Global Identities In Transit

Global Identities in Transit: The Ethics and Politics of Representation in World Literatures and Cultures explores the myriad aspects of identity formation and identity representation in an increasingly globalized world. Covering a variety of cultural and historical experiences in addition to several texts of world literatures, the contributors discuss the configurations of transnationality and transculturality in our postcolonial and globalized world. Acknowledging that nationality, ethnicity, gender, and class are continually shaped by historical processes, the contributors hone in on the ways that the increase in mobility via migration, diaspora, and exile render identities always in transit In the face of structural inequalities and social injustices predominant in this context, the chapters reflect on the moral obligations of representation. This collection will be of interest to scholars of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and world literature.

“[R]ecommended to anyone interested in multiculturalism and migration....[and] food for thought also for scholars studying migration in less privileged contexts.”—Social Anthropology In this compelling study of the children of serial migrants, Danau Tanu argues that the international schools they attend promote an ideology of being “international” that is Eurocentric. Despite the cosmopolitan rhetoric, hierarchies of race, culture and class shape popularity, friendships, and romance on campus. By going back to high school for a year, Tanu befriended transnational youth, often called “Third Culture Kids”, to present their struggles with identity, belonging and internalized racism in their own words. The result is the first engaging, anthropological critique of the way Western-style cosmopolitanism is institutionalized as cultural capital to reproduce global socio-cultural inequalities. From the introduction: When I first went back to high school at thirty-something, I wanted to write a book about people who live in multiple countries as children and grow up into adults addicted to migrating. I wanted to write about people like Anne-Sophie Bolon who are popularly referred to as “Third Culture Kids” or “global nomads.” ... I wanted to probe the contradiction between the celebrated image of “global citizens” and the economic privilege that makes their mobile lifestyle possible. From a personal angle, I was interested in exploring the voices among this population that had yet to be heard (particularly the voices of those of Asian descent) by documenting the persistence of culture, race, and language in defining social relations even among self-proclaimed cosmopolitan youth.

In Permanent Transit: Discourses and Maps of the Intercultural Experience builds interdisciplinary approaches to the study of migrations, traffics, globalisation, communication, regulations, arts, literature, and other intercultural processes, in the context of past and present times. The book offers a convergence of perspectives, combining conceptual and empirical work by sociologists, anthropologists, historians, linguists, educators, lawyers, media specialists, and literary studies writers, in their shared attempt to understand the many routes of the intercultural experience. This Permanent Transit generates an overlapping of cultures, characteristic of a site of cultural translation. In their incessant creation of uncertainties, these pages also produce new hypotheses, theories and explanations, while pushing limits, bringing about epistemological changes, and opening new spaces for independent discussion and research. The potential for change is located at peripheries marked by hybridity, where the ‘new arrivals’ and the ‘excluded’ – like this book and many of its contributors – are able to use subversion to undermine the strategies of the powerful, regardless of who they are. Cultural translation – both as Judith Butler’s ‘return of the excluded’ and as Homi Bhabha’s hybridity – is a major force of contemporary democracy, also in the academic field.

Reconstructing transnational identities in postcolonial migration, The Postcolonial Subject in Transit highlights the complexities of cultural hybridity in contemporary African diasporic literature. It captures migrants’ desire for cultural inclusivity in disputed borders and locations of the West.

This book aims at deconstructing and problematizing linguistic ideologies related to Portuguese in late modernity and questioning the theoretical presuppositions which have led us to call Portuguese ‘a language.’ Such an endeavor is crucial when we know that Portuguese is a language which is increasingly internationalized, used as the official language in four continents (in ten countries) and which has come to play a relevant role in the so-called linguistic market on the basis of the geopolitical transformations in a multipolar world. The book covers a wide range of social, political and historical contexts in which ‘Portuguese’ is used (in Brazil, Canada, East-Timor, England, Portugal, Mozambique and Uruguay), and considers diverse linguistic practices. Through this critique, contributors chart new directions for research on language ideologies and language practices (including research related to Portuguese and to other ‘languages’) and consider ways of developing new conceptual compasses that are better attuned to the sociolinguistic realities of the late modern era, in which people, texts and languages are increasingly in movement through national borders and those of digital networks of communication.

Clear and well-defined identities are hard to sustain in a rapidly shifting world. Peoples, goods, and cultures are on the move. The internet and other technologies increase the amount, the speed, and the intensity of cultural exchanges. Individuals, organizations, and nations develop complex identities out of many traditions, different ideals, various ways of life, and many models of organization. Religious traditions both collide and interact, with spiritual journeys crossing religious boundaries. In this book, more than 20 contributors from different backgrounds and academic disciplines offer an array of practical theological perspectives to help understand these complex identities and negotiate this shifting world. (Series: International Practical Theology - Vol. 17) [Subject: Religious Studies, Cultural Studies]

The mobility regimes in which migratory careers of highly educated women are embedded have a high impact on the invisible sway between privileges and vulnerabilities in situated socio-political contexts. Between 1960s and 1990s, highly educated women began moving on their own, but, despite their qualifications, they nonetheless faced big challenges, some of which have not completely disappeared. Are highly educated migrant women really privileged? This book explores the empirical dilemma between privileges and vulnerability in the framework of conceptual transformations of the highly skilled migration and human mobility in history from the post-industrial era to the present. The book’s subject matter shows an existing sway between privileges and vulnerability in the construction process of the “migratory careers” of highly educated women, which depends on the articulation of macro, meso and micro factors and driving women historically to shape heterogeneous readaptation responses in different geo-political contexts. The case study of the Basque Country in Spain is presented as emblematic reflection of the global economy conformation. The history explored from a gender perspective shows that a critical understanding of the structures of opportunities and constraints influencing women’s mobility is relevant to overcome stereotypes and generate gender-sensitive policies for the socio-economic inclusion of more vulnerable groups.

In our turbulent world of global flows and digital transformations pervasive identity crises and self-reinvention have become increasingly central to everyday life. In this fascinating book, Anthony Elliott shows how global transformations – the new electronic economy, digital worlds, biotechnologies and artificial intelligence - generatesa metamorphosis across the force-field of identities today. Identity Troubles documents various contemporary mutations of identity – from robotics to biomedicine, from cosmetic surgery to digital lives – and considers their broader social, cultural and political consequences. Elliott offers a synthesis of the key conceptual innovations in identity studies in the context of recent social theory. He critically examines accounts of "individualization", "reflexivity", "liquidization" and "new maladies of the soul" – situating these in wider social and historical contexts, and drawing out critical themes. He follows with a series of chapters looking at how what is truly new in contemporary life is having profound consequences for identities, both private and public. This book will be essential reading for undergraduate students in sociology, cultural studies, political science, and human geography. It offers the first comprehensive overview of identity studies in the interdisciplinary field of social theory.