Pub Date : 2024-03-27DOI: 10.1163/18725465-bja10037
Nouzha Baba
This article examines the Moroccan-French author, Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel Les Yeux Baissés, translated as With Downcast Eyes. A winner of the Prix Goncourt, the author narrates the challenges of postcolonial displacement, exclusion and racism in a French multicultural neighbourhood. The novel explores the theme of displacement as one that is two-fold: firstly, it refers to the migration process, while secondly, it foregrounds the socio-cultural dimension of being “out of place” in the diaspora. I delve into the way migrants’ children experience the turbulence of displacement, exclusion, and racism. While engaging with postcolonial theoretical debates, this study considers the representation of migrants’ alienation in the narrative resulting from a lack of French hospitality and acute hostility. As such, this article demonstrates that postcolonial displacement does not enable the homogenization of cultures, but rather reinforces boundaries, at the social and cultural level, in the diaspora.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-29DOI: 10.1163/18725465-bja10036
Ayobami Onanuga, P. Onanuga
Geographical considerations continue to manifest in and influence the narratives surrounding non-heteronormative sexualities. Within this context, borders become central to the politics of inclusion-exclusion. In this study, we engage Jude Dibia’s Walking with Shadows, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Shivering,” and Uzondinma Iweala’s Speak No Evil in view of their engagement of the tripodal issues of homosexuality, home and migration. We interrogate the depictions and counterbalances evoked by the juxtaposition of the artistic motifs of ‘home’ versus migration; and argue that this dichotomy is wielded firstly as a form of escape from a judgmental ‘home’ and then as a means of providing a contrastive engagement of the perception of homosexuality within different territorial borders. Such transnational enactments of mobilities, we believe, also constitute platforms though which these authors channel energies and support on the way to soliciting acknowledgement and acceptance for people of alternative sexualities.
地理因素继续体现并影响着围绕非异性恋性取向的叙事。在此背景下,边界成为包容-排斥政治的核心。在本研究中,我们将探讨裘德-迪比亚(Jude Dibia)的《与阴影同行》(Walking with Shadows)、奇玛曼达-恩格齐-阿迪切(Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)的《颤栗》(The Shivering)和乌尊丁玛-伊维拉(Uzondinma Iweala)的《不作恶》(Speak No Evil),因为它们都涉及到同性恋、家园和移民这三足鼎立的问题。我们探讨了 "家 "与移民这两个并列的艺术主题所引发的描绘和抗衡;并认为这种二分法首先是作为一种逃离批判性 "家 "的形式,然后是作为一种在不同领土边界内对同性恋看法进行对比的手段。我们认为,这种跨国的流动性也构成了一个平台,这些作者通过这个平台来寻求对另类性行为者的承认和接受。
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Pub Date : 2023-06-13DOI: 10.1163/18725465-bja10035
Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja
There are far too few studies on Namibian art and artists in the diaspora. In response to this, I look at the work of Herman Mbamba, Jackson Wahengo and Shishani Vranckx. Mbamba is a visual artist based in Haugesund, Norway while musicians Wahengo and Vranckx are based in Copenhagen, Denmark and Amsterdam, The Netherlands, respectively. I offer an aesthetic reading, unpacking their work as counter-hegemonic maps, that signal the places of imagining otherwise. Wahengo and Vranckx’s songs lean towards national cultural memory while Mbamba’s abstract and figurative paintings conceal everyday realities. The concept of speculative cartography is applied, to read how these artists as African Diasporic subjects, speak to historic displacements and scatterings, while orientating themselves within national cultural memory that goes beyond ‘Namibianess’ or the African Diaspora. I argue that the speculative cartographies generate Thirdspaces that collapse binaries between settled and unsettled, imaginable and unimaginable, material and metaphysical spaces.
{"title":"Speculative Cartographies","authors":"Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja","doi":"10.1163/18725465-bja10035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18725465-bja10035","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 There are far too few studies on Namibian art and artists in the diaspora. In response to this, I look at the work of Herman Mbamba, Jackson Wahengo and Shishani Vranckx. Mbamba is a visual artist based in Haugesund, Norway while musicians Wahengo and Vranckx are based in Copenhagen, Denmark and Amsterdam, The Netherlands, respectively. I offer an aesthetic reading, unpacking their work as counter-hegemonic maps, that signal the places of imagining otherwise. Wahengo and Vranckx’s songs lean towards national cultural memory while Mbamba’s abstract and figurative paintings conceal everyday realities. The concept of speculative cartography is applied, to read how these artists as African Diasporic subjects, speak to historic displacements and scatterings, while orientating themselves within national cultural memory that goes beyond ‘Namibianess’ or the African Diaspora. I argue that the speculative cartographies generate Thirdspaces that collapse binaries between settled and unsettled, imaginable and unimaginable, material and metaphysical spaces.","PeriodicalId":42998,"journal":{"name":"African Diaspora","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46490605","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-13DOI: 10.1163/18725465-bja10030
Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot
Si les conversions au Judaïsme sont un phénomène encore méconnu en France, les convertis noirs, originaires d’Afrique ou des Antilles, sont parmi les plus invisibles. Embrassant le Judaïsme dans la diversité de ses courants, leurs histoires de vie reflètent une variété de parcours. Il est question de cerner leurs profils individuels religieux et identitaires, les modalités par lesquelles la conversion lie ces Africains et Antillais au monde juif et les processus de recomposition identitaire à l’œuvre. Quels sont leurs choix et motivations ? Comment s’inscrivent-ils dans le paysage juif de France ?
