Diaspora, Memory, and Identity: A Search for Home

by Vijay Agnew

Overview

Memories establish a connection between a collective and individual past, between origins, heritage, and history. Those who have left their places of birth to make homes elsewhere are familiar with the question, "Where do you come from?" and respond in innumerable well-rehearsed ways. Diasporas construct racialized, sexualized, gendered, and oppositional subjectivities and shape the cosmopolitan intellectual commitment of scholars. The diasporic individual often has a double consciousness, a privileged knowledge and perspective that is consonant with postmodernity and globalization.

The essays in this volume reflect on the movements of people and cultures in the present day, when physical, social, and mental borders and boundaries are being challenged and sometimes successfully dismantled. The contributors - from a variety of disciplinary perspectives - discuss the diasporic experiences of ethnic and racial groups living in Canada from their perspective, including the experiences of South Asians, Iranians, West Indians, Chinese, and Eritreans. Diaspora, Memory, and Identity is an exciting and innovative collection of essays that examines the nuanced development of theories of Diaspora, subjectivity, double-consciousness, gender and class experiences, and the nature of home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802093745
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
Publication date:	12/28/2005
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	260
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.96(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Vijay Agnew is a professor in the Division of Social Science at York University, and was the director of the Center for Feminist Research from 2001 to 2006.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
VIJAY AGNEW

Part 1: Diaspora and Memory

1. Language Matters
   VIJAY AGNEW
2. Memories of Internment: Narrating Japanese-Canadian Women’s Life Stories
   PAMELA SUGIMAN
3. Wounding Events and the Limits of Autobiography
   MARLENE KADAR

Part 2: History and Identity

1. Memoirs of a Sirdar’s Daughter in Canada: Hybridity and Writing Home
   RISHMA DUNLOP
2. Ghosts and Shadows: Memory and Resilience among the Eritrean Diaspora
   ATSUKO MATSUOKA and JOHN SORENSON
3. A Diasporic Bounty: Cultural History and Heritage
   VIJAY AGNEW

Part 3: Community and Home

1. Diaspora and Cultural Memory
   ANH HUA
2. Gendered Nostalgia: The Experiences of New Chinese Skilled Immigrants in Canada
   IZUMI SAKAMOTO and YANQIU RACHEL ZHOU
3. ‘I Feel Like a Trini’: Narrative of a Generation-and-a-Half Canadian 230
   CARL E. JAMES
4. The ‘Muslim’ Diaspora and Research on Gender: Promises and Perils
   HAIDEH MOGHISSI
5. The Quest for the Soul in the Diaspora
   VIJAY AGNEW

Afterword
SUSAN E. BABBITT

Contributors