Session 7: Migration, Identity and Otherness
1st Global Conference
Tuesday 22nd September – Thursday 24th September 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford
The Other Bodies on Native Land: Ruminations on Colonization, Migration and Settlement
Beenash Jafri
York University, Canada
In this autobiographical narrative, I recount my experiences as a diasporic South Asian (“Indian”) female body coming into consciousness alongside my experiences in coming to know Aboriginality (another sort of “Indian”) in Canada – two sets of experiences that are closely, if ambiguously, linked. Using Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks as a starting point, I reflect on my contradictory embodiment of colonizer/colonized subjectivities, one manifestation of which is observed through a “longing to belong” in Canada that simultaneously masks Indigenous struggles for sovereignty and self-determination. I suggest that this masking of Indigenous struggles is in fact constitutive of some narratives of diaspora, wherein an engagement with the realities of ongoing colonial violence is sacrificed in order to claim citizenship, both formal and informal, in the white settler nation. Central to this autobiography, then, is the project of continually unmasking the relationship between diaspora and Indigeneity. My discussion is propelled by explorations of past dreams, memories and thoughts that map the conscious and unconscious processes of coming to know myself alongside my “encounters” with Aboriginality. Drawing upon scholarship from Indigenous, postcolonial and critical feminist studies, I focus on four central moments/themes: early glimpses; self-mapping; (un)learning language; and finding home/community. In grappling with the visceral, psychic experience of colonization, the intention of this piece is to attempt to reconcile often conflicting Selves and conflicting narratives in a way that can meaningfully support decolonizing processes/struggles in North America.
Between Egypt and Italy: Masculinity, Memory, and Migration
Joseph Viscomi
Department of Anthropology and History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
Since the early 1990s, the Arab Gulf region has been saturated with migrant workers from South Asia and Indonesia and a generation of Egyptian migrant workers has returned to Egypt from the Gulf. A smaller population of “path-breakers,” Egyptian men who chose to migrate to Europe in the past 25 years, are now inspiring a movement of youth toward the northern shores of the Mediterranean, as the Gulf steadily becomes a less attractive place for Egyptians to live and work.
My research examines forms of masculinity as lived and as remembered by Egyptians who are planning to go to, are currently in, and have returned from Italy. Because this population is predominately male and transient (that is, they do not remain in Italy with their families), and because the experience of immigration is often portrayed as a “rite of passage” for young men, I look at how categories of masculinity are valued and remembered in the lives of migrants and their families at different moments in time. Some questions this research asks include: how is the migrant’s experience valued in different contexts, in Italy and Egypt, before he leaves and after he returns? How are value and masculinity themselves constituted in these contexts? How does the migrant appeal to or dis/claim particular aspects defined as masculine in different circumstances? How does a more phenomenological study of Egyptian migrants in Italy challenge state-centric approaches that dominate migration studies and speak to the experiential aspects of contemporary migration across the Mediterranean? Finally, I argue that though oral history, life history, and ethnography scholars can better represent the processes at play in the constitution of the social worlds of migrants as they move between the shores of North Africa and Southern Europe.
This paper is based on research conducted in Egypt periodically from 2005-2008 and research that will be conducted during the summer of 2009.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Language Ideology in the United States: Migration, Local Identity and Discrimination
Elizabeth Canon
University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, USA
Dialect prejudice is alive and well in the United States and few groups are more stigmatized than Southern Americans. As a native of the Deep South, I travelled to the upper Midwest for work. As a well-educated member of the upper middle class, I did not anticipate the reception I received. As long as I didn’t speak, I was greeted with friendliness and smiles – in other words, I ‘passed.’ When I spoke, I discovered that I was an alien, a stranger, a foreigner in a land that was largely unprepared to accept those who can’t or won’t linguistically assimilate.
How do we use language features to mark those who ‘aren’t from around here?’ How closely linked are the notions of local identity, dialect, and the outsider? What does this mean for speakers of non-standard dialects as they move into regions where the prestige norm is spoken? Rosina Lippi-Green writes, “Accent discrimination can be found everywhere in our daily lives. In fact, such behavior is so commonly accepted, so widely perceived as appropriate, that it must be seen as the last back door to discrimination.” This paper will look at Dennis Preston’s work in dialect perception in the United States, and the language subordination model as outlined by Lippi-Green. I will offer my own experience as a case study in migration-related language ideology, and support my claims of prejudice with corroborating evidence from other accounts, both contemporary and historical, of Southerners in the American Midwest.
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