Session 2: Diasporic Gazes: Recent Trends
Session 2: Diasporic Gazes: Recent Trends
Chair: Julie Fletcher
Tracking the Diasporic Gaze: Acquired Acts of Looking & and Plots of Identities
Brigit Breninger & Thomas Kaltenbacher
Intercultural Competence, University of Salzburg, and Department of Linguistics, University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria
For some time now diasporic studies have been concerned with the multiple viewpoints that move beyond the single-perspective of Western rationalism in order to create new places and spaces from which to look and be seen. Such multiple viewpoints have not only been theorised to change the way in which diasporic people see themselves but have also began to have an impact on the host culture, especially in relation to changes in perceptions and conceptions of ‘national’ identities. With the help of an interdisciplinary approach to this field of study we supplement existing theories with evidence from eyetracking experiments which are carried out to visualise the various ‘diasporic gazes’.
For this purpose we have compiled two sets of visual stimuli (including, amongst others, Austrian advertisements, webpages and photographic images) consisting of data provided by Austrian subjects and data provided by first generation Nigerian subjects who were asked to collect images of what is/means ‘Austrian’ for them. The data sets comprise various cultural symbolics with ideologically modified second order signification and serve as stimuli for an eyetracking experiment designed to track eye movements and fixations of 10 first generation Nigerian subjects in Austria (stratified according to gender, age and region) and 10 second generation Nigerian subjects in Austria as well as 10 Austrian subjects.
The method of eyetracking allows a “gaze contingent” analysis as well as the analysis of fixation and eye movement patterns. The interpretation of the latter are supposed to reveal
acquired acts of looking and stereotypical plots of identities which are re-enacted and/or dismissed. Furthermore we hope to show differences and changes in the various perceptions of cultural representations with the findings of this eye- tracking study.
The Return of Diaspora to the Homeland: Israel & Pakistan Compared
Theodore P. Wright (Jr.)
State University of New York at Albany, USA
The call for Papers lists every conceivable category of analysis except the reversal of migration of the diaspora and its return to the homeland. One can think of a few historical cases such as the reversal of the medieval “drang nach osten’ to Germany in 1945, the return of some Moors and Jews expelled in 1492 to Spain after 1974, the repatriation of Japanese colonists from Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria, also in 1945, in some sense the plantation of Scots in Northern Ireland in the 17th century from which they had emigrated in the 6th century, the return of some Calvinists from New England to England in 1649-60 like my ancestor, Henry Sewall of Coventry and his remigration to Massachusetts after the Restoration and a few others. But the outstanding 20th century case is the return (aliyah) of European Jews to Palestine under the impulse of anti-Semitism and Zionism, the evacuation of endangered “Oriental” Jews to Israel after its establishment in 1948.Then in the 1970s, the return of many Soviet Jews. There is a huge literature on this.
Less well known is the flight of a million or so Indian Muslims (the”Muhajirin”) to Pakistan in 1947-50, accompanied by migration in the opposite direction to India of a similar number of Hindus and Sikhs There have been very few comparisons of Israel and Pakistan as the only two religion-based states in modern times, because of repugnance of Jewish and Muslim scholars to being compared with “the enemy”.
I propose to do this comparison with respect to the phenomena of diaspora and return, exploring (a) the relative”push” and “pull”motives. In what sense was Palestine a “homeland’ for Jews? How many of the Muhajirin’s ancestors had actually lived in what became Pakistan?What were the changing roles and condition of the two diasporas before return (Muslims as rulers of Northern of Noth India; Jews as “middleman minorities; in Europe and the Middle East); (b) relations with the respective “native” populations; Hindus/Sikhs; Punjabis, Sindhis andBbengali Muslims, and Palestinians Arabs. (c) shifts of power in Pakistan from Muhajirin to Punjabis after 1951 and from Ashkenazim to Sephardim with the rise of the Likud coalition in Israel in the 1980s. (d) trends toward assimilation or separatism..
‘The Last Soviet Generation’ in Britain: Reimagining Nationhood
Andy Byford
Wolfson College, Oxford, United Kingdom
The past couple of decades have seen a remarkable expansion of the Russian-speaking post-Soviet ‘Diaspora’ across the Western world, including Britain. The nature of this ‘Diaspora’ is ambiguous in its fragmentedness and plurality. In the UK, this migrant body has in the past few years been prompted to engage in more active institutional self-organisation and identity reinventions in an attempt to make the most of its steady expansion, its ethnic, socio-economic and generational stratifications, and its invariably contradictory relationship to ‘home’ (its past, present and future).
One way of analysing the nature of this migrant body is to look at strategies of grassroots meaning-creation and remembering specifically of the generation raised in the Soviet Union and then uprooted by the upheavals and opportunities of post-socialist ‘transition’.
The proposed paper would focus on the symbolic work that such relatively recent Russian-speaking post-Soviet migrants to the UK invest in constructing a meaningful life-world across the spatio-temporal, socio-cultural and inter-generational dislocations caused both by the collapse of communism and by the newly emergent patterns of global migration. The paper will discuss if and how this migrant body can be viewed in ‘Diasporic’ terms and what sort of symbolic work post-Soviet migrants to the UK invest in reconstructing both their national and their migrant identities.
The paper is envisaged as a preliminary analysis of strategies of improvised identity (re)invention, based on fieldwork and interviews carried out in various parts of England at the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008. The informants are mostly members of ‘the last Soviet generation’ (now in their mid-30s-50s) who reached adulthood in the USSR during the 1970s-early 1990s and who then migrated to the UK between 1991 and the present.
Entries (RSS)