{"title":"Les convertis noirs au Judaïsme en France","authors":"Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot","doi":"10.1163/18725465-bja10030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18725465-bja10030","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Si les conversions au Judaïsme sont un phénomène encore méconnu en France, les convertis noirs, originaires d’Afrique ou des Antilles, sont parmi les plus invisibles. Embrassant le Judaïsme dans la diversité de ses courants, leurs histoires de vie reflètent une variété de parcours. Il est question de cerner leurs profils individuels religieux et identitaires, les modalités par lesquelles la conversion lie ces Africains et Antillais au monde juif et les processus de recomposition identitaire à l’œuvre. Quels sont leurs choix et motivations ? Comment s’inscrivent-ils dans le paysage juif de France ?","PeriodicalId":42998,"journal":{"name":"African Diaspora","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41269661","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-13DOI: 10.1163/18725465-bja10034
Emma-Lee Amponsah
The article explores how Black people in Belgium have sought meaningful engagement with their history, culture, and identity to create a shared cultural memory, and vice versa: how Black people’s engagement with a shared cultural memory has formed a collective, Afro-diasporic identity and culture. To illustrate how Black identities take shape beyond personal histories, cultures, and memories, I conceptualize a memory framework called Black Cultural Memory (BCM), giving insight into Black people’s interconnected identity constructing/maintaining embodied culture, and shed light on how social media, memory and Black people’s lives interact by discussing how cultural memory is shaped, sharpened and inquired through Black people’s contemporary digital engagement. Examining the memory practices and discoursers of Belgian Renaissance, New Awoken African Generation, and #BLMbelgium, I illustrate how digital platforms helped these initiatives to shape and distribute notions of collective blackness, which ultimately connects them to a global Afro-diaspora culture.
{"title":"Towards a Black Cultural Memory","authors":"Emma-Lee Amponsah","doi":"10.1163/18725465-bja10034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18725465-bja10034","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The article explores how Black people in Belgium have sought meaningful engagement with their history, culture, and identity to create a shared cultural memory, and vice versa: how Black people’s engagement with a shared cultural memory has formed a collective, Afro-diasporic identity and culture. To illustrate how Black identities take shape beyond personal histories, cultures, and memories, I conceptualize a memory framework called Black Cultural Memory (BCM), giving insight into Black people’s interconnected identity constructing/maintaining embodied culture, and shed light on how social media, memory and Black people’s lives interact by discussing how cultural memory is shaped, sharpened and inquired through Black people’s contemporary digital engagement. Examining the memory practices and discoursers of Belgian Renaissance, New Awoken African Generation, and #BLMbelgium, I illustrate how digital platforms helped these initiatives to shape and distribute notions of collective blackness, which ultimately connects them to a global Afro-diaspora culture.","PeriodicalId":42998,"journal":{"name":"African Diaspora","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45213412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-13DOI: 10.1163/18725465-bja10033
A. I. Tewolde
In this article I reflect on how I was perceived by members of my own ethnic community in Pretoria, South Africa, in everyday interactions. In these interactions, I was viewed as an integral part of the community, rather than a detached academic. I employ the theory of community researcher and the theory of the everyday to frame my experiences and my argument. Recent debates on insider/outsider positionalities conceptualize co-ethnic migrant researchers as situational insiders. Drawing on my lived experiences, however, I argue that my insiderness has been consistently embraced by my co-ethnics. To establish strong rapport with members of their co-ethnics, migrant researchers need to maintain close social contact, informality and casualness, in their everyday interactions to enhance their positionality as trusted insiders during future actual research encounters. This study contributes to theoretical understandings of migration studies and researcher positionalities.
