in New Zealand. The texts include a number of novels as well as non-fictional journals and memoirs. Robin Cohen's definition of diaspora provides a framework for understanding the British settler community in New Zealand as an imperial diaspora. My approach modifies Cohen's framework by also employing constructivist theories of diaspora, in particular by Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy and James Clifford. These theorists see identity as continuously produced within representation and diaspora as furthering cultural crossover and hybrid identities. This view of the British diaspora reveals fissures within the teleological ideology of the nation-state, which underlies imperialism. Rather than focusing on a binary of imperial centre and colonial periphery, I understand the diasporic community in New Zealand as part of an international network in which mobility and a shared print culture provided manifold connections. The main research question asks how the texts participate in the construction of identity in the diasporic community in New Zealand and how they situate themselves within a wider context of diasporic print culture. It focuses both on the identity of women within the community and on the significance of notions of women‟s role, femininity and women's writing for the identity production of the community as a whole. The three sections, "Journey", "Settling" and "Community", trace the diaspora's narrative production of its collective identity through time and space. They consider the diaspora‟s textual imagining of its journey to New Zealand, its project of settling there, and its building of a distinct community. It emerges that the texts usually attempt to reconcile a number of contradictions and conflicting discourses, at the basis of which lies a fundamental tension between the diaspora's dispersal from the homeland and its need to produce a collective identity. This tension leads to an underlying instability within the texts and frequently causes them to deconstruct their own ostensible ideologies. However, at the same time the texts offer a number of powerful ideas and narratives which allow the diaspora to create a complex but meaningful collective identity.</p>

'I Can Tell You This Is a Fine Country': Identity Construction in the British-New Zealand Imperial Diaspora

<p>This thesis uses diaspora theory to analyse late-nineteenth-century texts written by women in New Zealand. The texts include a number of novels as well as non-fictional journals and memoirs. Robin Cohen's definition of diaspora provides a framework for understanding the British settler community in New Zealand as an imperial diaspora. My approach modifies Cohen's framework by also employing constructivist theories of diaspora, in particular by Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy and James Clifford. These theorists see identity as continuously produced within representation and diaspora as furthering cultural crossover and hybrid identities. This view of the British diaspora reveals fissures within the teleological ideology of the nation-state, which underlies imperialism. Rather than focusing on a binary of imperial centre and colonial periphery, I understand the diasporic community in New Zealand as part of an international network in which mobility and a shared print culture provided manifold connections. The main research question asks how the texts participate in the construction of identity in the diasporic community in New Zealand and how they situate themselves within a wider context of diasporic print culture. It focuses both on the identity of women within the community and on the significance of notions of women‟s role, femininity and women's writing for the identity production of the community as a whole. The three sections, "Journey", "Settling" and "Community", trace the diaspora's narrative production of its collective identity through time and space. They consider the diaspora‟s textual imagining of its journey to New Zealand, its project of settling there, and its building of a distinct community. It emerges that the texts usually attempt to reconcile a number of contradictions and conflicting discourses, at the basis of which lies a fundamental tension between the diaspora's dispersal from the homeland and its need to produce a collective identity. This tension leads to an underlying instability within the texts and frequently causes them to deconstruct their own ostensible ideologies. However, at the same time the texts offer a number of powerful ideas and narratives which allow the diaspora to create a complex but meaningful collective identity.</p>

The Chinese in Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, and Panama: Lessons in History, Identity, and Culture, and Interconnections with the Chinese in the Philippines

The Chinese in Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, and Panama have had long histories of migration dating back to the nineteenth century, when British and Spanish colonial powers started to bring them to the Caribbean and Latin America from Guangdong province. The primary goal was to provide labor for the sugar cane, guano, bird nest, gold and silver mining, and other industries. In the 1870s, Havana could boast of having the largest Chinatown in the Caribbean, with more than 10,000 Chinese. Today, it has fewer than 100 Chinese Cubans. Trinidad and Tobago’s population of Chinese waned after the nineteenth century, but many Trinidadians have some Chinese ancestry, while Panama currently has the highest percentage (7 percent) of Chinese among Latin American countries. What stories, approaches, and lessons can be learned by comparing their histories to that of the Chinese in the Philippines? More specifically, how are the experiences of the Chinese in these three countries, whether citizen or recent immigrant, similar to those in the Philippines? What can we learn from the scholarship on the Chinese in the Caribbean that can help shape our own research agenda in studying the Chinese in the Philippines? Through a combination of historical and ethnographic research, this essay discusses the ways in which the identities of each Chinese diasporic community are being shaped by local and external forces, including China’s increasing presence in the region. This essay hopes to serve as a guidepost to Chinese diaspora scholars interested in examining further the transhemispheric connections between the Caribbean and Southeast Asia.

