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- Convenors:
-
Carsten Wergin
(Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg)
Valerio Simoni (Geneva Graduate Institute)
Anne-Christine Trémon (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales)
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- Format:
- Panel
Short Abstract:
In this panel, we ask what has become of diaspora in the contemporary world, where (1) neonationalisms and suspicions against multiple belongings are on the rise, and (2) the global struggle for soft and hard power is intensifying.
Long Abstract:
Diaspora commonly refers to a spatially dispersed group of people who maintain translocal connections to a place they came from and/or to other places where the diaspora scattered. We define diasporic mediations as a set of cultural, political, economic articulations linking people in a diaspora through particular (im)material objects: money, houses, food, news. These objects connect, overcoming fragile relationships, but they also mediate conflicting spatiotemporal positionings between home or away, past and future.
The boom in diaspora studies of the early 1990s was part of a broader academic interest in globalization. Scholars saw diasporas as an expression of (1) increased flows of people, capital, and goods that was linked to spatiotemporal compression, and (2) as new forms of transnational communities that are strongly shaped by a global neoliberal hegemony. Today, both spatiotemporal compression and late-liberal market economics are contested. In this panel, we therefore ask what has become of diaspora in the contemporary world, where (1) neonationalisms and suspicions against multiple belongings are on the rise, and (2) the global struggle for soft and hard power is intensifying?
Bridging the analytical divide in anthropological studies of diaspora between political-economic approaches and socio-cultural approaches, this panel calls for papers that:
1. Analyze how (im)material objects mediate between members of diaspora across time and space;
2. Pay attention to the ways in which these mediations are both shaped by and contribute to shaping political economic relations and sociocultural identifications;
3. Consider the reconfigurations of diasporic mediations in an area of contested globalization.
Accepted papers:
Paper short abstract:
Hong Kongers negotiated diasporic identity hyperconscious the homeland is disappearing. This paper explores how, in a globalized, digitally connected world, classic notions of diasporic nostalgia for an unchanged homeland invert to conscious nostalgic-driven identity for a changed homeland.
Paper long abstract:
The 2020 National Security Law in Hong Kong has led to a mass exodus, 15% of which have resettled in the UK under the Hong Kong BN(O) Pathway. Prior to migration, Hong Kong identity is already often tied to ‘fusion cuisine’: from ‘East-Meets-West’ dishes at Hong Kong style cafes, to the plethora of various Asian diasporic food reimagined to Hong Kong taste as everyday cuisine. Food had been politicized as embodying Hong Kong identities before, from the anti-authoritarian Milk Tea Alliance formed in 2020, to the ‘heritagization’ of Hong Kong style milk tea (Mak 2021). As the ‘mainlandization’ of Hong Kong sees traditional Hong Kong/Canton style foods disappearing in favor of mainland traditions, the BN(O) diaspora finds themselves becoming living histories of a Hong Kong disappearing before their eyes.
In this paper I explore how Hong Kongers in Bristol witness Hong Kong ‘disappearing’ through social, cultural, and political change, as they leave and mainlanders move in. With a focus in particular on food traditions, I explore how BN(O) Hong Kongers in exile make themselves guardians and custodians of a ‘Hong Kong culture’ that is fading from Hong Kong. In this, classic diasporic notions of the Homeland Frozen in Time are inverted, and the diaspora consciously watched their homeland ‘disappear,’ while freezing what ‘culture and traditions’ they can abroad. I question if, given the age of a globalized, digitally connected world, notions of frozen homeland no longer reflect the realities of diasporic identity and nostalgia.
Paper short abstract:
This study explores why privileged young Chinese emigrate, using entrepreneurship to navigate a "risk society" marked by reduced freedoms and intense competition. By leveraging UK residency and Chinese nationality, they build 'mobility capital' for strategic global movement.