{"title":"Living Insider Positionality with Co-ethnics in Everyday Life","authors":"A. I. Tewolde","doi":"10.1163/18725465-bja10033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18725465-bja10033","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this article I reflect on how I was perceived by members of my own ethnic community in Pretoria, South Africa, in everyday interactions. In these interactions, I was viewed as an integral part of the community, rather than a detached academic. I employ the theory of community researcher and the theory of the everyday to frame my experiences and my argument. Recent debates on insider/outsider positionalities conceptualize co-ethnic migrant researchers as situational insiders. Drawing on my lived experiences, however, I argue that my insiderness has been consistently embraced by my co-ethnics. To establish strong rapport with members of their co-ethnics, migrant researchers need to maintain close social contact, informality and casualness, in their everyday interactions to enhance their positionality as trusted insiders during future actual research encounters. This study contributes to theoretical understandings of migration studies and researcher positionalities.","PeriodicalId":42998,"journal":{"name":"African Diaspora","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46466891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-13DOI: 10.1163/18725465-bja10032
Nouzha Baba
In this article, I analyse the prominent Moroccan-French author, Fouad Laroui’s novella De quel amour blessé (What Wounded Love, 1998) which narrates a story of an intercultural love affair in the diaspora, shaped in-between France and Morocco. This tragicomedy romance story, maps migrants’ cultural displacement and identity (re)construction. I look into how Maghrebian migrants’ French-born youths, known as the Beur generation, plot transcendent cultural and national routes of belonging. Through the protagonist’s case, the son of Moroccan migrants, the novella unfolds how postcolonial Maghrebian migration in France has engendered an intercultural and relational identity that belongs to different cultural subjectivities. It suggests a deconstruction of the idea that migrants’ identity are inextricably linked to a fixed culture, time and place, and instead, stresses identity as a process of becoming. Laroui’s narrative is a productive literary form of self-representation, of contesting homeland roots, (re)deconstructing identity and mapping intercultural attachments of belongings.
{"title":"Narrating Cultural Displacement and (Dis)Locating Beur Identity in Fouad Laroui’s De Quel Amour Blessé","authors":"Nouzha Baba","doi":"10.1163/18725465-bja10032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18725465-bja10032","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this article, I analyse the prominent Moroccan-French author, Fouad Laroui’s novella De quel amour blessé (What Wounded Love, 1998) which narrates a story of an intercultural love affair in the diaspora, shaped in-between France and Morocco. This tragicomedy romance story, maps migrants’ cultural displacement and identity (re)construction. I look into how Maghrebian migrants’ French-born youths, known as the Beur generation, plot transcendent cultural and national routes of belonging. Through the protagonist’s case, the son of Moroccan migrants, the novella unfolds how postcolonial Maghrebian migration in France has engendered an intercultural and relational identity that belongs to different cultural subjectivities. It suggests a deconstruction of the idea that migrants’ identity are inextricably linked to a fixed culture, time and place, and instead, stresses identity as a process of becoming. Laroui’s narrative is a productive literary form of self-representation, of contesting homeland roots, (re)deconstructing identity and mapping intercultural attachments of belongings.","PeriodicalId":42998,"journal":{"name":"African Diaspora","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48235696","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-29DOI: 10.1163/18725465-bja10031
Marie Godin, Jean-Luc Nsengiyumva, Sarah Demart
La question du retour des migrants africains installés en Europe est loin d’être neuve avec des travaux qui se focalisent essentiellement sur les aspirations au retour et les processus de sa concrétisation. Aussi pertinent qu’il puisse être, ce focus repose sur une approche limitée, du fait du privilège accordé à la spatialité du phénomène, ce qui trahit une conception normative héritée des politiques d’immigration et de développement. Soumettre notre compréhension du retour à une catégorie qui est indissociable du management des flux migratoires, ne permet pas de penser de manière adéquate le retour comme déplacement spatial, mais aussi politique, culturel, identitaire, devant être resitué dans l’histoire longue de cet espace afro-européen. Ce changement d’échelle temporelle suppose un changement de régime épistémologique que nous souhaitons explorer à partir du point de vue des personnes d’ascendance congolaise et rwandaise nées et, ou socialisées en Belgique.
{"title":"Pour une redéfinition de la notion de “retour”","authors":"Marie Godin, Jean-Luc Nsengiyumva, Sarah Demart","doi":"10.1163/18725465-bja10031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18725465-bja10031","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 La question du retour des migrants africains installés en Europe est loin d’être neuve avec des travaux qui se focalisent essentiellement sur les aspirations au retour et les processus de sa concrétisation. Aussi pertinent qu’il puisse être, ce focus repose sur une approche limitée, du fait du privilège accordé à la spatialité du phénomène, ce qui trahit une conception normative héritée des politiques d’immigration et de développement. Soumettre notre compréhension du retour à une catégorie qui est indissociable du management des flux migratoires, ne permet pas de penser de manière adéquate le retour comme déplacement spatial, mais aussi politique, culturel, identitaire, devant être resitué dans l’histoire longue de cet espace afro-européen. Ce changement d’échelle temporelle suppose un changement de régime épistémologique que nous souhaitons explorer à partir du point de vue des personnes d’ascendance congolaise et rwandaise nées et, ou socialisées en Belgique.","PeriodicalId":42998,"journal":{"name":"African Diaspora","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45577718","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}