Looming Diasporic In-Betweenness: A Critical Study of Hybridity and Culture in Agha Shahid Ali’s Poetic World

Hybridity is an outcome of consistent movement and interaction of two different aspects of human existence. The forces of nature when confluence each other cause hybrid existence bringing the traces of both into it. It may by and large cohabit the space and time, race and culture, philosophy and religion etc. It encompasses the divergent modes of existence, thinking patterns, behavioral norms, socio-cultural ethos, political and administrative ambience. Diasporic Hybridity is pertinent discourse. It is cause of anxiety in the early stage of migrant experience whereas settling base of later stage of existence of diasporic community. Present paper is an attempt to trace the threads of looming diasporic in-betweenness as reflected in the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali.

Fractured Identities: A Study of Diasporic Reality & Identity Crisis in Agha

Diaspora is much talked and celebrated discourse across the disciplines. Confrontation of diasporic community with native community gives rise to multi-dimensional problems. Diasporic community thus undergoes different levels of realities that change their perception as person who migrated from his/her homeland in search of new opportunities. Their perception as a segment in foreign land is marked with the sense of alienation, hybridity, identity crisis and many other mental and physical, cultural-religious, and spatial-geographical turmoil. In a sense they come across the diasporic reality. Diasporic reality is a combined study of Diaspora and problems of migrants. This paper explores the meaning of diaspora through the definitions of different writers and the problems of migrants. It specifically attempts to trace the problems of identity crisis and hybridity as confrontation with different often contradictory socio-cultural, religious, and different historical backdrop in which diasporic community is located in.

The virtual faikava: Maintaining vā and creating online learning spaces during COVID-19

Covid-19 has had a major impact on collectivist cultures and their means of social interaction and maintaining contact with those in their wider community. This has particularly been the case for Pacific peoples living in diaspora, with Covid-19 preventing travel home and social distancing and forced lockdowns restricting the ability to gather. This has also impacted vā, the Pacific concept of ‘relational space’ critical to connectivity and maintaining relationships. This paper explains the creation of virtual faikava; online meeting environments in which Pacific kava users meet, maintain vā, connect with those at home and in the wider diasporic community and learn, while consuming their traditional beverage kava.

Self-reflexivity and the Representation of The Indian Diasporic Community in Deepa Mehta’s Bollywood/Hollywood

This paper discusses Deepa Mehta’s lighthearted romantic comedy Bollywood/Hollywood as a representation of the Indian diasporic community settled in Canada. What makes this film especially interesting is that it focuses on how, for overseas Indians, Bollywood offers the possibility of accessing the home culture in a globalised world. Bollywood as an industry is synonymous with the genre of family melodrama, and when Mehta uses this term it represents, not just the Bombay Film Industry, but also the cultural iconicity of the genre, which in turn represents the film sensibility of the entire ‘mass’ of Indians located within the country and in the diaspora. At one level, the film is a lighthearted comic portrayal of the Indo-Canadian community in Toronto and its strong connection with “our magnificent Indian culture” (B/H) through the Hindi movies churned out by Bollywood. At a closer look at a number of scenes, light is cast on the way Deepa Mehta emphasizes the cultural divides through interesting narrative and visual constructions. The actual argument of the film emerges in a dialectical reading and recognition of the oppositional forces operating within and without the narrative world. What is particularly striking about this film is its self-reflexivity. It announces itself as a Bollywood melodrama and celebrates this identity. Bollywood is thus positioned as both a subject and an object of contemplation—a world of Cinema that is a part of our memory and a vehicle of history. The critique of the formula also comes from within the formulaic narrative itself. Deepa Mehta constantly uses the genre and also plays around with it in interesting ways

Performing and preserving memories: vernacular photographs in the South Vietnamese diaspora

This thesis explores how photographs from 1980-1995 of the South Vietnamese diasporic community in Orange County, California communicate selective ideas about exilic identity and memory following the militarized migration of this refugee community fleeing war. Focusing on two case studies drawn from photographs included in the Paul Tran Files and the Project Ngọc Records, the thesis investigates the (in)visible desires of the community and how such desires are (re)produced and mediated through images. Vernacular photographs of commemorative events produced by the community are crucial to our understanding of the visual tropes used to anchor the Vietnamese diasporic identity. Additionally, the photographs themselves function as a means of contesting nation building and for intergenerational transmission of memory. Just as importantly, an examination of the photographs’ multi-temporal and serial qualities reveals how youth are culturally disciplined through the gendered labour of memory keeping.