Paper long abstract:
This study examines why young, privileged Chinese individuals emigrate, how they sustain fluid, ongoing movement, and the life goals through migrant entrepreneurship. Through interviews with 30 young Chinese migrant entrepreneurs in the UK, this study reveals that they migrate primarily to escape an increasingly "risk society" (Beck, 1992), characterized by reduced social and personal freedoms, a hostile business environment, and hyper-competition within professional and entrepreneurial sectors in the PRC. In this context, elite-oriented immigration policies of Northern countries align with these migrants' goals, creating a duality of 'neoliberalism as exception' and 'exceptions to neoliberalism' (Ong, 2006), which facilitates selective entry for young, privileged Chinese. Intriguingly, even within the perceived context of an increasingly 'risk society,' young, privileged migrants are hesitant to relinquish their Chinese nationality, despite having diligently obtained UK residency. This choice reflects a deliberate strategy to cultivate 'mobility capital' (Moret, 2017). A Northern country's residency offers mobility to exit China when “risks” emerge, while Chinese nationality enables a strategic return when advantageous. This study contributes to the literature on how young, privileged Chinese individuals from the not-so-distant ‘Deng Xiaoping Era’ (Vogel 2011) view China’s ongoing “New Era” (Shirk 2018) as shaping their future aspirations with uncertainty; it examines how revenue-driven immigration controls in postcolonial Northern countries impact Southern elites by enabling them to project their domestic inequality issues onto a global scale through the use of mobility capital. In this study, I term these young Chinese elites "Chinese Übermensches," an unparalleled phenomenon in Chinese migration history.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how content creators of the Chinese diaspora in Italy navigate Italian-language digital spaces amidst increasingly polarised global politics by creating avenues for both transnational diplomacy and shifting politics of belonging.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years, questions around diasporic identity have begun to be posed from new angles that highlight the increasing role played by both sending and receiving states’ need for political legitimation and national image building. In light of mounting tensions between the United States, China and the world, members of the Chinese diaspora today are increasingly asked to take sides within highly polarised political and discursive fields articulated not only through the PRC state policy, but also across host states and societies— with interlinking pressures leveraging multiple kinship and affective ties. Diverging experiences of Chineseness around the world are thus forced within an imagined coherent cultural and political body by both the PCR's increasingly pervasive diaspora governance strategies and by host societies that construct ethnic Chinese as political and cultural Others. Based on digital ethnography and interviews with content creators of the Chinese diaspora living in Italy, this paper explores how people of Chinese descent navigate Italian-language digital spaces amidst growing threats to multiple belongings. We argue that different digital spaces create avenues not only for transnational public diplomacy but also for questioning the necessity of monolithic diasporic identities in favour of shifting politics of belonging.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores 'diasporism' as a catch-all label embraced by Jewish communities in the US and UK seeking to enact Jewish identity without Zionism, with particular attention paid to the tensions between aspirations for both rootedness and diasporic identity.
Paper long abstract:
In the US and UK, there is a growing movement of Jewish people practicing self-determination by cultivating Judaism without Zionism. Many of these Jewish people claim the condition of being ‘in diaspora’, mobilizing this concept as a political identity. As theorized by scholars of the black radical tradition, this conceptualization of diaspora, unlike traditional models that stipulate a people relating to a homeland (Safran 1991), describes a community outside the norms of nation-states and borders (Hall 1995, 207), a space of counterculture (Gilroy 1993) whose inhabitants experience a multiplicity of consciousness (Du Bois 1903). Thinking with these scholars, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz (2007) coined the term ‘diasporism’, defining it by a political commitment to solidarity and a belief in a Jewish history and future independent of a national homeland.
Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, this project explores the embrace of diaspora as a third space and its deployment as a political ideology amongst Jewish community farm members. This research asks why members are drawn to diaspora as a political identity and what possibilities they believe it engenders. Amid the potentials and implications of deploying diaspora as a political ideology, this paper attends particularly to the tensions inherent in an ideology that claims diaspora while building communities rooted in land. It asks, if, and in what ways, community members reconcile claims to diasporism with projects for rootedness in a world structured by ongoing coloniality (Grosfuegel 2002).