ENG 1A - Lyons: Recommended eBooks & Books in Print

Patrick Manning refuses to divide the African diaspora into the experiences of separate regions and nations. Instead, he follows the multiple routes that brought Africans and people of African descent into contact with one another and with Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In weaving these stories together, Manning shows how the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Indian Ocean fueled dynamic interactions among black communities and cultures and how these patterns resembled those of a number of connected diasporas concurrently taking shape across the globe. Manning begins in 1400 and traces five central themes: the connections that enabled Africans to mutually identify and hold together as a global community; discourses on race; changes in economic circumstance; the character of family life; and the evolution of popular culture. His approach reveals links among seemingly disparate worlds. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, slavery came under attack in North America, South America, southern Africa, West Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and India, with former slaves rising to positions of political prominence. Yet at the beginning of the twentieth century, the near-elimination of slavery brought new forms of discrimination that removed almost all blacks from government for half a century. Manning underscores the profound influence that the African diaspora had on world history, demonstrating the inextricable link between black migration and the rise of modernity, especially in regards to the processes of industrialization and urbanization. A remarkably inclusive and far-reaching work, The African Diaspora proves that the advent of modernity cannot be imaginatively or comprehensively engaged without taking the African peoples and the African continent as a whole into account.

Drawing from Anglo-American, Asian American, and Asian literature as well as J-horror and manga, Chinese cinema and Internet, and the Korean Wave, Sheng-mei Ma's Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity probes into the conjoinedness of West and East, of modernity's illusion and nothing's infinitude. Suspended on the stylistic tightrope between research and poetry, critical analysis and intuition, Asian Diaspora restores affect and heart to the experience of diaspora in between East and West, at-homeness and exilic attrition. Diaspora, by definition, stems as much from socioeconomic and collective displacement as it points to emotional reaction. This book thus challenges the fossilized conceptualizations in area studies, ontology, and modernism.The book's first two chapters trace the Asian pursuit of modernity into nothing, as embodied in horror film and the gaming motif in transpacific literature and film. Chapters three through eight focus on the borderlands of East and West, the edges of humanity and meaning. Ma examines how loss occasions a revisualization of Asia in children's books, how Asian diasporic passing signifies, paradoxically, both born again and demise of the old self, how East turns yEast or the agent of self-fashioning for Anglo-America, Asia, and Asian America, how the construct of bugman distinguishes modern West's and East's self-image, how the extreme human condition of non-person permeates the Korean Wave, and how manga artists are drawn to wartime Japan. The final two chapters interrogate the West's death-bound yet enlightening Orientalism in Anglo-American literature and China's own schizophrenic split, evidenced in the 2008 Olympic Games.

This book is intended to fill in a gap in the study of modern ethno-national diasporas. Thus, against the background of current trends - globalization, democratization, the weakening of the nation-state and massive transstate migration, it examines the politics of historical, modern and incipient ethno-national diasporas. It argues that unlike the widely accepted view, ethno-national diasporism and diasporas do not constitute a recent phenomenon. Rather, this is a perennial phenomenon whose roots were in antiquity. Some of the existing diasporas were created in antiquity, some during the Middle Ages and some are modern. An essential aspect of this phenomenon is the endless cultural-social-economic and especially political struggle of these dispersed ethnic groups that permanently reside in host countries away from their homelands to maintain their distinctive identities and connections with their homelands and other dispersed groups of the same nation. While describing and analyzing the diaspora phenomenon, the book sheds light on theoretical questions pertaining to current ethnicity and politics.

The proliferation of old age homes and increasing numbers of elderly living alone are startling new phenomena in India. These trends are related to extensive overseas migration and the transnational dispersal of families. In this moving and insightful account, Sarah Lamb shows that older persons are innovative agents in the processes of social-cultural change. Lamb's study probes debates and cultural assumptions in both India and the United States regarding how best to age; the proper social-moral relationship among individuals, genders, families, the market, and the state; and ways of finding meaning in the human life course.

