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The connections between the Indian Freedom movement and the Kenyan Indian diaspora after the First World War led to the involvement of the Indian National Congress and Gandhi in the struggle of the Kenyan Indians for equality and equal treatment with the British white settlers in Kenya. The Congress considered that the success of the equality struggle in Kenya would also lead to equal treatment of Indians in India itself. This was consistent with the prevailing political goal of the freedom movement in India in 1919, which was self-rule through Dominion Status under the British Crown. But when the struggle of the Kenya Indians failed and equality was denied to them by the famous Devonshire Declaration in 1923, there the Indian freedom movement realized that this signalled unequal status and a denial of self-rule to India itself. Historic consequences followed. This was the turning point and over the years immediately after the Kenyan decision (1923–1929), the Indian National Congress changed its political aim from Dominion Status to Full Independence as a Republic, realized over the 17 years to 1947.

This paper explores the cultivation of STEAM literacy through the employment of practices derived from traditional reading strategies. This teaching and learning framework focuses on utilizing multimodal texts to increase exposure and opportunities for students to creatively explore diverse realms of STEM through the arts. Featuring student-centered endeavors through self-selected texts and in-class reading practices followed by tiered scaffolded discourse engagements, this framework initiates greater interest, autonomy, and culturally and linguistically authentic practices enhancing STEAM literacy. Embedded in the implications is the deconstruction of frequently aggregated STEM data that “overrepresents” the Asian demographic. Using the lens of the model minority myth, this paper attempts to disaggregate the Asian category, illuminating the actual diaspora that makes up the Asian and Asian American communities, many of which are not represented in STEM fields. Through more reading opportunities and fostering discourse practices, the arts contribute greater inclusion, cultivating STEAM literacy for all students.

While Bitran and Tan (2013. Diaspora Nation: An Inquiry into the Economic Potential of Diaspora Networks in Canada. Toronto: Mowat Centre, University of Toronto, 8) believe that Canada (Turtle Island) is a ‘diaspora nation’, it is also evident that Canada as a settler colonial state has deeply rooted systemic and blatant forms of racism that have historically victimized and otherized diasporic communities of colour for the purpose of maintaining and perpetuating White hegemony. Even though cultural diversity and diasporic identities are often hailed to have underpinned Canadian ‘multiculturalism’, the aforementioned contradiction unravels the discourse or intent of multiculturalism in Canada – a country not fostering inclusivity, equality and justice for all the marginalized populations – but quite strikingly the opposite – the politics of Whiteness undergirded by the legacy of settler colonialism, historically. The identity of Canada as a country embracing ‘multiculturalism’ has a deeply rooted history of settler colonialism and its devastating consequences on Indigenous peoples living in this land for thousands of years before the arrival of White European settlers. And, of course, a plethora of studies have been done concerning those issues of racism, multiculturalism, settle colonialism and so forth in Canada. Similarly, a number of studies do exist that explore numerous diasporic identities based on their countries of origin. However, in this essay, I explore intersectional nature of three broad diasporic identities – Indigenous, Black and immigrant peoples of colour in Canada – who have common and intersecting experiences of forced/voluntary dispersal, homelessness, cultural alienation, marginalization, and so forth. Based on the intersecting experiences, the diasporas in Canada can ramp up an effective alliance to fight the injustices caused by White people through various institutions and state apparatuses. In order to critically examine the intersectionality of the three overarching diasporas and their issues, the essay uses Critical Race Theoretical (CRT) approach of intersectionality, postcolonial as well as Indigenous perspective to better understand how the diasporas are nuanced and interrelated despite their unique issues and existential characteristics. Similarly, viewing the diasporic intersection in Canada from critical race theoretical notion of intersectionality together with Indigenous perspective offers an understanding on how different diasporas in Canada and elsewhere share similar historical experiences and, at the same time, forge solidarity for their common good. On the one hand, the diasporic convergence with Indigenous peoples in it (re)fashions the Native space as an equitable space grounded on traditional Indigenous metaphor of common pot – inclusivity, renewal, mutual respect and responsibility, and on the other, it also highlights the necessity of critically (re)examining diasporas in Turtle Island by considering Indigeneity as an integral part of the discourse – study of diasporas not in isolation with Indigenous peoples, but as intersectional identities, so to speak.

