B1639 - Global Diasporas. Cultures, Identities and Politics (1) (LM)

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course students will have a good knowledge of a portion of the vast field of diaspora studies. Students will learn about diasporic cultures, imaginaries, consciousness, subjectivities and practices across a variety of contexts and will be able to assess the stakes of ‘diaspora’ as an analytical concept as well as lived experience. Students will also learn about the importance of intertwining critical race theory with ethnography in order to understand diasporic subjectivities are racialised. The course will also equip students with decolonial approaches and methodologies to migration and diaspora studies enabling them to achieve the tools to critically engage with historical and contemporary debates around identity, nationalism, race, multiculturalism and difference.

Course contents

"Diaspora" as a concept has enabled an understanding of identities and cultures beyond national, ethnic or racial connotations. Diaspora functions as a vision to think of subjectivities and communities not as epiphenomena of nation-states but as springboard for de-territorialised and transnational cultural and political formations and political subjectivities. Central notions associated with diaspora are those of imagination, hybridity, double consciousness and resistance. In this light, this course explores African and Asian Diasporas in the contemporary world. The first part introduces students to anthropological and social theory of migration and looks at what Diaspora as a heuristic device has brought to studies and understandings of home, belonging, identities and political cultures. The second part will look at both historical and contemporary lived experiences of Diasporas in the global context, delving into specific studies and reflections on the Jewish diaspora, the Asian diaspora, the Palestinian diaspora as well as the African diaspora. In addition to this, we will pay some attention to the significance of the 'borderland' as a site of fugitive political and cultural formations in opposition to nationalist and exclusivist formations and rhetoric.

In the second part, the course focuses on how liberal states manage Diasporas through containment, confinement, disciplining and through a highly emotional politics of fear. Finally, we will analyse diasporas as "cultures of resistance" effecting a dissolution of borders and boundaries in their everyday aesthetic and performative practices.

Weekly topics for this course will include:

Migration and Diaspora. An introduction

Thinking with the Sea. Tidal Politcs and Imperial waters

 Diaspora and diasporic imagination

Diaspora and the after-life of slavery

Liberal states and diasporas

Race and racial politics

Borders, Boundaries and Necropolitics

Diaspora, Trauma and Displacement

Border-lands: Crossing, Inhabiting, Resisting

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Readings/Bibliography

The course is highly interdisciplinary but with a strong focus on ethnographic studies. Critical scholars whose work we will engage with for this course include: Stuart Hall on 'race' as a floating signifier, Paul Gilroy on the Black Atlantic, Saidiya Hartman on slavery and its after-live, Gloria Wekker and Fatima el Tayeb on queering diasporas, cultural archives and whiteness in Europe, Eduard Glissant on the right to opacity, Ghassan Hage on the diasporic condition, Abdelmayak Sayyad on trauma and migration, Nadia Fadil Mayanthi Fernando and Annelies Moors on Islam in Europe and secular and religious affects.

A complete syllabus with weekly readings for student attending the course will be uploaded closer to the beginning of the class.

 

Below is a general reading list for the course:

Mishra, S. 2006. Diaspora Criticism, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

Paerregaard, K. 2010. Interrogating diaspora: Power and conflict in Peruvian migration. In Bauböck R. & Faist T. (Eds.), Diaspora and Transnationalism: Concepts, Theories and Methods (pp. 91-108).

Brah, A. 1996. ‘Diaspora, border and transnational identities’, in Cartographies of diaspora: contesting identities. London & New York; Routledge, pp. 178-210.

Hall, S. .2012. ‘Avtar Brah's cartographies: Moment, method, meaning’. Feminist Review, (100), 27-38.

Clifford, J. 1994. Diasporas, Cultural Anthropology 9(2): 302-338.

Gilroy, P. 1993. The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness, London, Verso.

Clifford, J. 1992. “Travelling Cultures”, in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, P. Treichler, (eds) Cultural Studies, London, Routledge, pp. 27-64.

Clifford, J.1997. Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, London, Harvard UP.

Cohen, R. 1997. Global Diasporas. An Introduction, London, UCL Press.

Shohat, E. 2006. Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices, London: Duke University Press.

Gilroy, P. 1997.‘Diaspora and the Detours of Identity’, in Kathryn Woodward (ed.) Identity & Difference. London: Sage Publications in Association with Open University, pp. 299-343.

Safran, W. 1991. ‘Diasporas in Modern Societies. Myth of Homeland and Return’, in Diaspora. 1 (1): 83-99.

Wesling, M. 2008. ‘Why queer diaspora’, in Feminist Review 90: 20-47.

Rahier, J., Hintzen, P. C., & Smith F., 2010. Global circuits of blackness: Interrogating the African diaspora. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Abushouk, A. I., & Ibrahim, H. A., 2009. The Hadhrami diaspora in Southeast Asia: Identity maintenance or assimilation? Leiden; Boston: Brill.

