In the five texts by Rudnyckyj, And, Parrenas, Maher &Pahar, and Rushdie there is an overall theme of identity in diaspora. Regarding identity, Stuart Hall argues that, “instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, as a “'production', which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.” (Hall 222) In other words, identity is not stagnant, but active and forever changing. Moreover, that cultural practices and people are not represented by a restrictive an innate personality or existence but instead represent a dynamic understanding that is constantly in motion. How these five articles all inter-relate is that they give a clear representation of how diaspora (a group of people who live outside the area in which they had lived for a long time or in which their ancestors lived) not only produces the transformation of identity, but also the production of new identity. In brief, diaspora is an impetus for the metamorphosis of identity.
In the first article, written by Ien Ang, the main point of discussion is identity in diaspora in relationship with citizenship and national identity. The author, Ien Ang, came from a Pernanakan Chinese family in Indonesia. He not only went to school in the Netherlands, but also had resided in Australia in more than ten years. In the article he relates with how he struggled with the feeling of not having a concrete national identity. However, what Ien illustrates is how his identity has been transformed by diaspora. As the article enunciates, “It (diaspora) deconstructed dominant notions of identity, belonging, and citizenship” (Ang in Louie). Essentially, that the trad...
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...sive’ idea of identity without borders, intermittent through a plurality of cultures, and transcends the traditional, is best represented in the final article by Salman Rushdie. Especially in the article’s allegory, “the broken mirror may actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed,” furthermore that, “the broken glass is not merely a mirror of nostalgia, it is also, a useful tool with which to work in the present.” identity that the matter of “'becoming' as well as of 'being; belongs to the future as much as to the past.” (Hall 225) Specifically, identity is not something, which is already fixed existence, but instead transcends time, history and culture, and is submitted to continuous transformation. Furthermore, Diaspora is just one of the areas in which, national identity, gender identity, family identity, are continually being reconstructed.
Seeing through a multicultural perspective. Identities, 19(4), 398. doi:10.1080/1070289X.2012.718714. Steven, D. K. (2014). The 'Secondary'.
Identity is 'how you view yourself and your life.'; (p. 12 Knots in a String.) Your identity helps you determine where you think you fit in, in your life. It is 'a rich complexity of images, ideas and associations.';(p. 12 Knots in a String.) It is given that as we go through our lives and encounter different experiences our identity of yourselves and where we belong may change. As this happens we may gain or relinquish new values and from this identity and image our influenced. 'A bad self-image and low self-esteem may form part of identity?but often the cause is not a loss of identity itself so much as a loss of belonging.'; Social psychologists suggest that identity is closely related to our culture. Native people today have been faced with this challenge against their identity as they are increasingly faced with a non-native society. I will prove that the play The Rez Sisters showed this loss of identity and loss of belonging. When a native person leaves the reservation to go and start a new life in a city they are forced to adapt to a lifestyle they are not accustomed to. They do not feel as though they fit in or belong to any particular culture. They are faced with extreme racism and stereotypes from other people in the nonreservational society.
Print. The. national identity, n. OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2014. Web. The Web.
The Southern Diaspora was one of the largest American population movements among the white and black population. From 1900 to 1970 more than 28 million southerners left their home regions in search of better jobs in the cities and suburbs of the North and the West making “the size of the diaspora is the first revelation” (pg. 13). “The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America” by James N. Gregory shows the migration of black southerners and whites together to see the connections and differences. Gregory’s main argument is that the southern diaspora greatly influenced contributions to religion, music and politics that shaped America.
As the Diaspora experience is presented as a distinct identity trait of the Jewish people, there is ...
Knott , Kim, and Seán McLoughlin, eds. Diasporas Concepts, Intersections, Identities. New York : Zed Books, 2010. Print.