Canada’s Ukrainian diaspora occupy an enviable, if not rare, ‘intergenerational sweet spot’. This sweet spot endows them with a high degree of positionality within Canada, enabling both long and short-term support for Ukraine since the crisis began in 2014. In examining Ukrainian diaspora positionality in the Canadian context, we find there are varied strategies that help offset hardship at the community and household level while addressing the long-term fragility of the country. While new migrants and temporary workers are actively remitting back home, older generation diaspora members compensate for smaller remittance volumes by lobbying and by influencing the state apparatus through various forms of political and social activism. This has the effect of shifting the costs borne by individuals to the host state and is consistent with our insights on principal-agent relations between states and diaspora. Although Ukraine’s macroeconomic performance will remain fragile for the foreseeable future, we identify four complementary forms of diaspora engagement in times of crisis, namely the mobilization of aid, political activism and volunteering, remittances and other financial flows, and delegating responsibilities to host-country institutions.

This article provides a comprehensive framework to explain why Turkey has adopted a pro-active diaspora agenda since the early 2000s. It shows that Turkey’s diaspora policy is the result of an amalgamation of domestic, transnational, and international factors: Domestically, the AKP’s rise to power resulted in drastic economic and political reforms and the promotion of a new identity based on neo-Ottomanism and Sunni-Muslim nationalism. These developments have transformed Turkey’s state-diaspora relations. The 2013 Gezi Park protests and the 2016 failed coup attempt also played a role. Transnationally, Turkish expatriates’ growing socioeconomic and political clout in their host countries, as evidenced by the mushrooming of political parties founded by Turks in Europe, has urged Turkey to reconsider the efficacy of its diaspora as a source of influence abroad as well as a noteworthy electorate in national elections. Various international events have also shaped Turkey’s new diaspora agenda, including Turkey’s increasing bargaining power vis-à-vis the EU since the early 2000s, particularly after the European refugee crisis, and the rise of Islamophobia in the post-9/11 era. I suggest that domestic factors have played the most significant role in shaping Turkey’s diaspora agenda. I examine the domestic dimension both as an independent factor and also in relation to transnational and international factors. The configuration of a new political elite has changed the ways in which Turkey interacts with its transnational diaspora and perceives its international position vis-à-vis European countries. The findings of the article draw on official statements and documents, semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted with Turkish officials, the Euro-Turks Barometer Survey, and news sources.

India’s connections with Southeast Asia are rooted in history in terms of geography, civilization, culture, economy and strategy. These connections became deeper since the 1990s as India initiated the policy of ‘Look East’ that resulted in manifold growth with ASEAN and Singapore. The initiation of ‘Look East Policy’ opened the door for Singaporean Indians for investments and interaction with their motherland. Through the ‘Look East Policy’ the distance between India and ASEAN ended and India was connected with this region and especially Singapore through trade relations. With this policy, India was able to enter this region and this was the chance for the Indian people to revitalize and energize their social and cultural bonds with their motherland (Pande 2017). These relations were further intensified after 2014 as Prime Minister Narendra Modi officially launched ‘Act East Policy’. While ‘Look East Policy’ was launched by India in the backdrop of the critical economic situation, the ‘Act East Policy’ is aimed at strengthening our relations in terms of cultural, political and strategic dimensions. Therefore, this paper aims to study and analyse the role of the Indian diaspora as a soft power for making strong bilateral bonds between India and Singapore with special reference to the political and economic scenario.

‘It was narak’, remains the common refrain of post-indentured women when prodded about their life as girmits before slipping into a cryptic Alcestis-like silence. Though, women made up nearly 40% o...

