Can we ever go home again? This question lies at the heart of Homecomings by Wong Yoon Wah, a veteran Singaporean poet and a prominent voice in global Chinese literature.In these poems, Wong delves into his country’s precolonial and colonial history, the natural heritage of the rainforest, his memories of his kampung hometown, his heartbreak at the closure of Nanyang University, and the global traumas of European colonisation and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.He expresses the loneliness and dislocation of the Chinese diaspora, as well as the sorrow of his generation as so many of their cultural touchstones are destroyed in the name of progress. At the same time, he embraces a planetary mode of thinking, sensing rapport with fellow humans from distant cultures and geographies, identifying even with the plants and animals that compose our ecosystem.Filled with nostalgia, bitter irony and strange beauty, Homecomings is a love letter to the past, revisiting its glories, making peace with t
Heritage and History in the China–Australia Migration Corridor traces the material and social legacy of migration from China to Australia from the 1840s until the present day. The volume offers a multidimensional examination of the material footprint of migration as it exists in the migration corridor stretching between Zhongshan county in south China and Australia. Spanning the fields of heritage studies, migration studies, and Chinese diaspora history, Denis Byrne, Ien Ang, Phillip Mar, and other contributors foreground a transnational approach to the heritage of migration, one that takes account of the flows of people, ideas, objects, and money that circulate through migration corridors, forming intricate ongoing bonds between those who migrated to Australia and their home villages in China.
Historian Louis Hartz once proposed the thesis that those societies that were established as European colonies tended to reflect the characteristics of their home countries at the time of their foundi
This book examines the dynamic processes by which communities establish distinct notions of 'home' and 'belonging'. Focusing on the agency of diasporic groups, rather than (forced or voluntary) disper
The figure of the disaporic or migrant writer has recently come to be seen as the 'Everyman' of the late modern period, a symbol of the global and the local, a cultural traveller who can traverse the
Geographers working in Asia and the west discuss historical and contemporary Chinese diasporas; Hong Kong and Taiwan as diasporic homelands; ethnicity, identity, and diaspora as home; migration and se
As the former capital of two great empires—Eastern Roman and Ottoman—Istanbul has been home to many diverse populations, a condition often glossed as cosmopolitanism. The Greek-speaking Christian Orth
Home. In My Heart, Beating So Far away examines Lali’s exploration as an immigrant, grappling with issues of identity, home, family and diaspora. In her photographs taken over a span of ten years, she
The philosopher Philo was born about 20 BCE to a prominent Jewish family in Alexandria, the chief home of the Jewish Diaspora as well as the chief center of Hellenistic culture; he was trained in Gre
By the end of the twentieth century some nine million people of South Asian descent had left India, Bangladesh or Pakistan and settled in different parts of the world, forming a diverse and significant modern diaspora. In the early nineteenth century, many left reluctantly to seek economic opportunities which were lacking at home. This is the story of their often painful experiences in the diaspora, how they constructed new social communities overseas and how they maintained connections with the countries and the families they had left behind. It is a story compellingly told by one of the premier historians of modern South Asia, Judith Brown, whose particular knowledge of the diaspora in Britain and South Africa gives her insight as a commentator. This is a book which will have a broad appeal to general readers as well as to students of South Asian and colonial history, migration studies and sociology.
The philosopher Philo was born about 20 BCE to a prominent Jewish family in Alexandria, the chief home of the Jewish Diaspora as well as the chief center of Hellenistic culture; he was trained in Gre
The philosopher Philo was born about 20 BCE to a prominent Jewish family in Alexandria, the chief home of the Jewish Diaspora as well as the chief center of Hellenistic culture; he was trained in Gre
From the British-West Indian novelist who is rapidly emerging as the bard of the African diaspora comes a haunting work about “the final passage”—the exodus of black West Indians from their impoverished islands to the uncertain opportunities of England. In her village of St. Patrick’s, Leila Preston has no prospects, a young son, and a husband, Michael, who seems to prefer the company of his mistress. So when her ailing mother travels to England for medical care, Leila decides to follow her. As Caryl Phillips follows the Prestons’ outward voyage—and their bewildered attempt to find a home in a country whose rooming houses post signs announcing “No vacancies for coloureds”—he produces a tragicomic portrait of hope and dislocation. The Final Passage is a novel rich in language, acute in its grasp of character, and unforgettable in its vision of the colonial legacy. “Like Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, Phillips writes of times so heady and chaotic and of characters s
The philosopher Philo was born about 20 BCE to a prominent Jewish family in Alexandria, the chief home of the Jewish Diaspora as well as the chief center of Hellenistic culture; he was trained in Gree
Now in translation for the first time, the award-winning debut that broke literary ground in Japan explores diaspora, prejudice, and the complexities of a teen girl’s experience growing up as a Zainichi Korean, reminiscent of Min Jin Lee's classic Pachinko and Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street.Seventeen-year-old Ginny Park is about to get expelled from high school―again. Stephanie, the picture book author who took Ginny into her Oregon home after she was kicked out of school in Hawaii, isn’t upset: she only wants to know why. But Ginny has always been in-between; she can't bring herself to open up to anyone about her past, or about what prompted her to flee her native Japan. Then, among the scraps of paper and drawings of Stephanie's stories, Ginny finds a mysterious scrawl that changes everything: The sky is about to fall. Where do you go? Ginny sets off alone on the road in search of an answer, with only her journal as a confidante. In witty and brutally honest vignettes,
The philosopher Philo was born about 20 BCE to a prominent Jewish family in Alexandria, the chief home of the Jewish Diaspora as well as the chief center of Hellenistic culture; he was trained in Gree
A focus on the sites of Asian interaction enables this volume to shed new light on the growing field of diaspora studies. Research on Asia's many diasporas has enriched the older literature on migration to illuminate the links of kinship, affect, trade, and information that connect locations across Asia, and beyond. But where many recent works on particular diasporas have tended to look inwards - at how distinctive diasporic cultures maintained a sense of 'home' while abroad - the volume's focus has been on how different diasporas have come into contact with each other in particular places, often for the first time. It also engages with research in the fields of urban studies and urban history. The articles develop the already rich historical literature on port cities across Asia – the quintessential sites of Asian cosmopolitanism – as well as more recent work on the 'moving metropolises' and 'mobile cities' of contemporary Asia.
This book examines the concept of translation as a return to origins and as restitution of lost narratives, and is based on the idea of diaspora as a term that depicts the longing to return home and t
The philosopher Philo was born about 20 BCE to a prominent Jewish family in Alexandria, the chief home of the Jewish Diaspora as well as the chief center of Hellenistic culture; he was trained in Gree
