Dialogues In The Diasporas

The author stages a series of conversations with prominent writers and artists to assess how to define cultural identity in the modern world and age of mass media and global migration. His premise is that conventional cultural identity is not static.

Diasporas in Dialogue is an indispensable guide for those leading or participating in dialogue processes, especially in ethnically diverse communities. The text offers both a theoretical and practical framework for dialogue, providing insight into the needs, assets and challenges of working in this capacity. The first book to offer structured processes for dialogue with refugee communities - demonstrates how diaspora communities can be engaged in dialogue that heals, reconciles and builds peace Relates the story of the Portland Diaspora Dialogue Project, a remarkable collaboration between university researchers and African community activists committed to helping newly arrived refugees Written accessibly to provide practitioners, academics, and community members with a simple and cogent account of how, step by step, the process of healing communities and re-building can begin Published at a critical time in the face of the worldwide refugee crisis, and offers helpful frameworks and practical tools for dialogue in situations where individuals and communities are displaced

Dialogues Across Diasporas focuses on the shared historical legacies of members of the Africana and Latina diasporas, and the cultural impact of the African diaspora in the Americas. This book seeks to emphasize connections rather than divisions among different migratory ethnic communities via a reconfiguration of borders and ethnic identities. This collection of essays has three major goals: first, to foreground shared themes and strategies in the literary productions of women of Africana and Latina/o descent; second, to highlight the importance of the arts for community activism within shared diasporic spaces; and third, to illustrate the potential of artistic and activist collaborations among women from both groups across disciplinary, political, national, and ethnic divides. Dialogues across Diasporas is divided into three sections. The first section provides a theoretical overview of diasporic migrations, politics, and identities. It argues that diverse diasporas can unite around shared political and cultural experiences such as converting contested spaces into communities and resisting rhetorics of exclusion. The second section demonstrates the diverse ways in which migratory women and daughters of the diaspora frame their histories, lived experiences, and different forms of knowledge via poetry, short stories, academic essays, and other art forms. The third section focuses on women's activism, suggesting opportunities for collaboration among and between diverse diasporic communities.

Diasporas in Dialogue is an indispensable guide for those leading or participating in dialogue processes, especially in ethnically diverse communities. The text offers both a theoretical and practical framework for dialogue, providing insight into the needs, assets and challenges of working in this capacity. The first book to offer structured processes for dialogue with refugee communities - demonstrates how diaspora communities can be engaged in dialogue that heals, reconciles and builds peace Relates the story of the Portland Diaspora Dialogue Project, a remarkable collaboration between university researchers and African community activists committed to helping newly arrived refugees Written accessibly to provide practitioners, academics, and community members with a simple and cogent account of how, step by step, the process of healing communities and re-building can begin Published at a critical time in the face of the worldwide refugee crisis, and offers helpful frameworks and practical tools for dialogue in situations where individuals and communities are displaced

From Brazil to Germany, New York to Ghana, Dialogues of Dispersal examines intersections of gender and sexuality within Afro-diasporic communities. Considers communities in Brazil, the Caribbean, Germany, the UK, the US and West Africa, and how they overlap. Contains innovative analyses of knowledge production, globalization, popular culture, identity, colonialism, maternalism, dress, and transnational networks. Features interdisciplinary work by both established and emerging scholars. Acknowledges the accomplishments and the tensions of feminist scholarship and activism. Encourages further research by highlighting the range of electronic research materials on African diasporas available on the Internet.

Markus Nehl focuses on black authors who, from a 21st-century perspective, revisit slavery in the U.S., Ghana, South Africa, Canada and Jamaica. Nehl's provocative readings of Toni Morrison's A Mercy, Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother, Yvette Christiansë's Unconfessed, Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes and Marlon James' The Book of Night Women delineate how these texts engage in a fruitful dialogue with African diaspora theory about the complex relation between the local and transnational and the enduring effects of slavery. Reflecting on the ethics of narration, this study is particularly attentive to the risks of representing anti-black violence and to the intricacies involved in (re-)appropriating slavery's archive.

This book breaks new theoretical and methodological ground in the study of the African diaspora in the Atlantic world. Leading scholars of archaeology, linguistics, and socio-cultural anthropology draw upon extensive field experiences and archival investigations of black communities in North America, the Caribbean, South America, and Africa to challenge received paradigms in Afro-American anthropology. They employ dialogic approaches that demand both an awareness of the historical fashioning of anthropology's categories and selfreflexive, critical research and define a new agenda for the field. Paying close attention to power, politics, and the dynamism of never-finished, open-ended behavioral forms and symbolic repertoires, the contributors address colonialism, the slave trade, racism, ethnogenesis, New World nationalism, urban identity politics, the development of artworlds, musics and their publics, the emergence of new religious and ritual forms, speech genres, and contested historical representations. The authors offer sophisticated interpretations of cultural change, exchange, appropriation, and re-appropriation that challenge simplistic notions of culture.

The New York Times reports that since 1990 more Africans have voluntarily relocated to the United States and Canada than had been forcibly brought here before the slave trade ended in 1807. The key reason for these migrations has been the collapse of social, political, economic, and educational structures in their home countries, which has driven Africans to seek security and self-realization in the West. This lively and timely collection of essays takes a look at the new immigrant experience. It traces the immigrants' progress from expatriation to arrival and covers the successes as well as problems they have encountered as they establish their lives in a new country. The contributors, most immigrants themselves, use their firsthand experiences to add clarity, honesty, and sensitivity to their discussions of the new African diaspora.