"Chatora gives us an honest account of the migrant's experiences in a world that seeks to silence him. Diaspora Dreams is simultaneously suffocating and isolating. Battle after battle, the reader is constantly thrown into the unforgiving world of a black man in a white man's world." - Tariro Ndoro, Author Agringada: Like a Gringa, Like a Foreigner. Diaspora Dreams is Andrew Chatora's debut novella. It details the life and struggles of Kundai Mafirakureva, a Zimbabwean immigrant living in the United Kingdom. When Kundai departs a failing Zimbabwe for the greener pastures of England, he is convinced that his luck will immediately change. Yet what he finds in the UK convinces him that all that glitters is not always gold. Chatora takes us on a journey that acquaints us with Thames Valley, where Kundai must negotiate his place and his voice in a world where African men are not welcome. Set against the backdrop of petty classroom squabbles that constantly remind Kundai of his lower status as an immigrant, Diaspora Dreams exposes the tensions of working in the diaspora. The pressures of Britain also bear down on Kundai's family and relationships, threatening, in the words of du Bois, to "tear his soul asunder."

"Along the Perfume River lives an old woman who has never left her village, who has raised children and grandchildren, never having seen the other side of the river. A nightclub owner from Vietnam travels the world, hobnobbing with international celebrities. A young man goes to college in America, only to return to Vietnam with made-up stories and forged photographs of himself with President Clinton. And another grows up both an American teenager and a Vietnamese general's son ... the author himself." "In this collection of essays, noted journalist Andrew Lam explores his lifelong struggle for identity and challenges definitions - both society's and his own - of what it means to be an immigrant, a son, and a survivor."--BOOK JACKET.

In postcolonial theory we have now reached a new stage in the succession of key concepts. After the celebrations of hybridity in the work of Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, it is now the concept of diaspora that has sparked animated debates among postcolonial critics. This collection intervenes in the current discussion about the 'new' diaspora by placing the rise of diaspora within the politics of multiculturalism and its supercession by a politics of difference and cultural-rights theory. The essays present recent developments in Jewish negotiations of diasporic tradition and experience, discussing the reinterpretation of concepts of the 'old' diaspora in late twentieth- century British and American Jewish literature. The second part of the volume comprises theoretical and critical essays on the South Asian diaspora and on multicultural settings between Australia, Africa, the Caribbean and North America. The South Asian and Caribbean diasporas are compared to the Jewish prototype and contrasted with the Turkish diaspora in Germany. All essays deal with literary reflections on, and thematizations of, the diasporic predicament.

In recent years, the Vietnamese diaspora, including some of whom are Protestant Christian Việt Kiều, have returned to their natal homeland of Vietnam in large numbers. This book investigates the phenomenon of the Protestant Christian Việt Kiều who have returned and reestablished belonging in Vietnam with a missional purpose and the perspective of non-migrant local Protestant Christian leaders as a case study of diaspora missiology. It is based upon doctoral research utilizing in-depth interviews which sought to answer the following questions: 1) What are the motivating factors of Protestant Christian Việt Kiều returning to Vietnam for mission-related purposes? 2) What has been the experience in ministry of the returning Protestant Christian Việt Kiều regarding mission-related reasons for returning? 3) How have the non-migrants experienced the phenomenon of return? This book explores the answers to these questions as a case study of diaspora missiology. Findings suggest that the Protestant Christian Việt Kiều are welcomed back in Vietnam and contributing in many dynamic ways in the homeland. At the same time, the return journey is a road layered with complexities, contradictions, opportunities, and unique challenges. Findings from this diaspora community engaged in missions by and beyond the diaspora give insight into the paradigm of diaspora missiology and temper the enthusiasm for widely promoted theory. Important questions arise regarding how far diaspora as a framework can carry us.

The geo-political area of what once constituted Yugoslavia has been a region of significant migration since the 1960s. More recently, the conflicts in the region were the catalysts for massive displacements of individuals, families and whole communities. Thus far, there has been a gap in the literature on the qualitative experience of migrants from the former Yugoslavia through the twin theoretical lenses of transnationalism and diaspora. This book offers an ethnographic account of migration and life in diaspora of migrants originating from the former Yugoslavia and now living in Britain. Concepts such as the development of cultural beacons and diasporic borrowing are introduced through the ways in which migrants from the region form community associations and articulate - or avoid - such affiliations. The study examines the ways in which the experience of migration can be shaped by the socio-political contexts of departure and arrival, and considers how the lexicon associated with the act of migration can weave itself into the identities of migrants. The ways in which the transnational and diasporic spaces are dictated by certain narratives, for example the allegory of dreaming and the language of guilt, are explored. It also investigates migrants’ ongoing connection with the homeland, considering social and cultural elements, their reception in UK, and British media representations of Yugoslavia. Contributing to the knowledge on the experiences of migrants from a part of the world which has been under-researched in terms of its migrating populations, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Political Geography, Social Geography, Eastern European Politics, and Migration and Diaspora studies.

Chinese American authors often find it necessary to represent Asian history in their literary works. Tracing the development of the literary production of Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Lisa See, and Russell Leong, among others, this book captures the effects of international politics and globalization on Chinese American diasporic consciousness.

In 2975, the orphan Yatima is grown from a randomly mutated digital mind seed in the conceptory of Konishi polis. Yatima explores the Coalition of Polises, the network of computers where most life in the solar system now resides, and joins a friend, Inoshiro, to borrow an abandoned robot body and meet a thriving community of “fleshers” in the enclave of Atlanta. Twenty-one years later, news arrives from a lunar observatory: gravitational waves from Lac G-1, a nearby pair of neutron stars, show that the Earth is about to be bathed in a gamma-ray flash created by the stars’ collision — an event that was not expected to take place for seven million years. Yatima and Inoshiro return to Atlanta to try to warn the fleshers, but meet suspicion and disbelief. Some lives are saved, but the Earth is ravaged. In the aftermath of the disaster, the survivors resolve to discover the cause of the neutron stars’ premature collision, and they launch a thousand polises into interstellar space in search of answers. This diaspora eventually reaches a planet subtly transformed to encode a message from an older group of travellers: a greater danger than Lac G-1 is imminent, and the only escape route leads beyond the visible universe.