This book uses the uniquely positioned culture of East African Asians to reflect upon the most vexing issues in postcolonial literary studies today. By examining the local histories and discourses that underpin East African Asian literature, it opens up and reflects upon issues of alienation, modernity, migration, diaspora, memory and nationalism.

This book uses the uniquely positioned culture of East African Asians to reflect upon the most vexing issues in postcolonial literary studies today. By examining the local histories and discourses that underpin East African Asian literature, it opens up and reflects upon issues of alienation, modernity, migration, diaspora, memory and nationalism.

Capturing the important place and power role that culture plays in the decision-making process of migration, this Handbook looks at human movement outside of a vacuum; taking into account the impact of family relationships, access to resources, and security and insecurity at both the points of origin and destination.

African Diaspora Identities provides insights into the complex transnational processes involved in shaping the migratory identities of African immigrants. It seeks to understand the durability of these African transnational migrant identities and their impact on inter-minority group relationships. John A. Arthur demonstrates that the identities African immigrants construct often transcends country-specific cultures and normative belief systems. He illuminates the fact that these transnational migrant identities are an amalgamation of multiple identities formed in varied social transnational settings. The United States has become a site for the cultural formations, manifestations, and contestations of the newer identities that these immigrants seek to depict in cross-cultural and global settings. Relying mostly on their strong human capital resources (education and family), Africans are devising creative, encompassing, and robust ways to position and reposition their new identities. In combining their African cultural forms and identities with new roles, norms, and beliefs that they imbibe in the United States and everywhere else they have settled, Africans are redefining what it means to be black in a race-, ethnicity-, and color-conscious American society.

Culture, Literature and Migration gives us a unique insight into the emotional and physical experiences of immigrants. By shedding light on the challenges of the plight, the chapters in this book raise awareness of the global scale of the crisis and reduces hostility towards the displaced as a result of a better understanding of that which is often left unspoken of and unheard of. The distinctiveness of voluntary and involuntary immigration is brought forward and contextualized in order to emphasise the trauma of forced departure and the often forgotten psychological complications of the host nation. With such matters arising, there is an ultimate return to notions of hegemony, colonialism, otherness, hybridity and citizenship. New understandings of identity, nationalism and multiculturalism are explored in context of transnationalism and multiculturalism. Culture, Literature and Migration critically analyzes the transformation of the immigrant and highlights the importance of hope and the power of inclusiveness in a fragmented global environment. Content Introduction – Ali Tilbe and Rania M Rafik Khalil Chapter 1 – The Bildungsroman and Building a Hybrid Identity in the Postcolonial Context: Migration as Formative Experience in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane Petru Golban and Derya Benli Chapter 2 – The Migrant Female Writer, Originally from Muslim Country in the Literary Field: A Sociological Approach Francesco Bellinzis Chapter 3 – Migration, Integration and Power. The Image of “the Dumb Swede” in Swede Hollow and the Image of Contemporary New Swedes in One Eye Red and She Is Not Me Maria Bäcke Chapter 4 – Coerced Migration, Migrating Rhetoric: The ‘Forked Tongue’ of Native American Removal Policy in the Nineteenth-Century United States Estella Ciobanu Chapter 5 – The Migrant Hero’s Boundaries of Masculine Honour Code in Elif Shafak’s Honour Tatiana Golban Chapter 6 – Literary Representations of Progressive Era Lithuanian Immigrants in the United States and the Question of Genre: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) Cansu Özge Özmen Chapter 7 – Migration, Maturation and Identity Crisis in Abani’s Select Novels: A Postcolonial Reading Bernard Dickson and Chinyere Egbuta

The early twentieth century was marked by massive migration of southern Europeans to the United States. Transatlantic Subjects views this diaspora through the lens of Greek migrant life to reveal the emergence of transnational forms of subjectivity. According to Ioanna Laliotou, cultural institutions and practices played an important role in the formation of migrant subjectivities. Reconstructing the cultural history of migration, her book points out the relationship between subjectivity formation and cultural practices and performances, such as publishing, reading, acting, storytelling, consuming, imitating, parading, and traveling. Transatlantic Subjects then locates the development of these practices within key sites and institutions of cultural formation, such as migrant and fraternal associations, educational institutions, state agencies and nongovernmental organizations, mental institutions, coffee shops, the church, steamship companies, banks, migration services, and chambers of commerce. Ultimately, Laliotou explores the complex and situational entanglements of migrancy, cultural nationalism, and the politics of self. Reading against the grain of hegemonic narratives of cultural and migration histories, she reveals how migrancy produced distinctive forms of sociality during the first half of the twentieth century.

In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe argues that understanding Asian immigration to the United States is fundamental to understanding the racialized economic and political foundations of the nation. Lowe discusses the contradictions whereby Asians have been included in the workplaces and markets of the U.S. nation-state, yet, through exclusion laws and bars from citizenship, have been distanced from the terrain of national culture. Lowe argues that a national memory haunts the conception of Asian American, persisting beyond the repeal of individual laws and sustained by U.S. wars in Asia, in which the Asian is seen as the perpetual immigrant, as the "foreigner-within." In Immigrant Acts, she argues that rather than attesting to the absorption of cultural difference into the universality of the national political sphere, the Asian immigrant--at odds with the cultural, racial, and linguistic forms of the nation--displaces the temporality of assimilation. Distance from the American national culture constitutes Asian American culture as an alternative site that produces cultural forms materially and aesthetically in contradiction with the institutions of citizenship and national identity. Rather than a sign of a "failed" integration of Asians into the American cultural sphere, this critique preserves and opens up different possibilities for political practice and coalition across racial and national borders. In this uniquely interdisciplinary study, Lowe examines the historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic meanings of immigration in relation to Asian Americans. Extending the range of Asian American critique, Immigrant Acts will interest readers concerned with race and ethnicity in the United States, American cultures, immigration, and transnationalism.