Between Colonialism And Diaspora

A bold historical reevaluation of constructions of Sikh identity from the late eighteenth century through the early twenty-first.

The arrival of European settlers in the Americas disrupted indigenous lifeways, and the effects of colonialism shattered Native communities. Forced migration and human trafficking created a diaspora of cultures, languages, and people. Gregory D. Smithers and Brooke N. Newman have gathered the work of leading scholars, including Bill Anthes, Duane Champagne, Daniel Cobb, Donald Fixico, and Joy Porter, among others, in examining an expansive range of Native peoples and the extent of their influences through reaggregation. These diverse and wide-ranging essays uncover indigenous understandings of self-identification, community, and culture through the speeches, cultural products, intimate relations, and political and legal practices of Native peoples. ¾Native Diasporas explores how indigenous peoples forged a sense of identity and community amid the changes wrought by European colonialism in the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, and the mainland Americas from the seventeenth through the twentieth century. Broad in scope and groundbreaking in the topics it explores, this volume presents fresh insights from scholars devoted to understanding Native American identity in meaningful and methodologically innovative ways. ¾

Historical archaeology studies once relied upon a binary view of colonialism: colonizers and colonized, the colonial period and the postcolonial period. The contributors to this volume scrutinize imperialism and expansionism through an alternative lens that rejects simple dualities and explores the variously gendered, racialized, and occupied peoples of a multitude of faiths, desires, associations, and constraints. Colonialism is not a phase in the chronology of a people but a continuous phenomenon that spans the Old and New Worlds. Most important, the contributors argue that its impacts—and, in some instances, even the same processes set in place by the likes of Columbus—are ongoing. Inciting a critical examination of the lasting consequences of ancient and modern colonialism on descendant communities, this wide-ranging volume includes essays on Roman Britain, slavery in Brazil, and contemporary Native Americans. In its efforts to define the scope of colonialism and the comparability of its features, this collection challenges the field to go beyond familiar geographical and historical boundaries and draws attention to unfolding colonial futures.

Tradition and modernity as they relate to African and diasporic cultures do not exist within a vacuum. They reflect the constantly changing relations and factors that define daily life in Africa and beyond. For example, one cannot consider Congolese fabric in the mid-twentieth century without thinking about the immense impact of the Second World War on ideas about French colonialism and trade relations within the French empire. African cultures are immensely significant in the larger histories and microhistories of Africa and the African diaspora because they often reflect the important nuances of race, class, and gender and how these factors intersect with politics and society on local, regional, national, and global levels. This book thus examines the important connections between African cultures and social and political movements in the African diaspora--from Brazil to the United States.

This volume investigates what role colonial communities and diaspora have had in shaping the Portuguese empire and its heritage, exploring topics such as Portuguese migration to Africa, the Ismaili and the Swiss presence in Mozambique, the Goanese in East Africa, the Chinese in Brazil, and the history of the African presence in Portugal.

Nearly all studies of British people living in India during the British Raj examine the population within the context of imperialism, neglecting the sense of displacement, discontinuity, and discomfort that comprised everyday life for Anglo-Indians. In Imperialism as Diaspora, Ralph Crane and Radhika Mohanram set out to understand the real lives of Anglo-Indians from a new, interdisciplinary stance. Moving seamlessly between literature, history, and art—and examining many forgotten works—they show how the lives of Anglo-Indians constituted an intersection of imperalist and diasporic forces, which created a unique set of cultural fissures that played out in issues of race, gender, religion, and power as colonial history progressed.