Alajaji, S., 2015. Music and the Armenian diaspora: Searching for home in exile. Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Montgomery, E. J., 2019. Shackled sentiments: Slaves, spirits, and memories in the African diaspora. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books.

Singh, K.A. 2012. A Schizophrenic Metaphor? Disciplining Creoleness. Transform Anthropology, 20: 172-185. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-7466.2012.01150.x

Butler, Kim D. 2000. “From Black History to Diasporan History: Brazilian Abolition in Afro-Atlantic Context.” African Studies Review, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 125–139.

Holloway, Camara Dia. 2015. Afrochic: Africa in the Modernist Imagination in in Braham, P., African diaspora in the cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. Newark: University of Delaware Press.

Wekker, G. (2016) White innocence: Paradoxes of colonialism and race. Durham: Duke University Press. Introduction and Chapter 4

Hall, S. (1997). ‘Race: the floating signifier’ http://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Stuart-Hall-Race-the-Floating-Signifier-Transcript.pdf

Pierre, J. 2013. Race in Africa Today: A Commentary. Cultural Anthropology 28(3): 547–551.

de Witte, M. (2019), Black citizenship, Afropolitan critiques: vernacular heritage‐making and the negotiation of race in the Netherlands. Soc Anthropol, 27: 609-625. https://doi-org.ezproxy.soas.ac.uk/10.1111/1469-8676.12680

Harrison, F. V.1995. The Persistent Power of "Race" in the Cultural and Political Economy of Racism [https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.an.24.100195.000403] . Annual Review of Anthropology 24(1): 47-74.

Gilroy, P., 2001. Against race: Imagining political culture beyond the color line (1st Harvard University Press paperback ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Gill, L.K. 2012. Situating Black, Situating Queer: Black Queer Diaspora Studies and the Art of Embodied Listening. Transform Anthropology, 20: 32-44. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-7466.2011.01143.x

Gilroy, Paul. 2018. Where Every Breeze Speaks of Courage and Liberty: Offshore Humanism and Marine Xenology, or Racism and the Problem of Critique at Sea. Antipode 50 (1): 3-22.

Glissant, Edouard. 1997. The Poetics of Relation (University of Michigan Press).

Hartman, S., 2008. Lose your mother: A journey along the Atlantic slave route. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. (read as much as you can of this book which is written in a highly accessible style)

Abu-Lughod, L. 2011. Return to Half-Ruins: Fathers and Daughters, Memory and History in Palestine. In Hirsch M. & Miller N. (Eds.), Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory (pp. 124-136). New York: Columbia University Press. doi:10.7312/hirs15090.11

Boyarin, D., & Boyarin, J. 1993. Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity. Critical Inquiry, 19(4): 693-725. (warning: this is a complex text, focus on the main argument about the formation of diasporic Jewish identity and return)

Sayad, A. 2004. The suffering of the immigrant. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Bhandar, B. 2009. The Ties That Bind: Multiculturalism and Secularism Reconsidered. Journal of Law and Society, vol. 36, no. 3, 2009, pp. 301–326.

Fernando, M. 2019. State Sovereignty and the Politics of Indifference. PUBLIC CULTURE; 31 (2): 261–273. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-7286813

Fadil, N. 2009. Managing affects and sensibilities: The case of not-handshaking and not-fasting. Social Anthropology 17(4), 439–454.

Fernando, M. L. “Reconfiguring Freedom: Muslim Piety and the Limits of Secular Law and Public Discourse in France.” American Ethnologist, vol. 37, no. 1, 2010, pp. 19–35.

 

 

Teaching methods

Each week we will deal with one topic in depth. The week will consist in frontal lectures, group discussions and presentations and, occasionally, lectures and discussions will be complemented by audio-visual material. When possible we will organise discussions in the form of student debates around particular and controversial topics.

Students must attend at least 75% of the course to be considered as "attending students" and be involved in all class activities.

 

Assessment methods

Attending students:

A written 2500 essay on a topic to be agreed with the lecturer.

 

Non attending students:

Oral exam based on a choice of two monographs ( books ) and three journal articles from the syllabus that will be shared in due time.

Students taking an oral exam are expected, at a minimum, to be able to summarise the content and the main arguments of the texts, displaying also a good command of the language (pass). Students will show an understanding of the main debates and issues involved in the literature and will be able to make connections across topics, displaying an analysis of the materials, beyond a summary of the main ideas (merit). Command of the key language and concepts within the field is particularly appreciated. For a distinction, students will also need to show an ability to critically engage with the bibliographical materials, conveying their own original approach to the issues at stake. (distinction)

 

Teaching tools

Each lecture will be uploaded on VLE for students' perusal after the class.

A complete syllabus will also be shared at the beginning of week 1 and will include the list of all readings and class activities.

Office hours

See the website of Ruba Salih