This article tells the story of duelling philosophies over money and power in the philanthropic relationship between American Jews and Israelis during the twentieth century. Its purpose is to provide one case study for how an affluent diaspora community and the leadership of the corresponding ethnic homeland viewed the roles each should play in allocating funds. It details the battle over two conflicting schools of thought for how best to control the nature and flow of American Jewish philanthropy to the Yishuv and early Israeli State. It then describes the extensive steps taken by the eventual winning side to entrench a culture of American deference to Israelis in allocations decision making as the dominant mode of philanthropic partnership in the second half of the twentieth century. The relationship dynamics and tactical measures employed in the battle over allocations discussed in this case provide a framework for analysing other similar homeland-diaspora philanthropic relationships.

In a gesture of reconciliation, Spain and Portugal in 2015 passed bills inviting the descendants of Sephardic Jews – expelled 500 years earlier – to acquire citizenship. Applicants are to ascertain their Sephardic heritage through family trees, evidence of belonging to a religious community, language skills and/or retained links with the homeland. This article explores applicants’ motivations to request citizenship and the ways in which legal provisions, religious associations, and the migration industry become gatekeepers of and (re)shape what it means to be Sephardic. Based on interviews with applicants and other actors involved, the article discusses how states, religious associations, applicants themselves and businesses facilitate and define the process towards citizenship. It also points to how the repatriation laws have spurred identification with – but also alienation from – Spain and Portugal, by making it possible to gain an attractive EU passport, while encouraging the revisiting of a painful past.

This research report describes individual Indian descendants in Ho Chi Minh city in the aim of raising research questions for the scholarship of Indian diaspora studies. I focus on the Indian diasporic members who are largely descendants of those who, in the second half of the nineteenth century and before, migrated from French–British India to Vietnam. They are economically and culturally different from the current Indian expats, the members of the capitalized ’Cộng Đồng Người Ấn Độ’ (Indian Community) in Vietnam. The current Indian immigrants largely work in Indian companies and multinational groups. In other words, the Indians in Vietnam are not classified either as children of ’Kinh paternalism’ or of Vietnamese ’state paternalism’ (Salemink, The Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders: A Historical Contextualization, 1850–1900. London: Routledge Curzon, 2003, 258, 287). Nor, are they perceptually overseas daughters and sons of ’Hindu paternalism’ (Omvedt, Reinventing Revolution: New Social Movements and the Socialist Tradition in India. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1993, 31). The Indian descendants in Vietnam belong nowhere politically. The ambiguity of the Indian descendants in Vietnamese history and society does not suggest that they would be a research subject of the Indian or South Asian diasporas in the field of diaspora studies. Indeed, exploring the Indian diaspora in the dynamic contexts of Vietnamese nationalism offers a new direction in the diaspora studies in general and South Asian diasporas in particular. The report is based on my ethnographic research in Ho Chi Minh City in 2012–2014 at Indian individuals’ houses and at cultural centres.

This article analyses the political blogging of the Malagasy diaspora as part of their transnational political participation. It focuses on three aspects of the blogs: the most frequent topics addressed, how are the topics addressed, and the political bloggers. To do this, a Thematic Content Analysis based on four categories (‘soapboxes’, ‘transmission belts’, ‘conversation starters’ and ‘mobilisers’) of four of their most active and influential political blogs was conducted. The analysis revealed that (i) the blogs are mostly “soapboxes” that consist of commenting the political issues in Madagascar, (ii) their contents were mostly focused on the coup d’ état in 2009, and (iii) the bloggers are involved in direct political participation in parallel offline. This paper shows the role of the studied blogs as tribunes of opinions that gather a partisan audience discussing the Malagasy political issues, and as judgment tools contributing to the braking or fuelling of Madagascar’s international relations.