Asians have settled in every country in the Western Hemisphere; some are recent arrivals, other descendents of immigrants who arrived centuries ago. Bringing together essays by thirteen scholars from the humanities and social sciences, Displacements and Diasporas explores this genuinely transnational Asian American experience-one that crosses the Pacific and traverses the Americas from Canada to Brazil, from New York to the Caribbean. With an emphasis on anthropological and historical contexts, the essays show how the experiences of Asians across the Americas have been shaped by the social dynamics and politics of settlement locations as much as by transnational connections and the economic forces of globalization. Contributors bring new insights to the unique situations of Asian communities previously overlooked by scholars, such as Vietnamese Canadians and the Lao living in Rhode Island. Other topics include Chinese laborers and merchants in Latin America and the Caribbean, Japanese immigrants and their descendants in Brazil, Afro-Amerasians in America, and the politics of second-generation Indian American youth culture. Together the essays provide a valuable comparative portrait of Asians across the Americas. Engaging issues of diaspora, transnational social practice and community building, gender, identity, institutionalized racism, and deterritoriality, this volume presents fresh perspectives on displacement, opening the topic up to a wider, more interdisciplinary terrain of inquiry and teaching.  

The legal recognition of the housing, land, and property rights of refugees and displaced persons has expanded steadily in recent years as the realization has grown that securing these rights will be beneficial to long-term peace, stability, economic vitality and justice. This volume, first published in 2007, contains more than 240 of the laws, cases and materials that have been adopted during the past century, which accord those unjustly and arbitrarily displaced from their homes and lands with rights: not simply to return to their countries or places of origin, but to return to the original home, land or property from which they were initially forced to flee. The breadth of the restitution standards found within this volume, combined with selected examples of case law and other materials, are a clear indication that a right to housing, land, and property restitution for refugees and displaced persons has emerged within the global legal domain.

Today, Muslims are the second largest religious group in much of Europe and North America. The essays in this collection look both at the impact of the growing Muslim population on Western societies, and how Muslims are adapting to life in the West. Part I looks at the Muslim diaspora inEurope, comprising essays on Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, and the Netherlands. Part II turns to the Western Hemisphere and Muslims in the U.S. , Canada, and Mexico. Throughout, the authors contend with such questions as: Can Muslims retain their faith andidentity and at the same time accept and function within the secular and pluralistic traditions of Europe and America? What are the limits of Western pluralism? Will Muslims come to be fully accepted as fellow citizens with equal rights? An excellent guide to the changing landscape of Islam, thisvolume is an indispensable introduction to the experiences of Muslims in the West, and the diverse responses of their adopted countries.

Scholars of the African Americas are sometimes segregated from one another by region or period, by language, or by discipline. Bringing together essays on fashion, the visual arts, film, literature, and history, this volume shows how our understanding of the African diaspora in the Americas can be enriched by crossing disciplinary boundaries to recontextualize images, words, and thoughts as part of a much greater whole. Diaspora describes dispersion, but also the seeding, sowing, or scattering of spores that take root and grow, maturing and adapting within new environments. The examples of diasporic cultural production explored in this volume reflect on loss and dispersal, but they also constitute expansive and dynamic intellectual and artistic production, neither wholly African nor wholly American (in the hemispheric sense), whose resonance deeply inflects all of the Americas. African Diaspora in the Cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States represents a call for multidisciplinary, collaborative, and complex approaches to the subject of the African diaspora.

A dazzling and bracingly honest look at a great people in a great land. For many people in this country, Irish American culture conjures up thoughts of raucous pubs, St. Patrick's Day parades, memoirs peopled with an array of saints and sinners, and such quasi-Celtic extravaganzas as Riverdance. But there is much more to this rich and influential culture, as Maureen Dezell proves in this insightful, unsentimental reexamination of Irish American identity. Skillfully weaving history and reporting, observation and opinion, Dezell traces the changing makeup of the Irish population in this country, from the early immigrants to today's affluent, educated Irish Americans. With sensitivity and humor, she pinpoints what unites them: the traditions (if not the practices) of the Catholic Church; a sense of social duty; humor, often self-directed; and the deep-seated, apparently unshakable belief that any achievement is accidental and could easily be taken away tomorrow. From her exploration of the Church in Irish American life to her rediscovery of strong, culture-building women, to her historical and sociological look at the role alcohol plays in the Irish identity (here and abroad), to her discussion on the "New Irish," Dezell does not shy away from the central, uniting myths and methods of this proud heritage. Irish America is more than an enlightening look at a group of Americans masked by their own stereotypes. It is a long-overdue tribute to one of the building blocks of America itself.