Religious Belief and Diaspora in Coetzee’s Youth and Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus

This study focuses on the role that faith plays in immigrants’ lives in the South African novelist John Maxwell Coetzee’s Youth (2002) and the Arab British author Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus (2008). Specifically, the study analyzes and scrutinizes the faith (lessness)-informed attitudes of the two protagonists toward the various challenges they encounter as diasporic subjects in a society that instills alienation and displacement. Each protagonist goes through an identity crisis triggered by his inability to reach his objectives and goals as Coetzee’s John fails to be the poet he has aspired to be and Sami finds it hard to finish a PhD on Arabic poetry that his late father has encouraged him to pursue. While faith helps Yassin-Kassab’s protagonist to eventually overcome the challenges he faces, faithlessness in Coetzee’s novel deepens the protagonist’s sense of alienation and dislocation as the novel ends on a gloomy note. The study adopts an approach of textual analysis and comparison between the two novels. It also touches upon other fields including religion, history, identity, culture, diaspora, politics, and mental health. It examines the protagonists’ cultural, national, and religious identities based on settling in diasporic communities in relation to the historical backgrounds and the socio-cultural conditions in the homeland and the host country.

Diasporas and Politics

In 2020, according to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 281 million individuals, or 3.5 percent of the world’s population, live outside their country of origin. Some of them, in addition to native-born individuals who identify with their ancestors’ country of origin, are among the members of what is commonly conceptualized as diasporas, dispersed people outside a homeland. Scholars define diasporas in multiple ways, emphasizing more dynamic conceptions or fixed belonging (Diaspora Definitions). Diasporas have gained increased importance, both in academia and among policymakers. Relevant institutional and policy changes related to diaspora politics include the fact that dual citizenship toleration has grown cross-nationally as has the number of countries that allow overseas voting. What happens after individuals choose to or are forced to exit their homeland, following Albert Hirschman’s famous conceptualization? To what extent do political and other ties matter across national boundaries (Political Transnationalism) and, in turn, how do states manage their relations with members of the national community abroad (Country of Origin’s Diaspora Engagement)? In what ways are state–diaspora relations different for authoritarian states than for liberal democracies, and are diasporas democratizers (General Works; Authoritarianism and Extraterritorial Repression)? Why do some states tolerate dual citizenship while others do not (Dual Citizenship)? Turning to other facets of relations between countries and their diasporas—in matters of homeland conflicts, do actions of diasporas increase or decrease the likelihood of conflict, and what is their role in post-conflict resolution and development (Diasporas and Conflict)? How have debates evolved since scholars across a range of disciplines established the foundations of transnationalism in the early 1990s (Political Transnationalism)? Ethnic interest groups have influenced foreign policy (Diasporas, Foreign Policy and International Relations) in both host and home states, and diasporas’ growing role in diplomacy has been reflected in the emerging subfield of diaspora diplomacy. In an effort to answer the questions posed by this diaspora activity, scholars have made a plethora of contributions in the last three decades. This article gives an up-to-date overview of the academic literature addressing the role of diasporas in political science, beginning with General Works that present an overview of the state of the field, and proceeding to address these categories of knowledge creation.

Religious Discrimination, Diaspora, and United Nations Voting on Israel

This study examines whether discrimination against religious minorities and diaspora politics influences United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voting on Israel and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict between 1990 and 2014. We test discrimination against Jews, discrimination against Muslims, and general discrimination against all religious minorities in 183 countries. Our results indicate that repressive countries vote against Israel in the UNGA partly as a diversionary tactic seeking to divert attention from their own poor behavior. This is because discriminating against both Jews and Muslims, as well as religious discrimination in general, predict anti-Israel voting. We also find that countries with larger Jewish minorities are more likely to support Israel and countries with larger Muslim minorities are less likely to support Israel, although the latter effect is more conditional and most consistently pronounced in countries where discrimination against Muslims is low. This suggests that diaspora politics and transnational religious ties influence UNGA voting on Israel.

Security

Chapter 5 analyzes two billionaires within transnational diaspora politics, whose ethnonational identity generates security concerns for communities abroad. The Jewish-American casino mogul Sheldon Adelson has been financing a free newspaper, Israel Hayom, which has become the most widely read daily in Israel, staunchly supporting Benjamin Netanyahu and the “entrenchment–expansionism” position vis-à-vis Palestine. His interventions in the Israel–Palestine conflict ran counter to the majority views of American Jewry and undermined President Obama’s foreign policy. The second case examines whether the hedge fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam helped to fund the insurgency of the LTTE (“Tamil Tigers”) in his former home state Sri Lanka. While the case once produced spectacular headlines, upon closer inspection the political agency of Rajaratnam appears as very limited. He seems to have largely conformed to the demands put on the Tamil diaspora by the LTTE, and the U.S. government’s anti-terrorism policies restricted his options severely.