This contribution aims to approach the theme of a traveling Islam by starting from moving people and considering how their religious “luggage”—in terms of beliefs, ideas, and practices—travels with them and what this means for the circulation of religious ideas in Africa and beyond. The paper focuses particularly on Senegalese migrants of the Murid Sufi order residing in Italy and the Netherlands; it investigates how their religious luggage is important to them in the migration context and may circulate further from there. In addition, it explores how their religious luggage is moulded in, and through, their migration experiences: for instance, its meaning may change, or another layer may be added. Finally, ideas on (the force of) the Muridiyya may travel back to Senegal, adding other layers to the meaning of religion there as well.

The MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region has long been a site of Hindi film consumption and circulation, with Dubai emerging in recent years as a potent hub for Bollywood’s overseas distribution and marketing. Though the role of the “Gulf” in articulating immigrant experiences and regional identity among Malayali Indians is well documented (Radhakrishnan 2009), Hindi cinema’s popularity in the region has rarely received any scholarly attention. In the past decade, UAE has witnessed the launch of three cable and satellite television channels—Zee Aflam (2009), Zee Alwan (2012) and MBC Bollywood (2013)—with dedicated Bollywood content, much of which is dubbed in Arabic and targeted primarily at the local Emirati audience. This paper examines the consumption and dissemination of this dubbed Indian content, which includes Bollywood films as well as Hindi television series, among the Arabic-speaking audience. As I argue, the current popularity of “Bollywood in Arabic” can be historicized and traced back to popular Hindi cinema’s consumption in the Gulf during the sixties and seventies, particularly among the local Emirati audience. In doing so, I not only extend the scope of Hindi film scholarship beyond the hegemonic parameters of the nation and its citizens, but also, interrogate the role of Dubai and the “Gulf” as a cultural capital of transnational media economics.

This article argues that belonging can be characterized by absence. It explores this as experienced in two different geographical and historical contexts by two groups of actors: members of the early Tibetan diaspora in India (1959–1979) and former members of a religious group (Aum Shinrikyō) in Japan. The absence we conceptualize is double: it is not solely a spatial absence, but also a temporal absence in terms of the irreversibility of time. It is felt and articulated through emotions that play decisive roles in the constitution and sustaining of these communities. These communities as feeling communities are characterized by absence, but absence is simultaneously what makes them a community. This simultaneity allows our actors to create complex temporal frameworks by relating to reimagined pasts, different presents, and potential futures. Therefore, the article contributes to discussions of belonging by retheorizing the relationship between absence, emotions, and time.

Almost all the existing research in the subfield of nonreligion and secularity studies has focused to date on majority populations (Whites from Christian family backgrounds) in North America and Europe. Using data from the 2011 National Household Survey and the 2013–2017 General Social Surveys, this research note is a first step towards better understanding the ethno-racial and immigrant diversity within the nonreligious population of one nation, Canada. A further emphasis is placed on socio-demographic trends among these different nonreligious groups, as well as their various experiences when it comes to the presence or absence of spiritual beliefs and practices in their lives away from organized religion.

This paper uses three case studies—(1) community building by Methodist Chinese in Sibu, Sarawak; (2) the construction of transnational temple networks originating in Chinese temples in Sibu; and (3) hybrid spirit medium processions in Kalimantan—to explore aspects of the role of religion within the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. Analytic approaches to Chinese religion proposed by Weber and Mauss are discussed, and an argument is made in favor of following the spread of civilizational techniques into hybrid social and ritual formations.

This paper aims to analyse the perception of Koreans overseas in South Korean mass media. Nowadays, due to globalization processes, the economic, political and cultural contacts between South Korean society and Korean diaspora has intensified. As a result, the perception of Korean immigrants in South Korea is becoming more positive. The analyses of media materials show that South Korean media highly estimate the contribution made by Korean immigrants to the development of South Korea, both historically and in the modern period. In addition, media also praise the positive qualities of Korean immigrants, such as being hardworking, and their active participation in the political and economic life of the host country. Another common narrative is the positive role of Korean diaspora in bilateral relations between the host country and South Korea. The comparison of recent media materials with those of the beginning of the XXI century shows that the positive representation of Korean diaspora is a recent tendency. The article also underlines that the way South Korean media develop a narrative about South Korean diaspora is on many occasions close to the narrative of South Korean officials.

