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Transition from Africa to Diaspora is a story about a young woman, Chipo from a rural village in Africa to Canada. It highlights her challenges and struggles of an immigrant living in a foreign land and how she managed to overcome the obstacles.
Published three times per year by Indiana University Press for the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, Transition is a unique forum for the freshest, most compelling ideas from and about the black world. Since its founding in Uganda in 1961, the magazine has kept apace of the rapid transformation of the African Diaspora and has remained a leading forum of intellectual debate. In issue 113, Transition updates Countee Cullen’s iconic question by asking, "What is Africa to me now?" A soul-searchingly private query, its ramifications nevertheless play out in profoundly public ways, around issues of immigration, racial and ethnic tension, and the search for belonging. Guest edited by Benedicte Ledent and Daria Tunca, in this cluster Madhu Krishnan takes Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as a starting point for defining contemporary African literature, while Louis Chude-Sokei explores through their novels the experiences of Africans living in America. Julie Kleinman reveals the perspective of Malian immigrants in France, and photographer Johny Pitts searches Europe with his camera for what he calls "Afropeans." Meanwhile, celebrated author and editor Hilton Als has his own questions about diaspora, which he explores in recollections of a childhood summer in Barbados. Caribbean Canadian novelist David Chariandy also treats Transition readers to a sneak preview of his forthcoming novel, Brother. The issue concludes with a suite of essays that examine the social impacts of collective fear, and ask—given obvious parallels between the Rodney King beating and the murder of Trayvon Martin—why does this keep happening to young black men?
Four overarching themes underscore the essays in this book. These are the creation of African diaspora community and institutional structures; the structured and shared relationships among African immigrants, host, and homeland societies; the construction and negotiation of diaspora spaces, and domains (racial, ethnic, class consciousness, including identity politics; and finally African migrant economic integration, occupational, and labor force roles and statuses and impact on host societies. Each of the thematic themes has been chosen with one specific goal in mind: to depict and represent the critical components in the reconstitution of the African diaspora in international migration. We contextualized the themes in the African diaspora as a dynamic process involving what Paul Zeleza called the "diasporization" of African immigrant settlement communities in global transnational spaces. These themes also reflect the diversities inherent in the diaspora communities and call attention to the fluid and dynamic boundaries within which Africans create, diffuse, and engage host and home societies. In this context, the themes outlined in this book embody the diaspora tapestries woven by the immigrants to center African social and cultural forms in their host societies and communities. Collectively, the themes represent pathways for the elucidation of understanding African immigrant territorialization. Our purpose is to map out and identify the sources and sites for the contestations of the myriad of cultural manifestations of the new African diaspora and its depictions within the totality of the shared meanings and appropriations of the essences of African-ness or African blackness. The vulnerabilities, struggles, threats (internal or external to the immigrant community), and opportunities emanating from the diasporic relationships that these immigrants create are accentuated within the nexus of African global migrations. We view the African diaspora in terms of spatial and geographic constructions and propagations of African cultural identities and institutional forms in global domains whose boundaries are not static but rather dynamic, complex, and multidimensional. Simply stated, we approach the African diaspora from a perspective that incorporates the historical, as well as contemporary postmodern constructions of the Africa's dispersed communities and their associated transnational identity forms.
"This volume builds on and extends current discussions of the construction of gendered identities and the networks through which men and women engage diaspora. It considers the movement of people and ideas between the Caribbean and the Nigerian hinterland. The contributions examine Africa in the Caribbean imaginary, the way in which gender ideologies inform Caribbean men's and women's theoretical or real-life engagement with the continent, and the interactions and experiences of Caribbean travelers in Africa and Europe. The contributions are linked as well through empire, discussing different parts of the British Empire and allowing for the comparative examination of colonial policies and practices."--Back cover.
This book facilitates a critical reassessment of African immigrants, as well as their transnational challenges. It promotes knowledge about Africans in the Diaspora and the African continent through current and relevant case studies.
Published three times per year by Indiana University Press for the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, Transition is a unique forum for the freshest, most compelling ideas from and about the black world. Since its founding in Uganda in 1961, the magazine has kept apace of the rapid transformation of the African Diaspora and has remained a leading forum of intellectual debate. In issue 117, Transition presents new short fiction from writers with Uganda, Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, Liberia--and the diaspora--in their veins. Also in this issue are: selections from Transition's online forum, "I Can't Breathe," a venue for discussing the recent murders by police of unarmed black Americans; selections of poetry; and an interview with the architect and curator of the opening exhibit at Harvard University's new Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art.
Network diasporas are but the latest bridge connecting developing economy insiders, with their risk-mitigating knowledge and connections, to outsiders in command of technical know-how and investment capital. This book examines the interaction of expatriate talent with institutions in expatriates' countries of origin in an attempt to make the potential of diasporas and their knowledge a reality. The question of how to trigger and sustain such a virtuous cycle is a central concern of this book. The focus is on the "how to" details of how to design effective diaspora networks and transform brain drain into brain gain.
This book positions the identities that African ZmigrZs negotiate in transnational migration. It seeks to investigate the structure and modalities of the broader social contexts and parameters underpinning how these identities are constructed and rationalized. The identities African immigrants depict are transnational, resilient, enterprising, altruistic, and based upon a yearning desire for economic opportunities and total incorporation in global affairs. Their migratory identities are structured to finding solutions to ameliorate the myriad of pressing issues facing Africa.
This book introduces readers to the age of intra-African migration, a period from the mid-19th century onward in which the center of gravity of African migration moved decisively inward. Most books tend to zoom in on Africa’s external migration during the earlier intercontinental slave trades and the more recent outmigration to the Global North, but this book argues that migration within the continent has been far more central to the lives of Africans over the course of the last two centuries. The book demonstrates that only by taking a broad historical and continent-wide perspective can we understand the distinctions between the more immediate drivers of migration and deeper patterns of change over time. During the 19th century Africa’s external slave trades gradually declined, whilst Africa’s expanding commodity export sectors drew in domestic labor. This led to an era of heightened mobility within the region, marked by rapidly rising and vanishing migratory flows, increasingly diversified landscapes of migration systems, and profound long-term shifts in the wider patterns of migration. This era of inward-focused mobility reduced with a resurgence of outmigration after 1960, when Africans became more deliberate in search of extra-continental destinations, with new diaspora communities emerging specifically in the Global North. Broad ranging in its temporal, spatial, and thematic coverage, this book provides students and researchers with the perfect introduction to age of intra-African migration.