Rajan, R. S. (n.d.). Concepts in postcolonial theory: Diaspora, exile, migration . Retrieved from http://english.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/10743/G41.2900fall09.pdf
When lines of identity inevitably blend, relative jurisprudence must be exercised. Lines make excluding circles and methods of excluding people from asylum; our international community divides into unwelcome and welcome nations. As discourse, cultural identity means translating beliefs and feelings from one culture to another. In the process of translation, a screen of cultural values filters understanding of the values and experience of the “other.” The simple word “refugee” evokes images and stories particular to a collectively defined identity, invoking “an image of the radicalized other” (Daniel 272).
The first way describes cultural identity as a shared culture by many people; a culture is like a collective self. As he further argues that cultural identities always highlight the same practices of past which give people stability, unshifting and constant frames of reference and meaning beneath the shifting divisions and shifting in their actual history (6). Hall shares his personal experience of immigration in Minimal Selves (1987) that when he thinks about identity, he got to know that he has always felt that he is a migrant amongst the foreigners. Similarly Lahiri’s fiction is autobiographical she explains her sorrows as a migrant and suffering in a foreign
Rushdie, Salman. `Outside the Whale' Imaginary Homelands: Essays and criticisms 1981-1991 Penguin Books Ltd. (1992)
Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children employs strategies which engage in an exploration of History, Nationalism and Hybridity. This essay will examine three passages from the novel which demonstrate these issues. Furthermore, it will explore why each passage is a good demonstration of these issues, how these issues apply to India in the novel, and how the novel critiques these concepts.
Salazar, J.M., 1998, ‘Social identity and national identity’, in Worchel, S., Morales, J.F., Páez, D., Deschamps, J.-C. (Eds.), Social Identity, International Perspectives. Sage, London.
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, published in 1980, was perhaps the seminal text in conceiving opinions as to interplay of post-modern and post-colonial theory. The title of the novel refers to the birth of Saleem Sinai, the novel’s principal narrator, who is born at midnight August 15th 1947, the precise date of Indian independence. From this remarkable coincidence we are immediately drawn to the conclusion that the novel’s concerns are of the new India, and how someone born into this new state of the ‘Midnight’s child’, if you will, interacts with this post-colonial state. To characterise the novel as one merely concerned with post-colonial India, and its various machinations, is however a reductive practice. While the novel does at various times deal with what it is to be Indian, both pre and post 1947, it is a much more layered and interesting piece of work. Midnight’s Children’s popularity is such that it was to be voted 25th in a poll conducted by the Guardian, listing the 100 best books of the last century, and was also to receive the Booker Prize in 1981 and the coveted ‘Booker of Bookers’ in 1993. http://www.bookerprize.co.uk/
The concept of orientalism refers to the western perceptions of the eastern cultures and social practices. It is a specific expose of the eurocentric universalism which takes for granted both, the superiority of what is European or western and the inferiority of what is not. Salman Rushdie's Booker of the Bookers prize winning novel Midnights Children is full of remarks and incidents that show the orientalist perception of India and its people. It is Rushdie's interpretation of a period of about 70 years in India's modern history dealing with the events leading to the partition and beyond. Rushdie is a fantasist and a creator of alternate realities, the poet and prophet of a generation born at the degree zero of national history. The present paper is an attempt to study how Salman Rushdie, being himself a writer of diasporic consciousness, sometimes perceives India and its people as orientalist stereotypes and presents them in a derogatory manner.
...nial institution--one voice which would articulate their own sense of national identity. But exploration of these societies, and the literature produced by postcolonial authors and poets illustrates that there is a veritable infinite number of differing circumstances inherent in each postcolonial society, and, consequently, in each piece of literature produced by postcolonial writers. If one is to read this literature in a way which will shed some light on the postcolonial condition, one must understand and adopt the theory that we are all walking amalgamations of our own unique cultures and traditions. We are all always struggling with our own identities, personal and national. We must understand that there is no "one true voice" representing an easily identifiable postcolonial condition, but, instead, each author is his or her own voice and must be read as such.