Studies on Chinese diaspora and their connections with their homeland have focused on various perspectives, such as historical, socio-cultural, and economic, however, rarely discussed through literary works. This study aims to elaborate on the representations of the Chinese diaspora’s homeland in novels by two Chinese-American authors, Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, and two Chinese-Indonesian authors, Marga T. and Mira W. By employing Salman Rushdie’s memory-based imaginary homeland and Benedict Anderson’s creation-based imagined communities, the authors of this essay discuss the Chinese- American and Chinese-Indonesian people’s views of their homeland in their present contexts in their respective countries. The Chinese-American novels present their imaginary homeland through the utilization of fragmented legends and distorted myths. On the other hand, the Chinese-Indonesian novels present their imagined homeland by foregrounding the image of modernity through the exposure of wealthy families’ lifestyles and the picture of Western-oriented education and religious affiliations. The different experiences demonstrate that the notion of ‘homeland’ needs to be widened and pluralized to be able to embrace the heterogeneity of the diaspora.

Despite the lingering conflict between the government of Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora in the United States, issues of remittance and relationship relaxation between the refugees and Vietnamese government happened both in the 1990s. Recent years have seen the attitude-change of the returning diaspora and their shifting strategies of working in Vietnam. This paper describes the first step toward rapprochement between Vietnam and its diaspora in the United States, by analysing the attempts of Vietnam to approach its diaspora in the United States and the reactions of the diasporic community members. On the other hand, it also describes the efforts of Vietnamese Americans to empower Vietnamese people through philanthropic and civic engagement activities. The rapprochement via media and civic engagement reveals a shift from hard, intense ideological conflict to soft tactics in the transnational relation between Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora in the United States. This paper concludes that the process to rapprochement is still challenged by the significant differences in political views between the two sides. It suggests that the process of negotiation and conflict resolution be conducted with openness, honesty and acceptance of differences.

This paper suggests that images and stances associated with the diaspora in the homeland culture offer a unique prism through which internal tensions in homeland collective identity may be dissected and understood. We believe it is worthwhile to broaden the spectrum of inquiry of recent research on quantifiable diaspora economic and political involvement in homeland nation-states to the inherently fluid, abstract realm of cultural representation. The paper implements this research orientation by offering a preliminary discussion of homeland-construed representations and stances of the diaspora, based on the case study of Israel. Israel is a particularly useful case for our purposes because of the degree to which the diaspora serves as a ‘significant other’ for the homeland national culture. Our claim is that two main prisms, or frames of reference, which we label as ‘minority stance’ and ‘authenticity,’ designate Israeli views of its diaspora that prove fundamental to Israeli national self-definition. The degree of authenticity ascribed in Israeli culture to representations and practices associated with the diaspora is contingent on the positive or negative value attributed to them as embodying a ‘minority stance,’ that is, to the diaspora giving central importance to its environing host society in its own identity and self-understanding. Using Greek culture as a comparative point of reference, we suggest that these prisms may be but two examples of various homeland ‘filters’ on the diaspora experience – filters which pertain to the homeland society’s ongoing internal negotiations of identity and symbolic boundary work.

In light of the poor and fragmented literature on contemporary Greek diaspora in Italy, not yet adequately covered by the historical and social disciplines, this article attempts to fill that void, thus providing an essential contribution to the studies on the Greek diaspora. Using the results of a field research, we analyze the two main push and pull factors of Greek migration to Italy in the second half of the twentieth century, namely the student migration and the migration related to the Second World War. Through the narrative reconstruction by the second generation members, we retrace the most important phases that have characterized the migratory experience of Greek migrants in Italy within a wider historical framework of analysis, also by using unpublished documents collected in Greek, Italian and American historical archives. We use an analysis method that combines the narratives of second generation members with the statistical analysis of the variables, by reconstructing the family history through the use of data derived from both questionnaires and life stories.