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Drawing on a corpus of 113 narratives told by migrant workers who have returned to their home country, Ladegaard details Indonesian and Filipina (domestic) migrant workers’ experiences of homecoming after years of work abroad, separated from their loved ones. The narratives deal with two major themes: 1) Migrant workers’ experiences in the diaspora, which for many, particularly Indonesian workers, were associated with abuse and exploitation leading to trauma; and 2) migrant workers’ experiences of coming home, which include both the happy reunion with the family but also concerns about not ‘fitting in’ and the need to reinvent themselves because they are not who they were when they left. This is particularly true for workers whose migratory journeys have failed and who have come back to their hometowns without any financial award. Chapters also explore the major difference between Filipina and Indonesian migrant workers’ overseas experiences. The Filipina returnees share mostly positive stories while the Indonesian returnees uncover mostly negative stories, further illuminating what may explain these diverse migratory experiences. Finally, the book discusses how research on disenfranchised groups like (domestic) migrant workers can be used for social and political action. An excellent text that will appeal to academics, teachers and postgraduate students in the humanities and social sciences, particularly in sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, intercultural communication, anthropology, and migration studies.
"Drawing on a corpus of 113 narratives told by migrant workers who have returned to their home country, Ladegaard details Indonesian and Filipina (domestic) migrant workers' experiences of homecoming after years of work abroad, separated from their loved ones. The narratives deal with two major themes: 1) Migrant workers' experiences in the diaspora, which for many, particularly Indonesian workers, were associated with abuse and exploitation leading to trauma; and 2) migrant workers' experiences of coming home, which include both the happy reunion with the family but also concerns about not 'fitting in' and the need to reinvent themselves because they are not who they were when they left. This is particularly true for workers whose migratory journeys have failed and who have come back to their hometowns without any financial award. Chapters also explore the major difference between Filipina and Indonesian migrant workers' overseas experiences. The Filipina returnees share mostly positive stories while the Indonesian returnees uncover mostly negative stories, further illuminating what may explain these diverse migratory experiences. Finally, the book discusses how research on disenfranchised groups like (domestic) migrant workers can be used for social and political action. An excellent text that will appeal to academics, teachers and postgraduate students in the humanities and social sciences, particularly in sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, intercultural communication, anthropology, and migration studies"--
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 the imaginary reconstructions and reconstitutions of home by migrants and translators. The author analyses a corpus made up of novels and a memoir by Italian-Canadian writers Mary Melfi, Nino Ricci and Frank Paci, examining the theme of return both within the writing itself and also in the discourse surrounding the translations of these works into Italian. These ‘reconstructions’ are analysed through the lens of translation, and more specifically through the notion of written code-switching, understood here as a fictional tool which symbolizes the translational movements between different points of view. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of translation and interpreting, migration studies, and Italian and diasporic writing.
The global trend for immigrants to return home has unique relevance for Hong Kong. This work of cross-cultural psychology explores many personal stories of return migration. The author captures in dozens of interviews the anxieties, anticipations, hardships, and flexible world perspectives of migrants and their families, as well as friends and co-workers. The book examines cultural identity shifts and population flows during a critical juncture in Hong Kong history between the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984 and the early years of Hong Kong's new status as a special administrative region after 1997. Nearly a million residents of Hong Kong migrated to North America, Europe, and Australia in the 1990s. These interviews and analyses help illustrate individual choices and identity profiles during this period of unusual cultural flexibility and behavioral adjustment. Nan M. Sussmanis an associate professor and chair of psychology at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. "Sussman effectively weaves together themes about migration and remigration from such diverse sources as arts and literature, history, sociology, and her own discipline of psychology. This book will make an excellent contribution to research on acculturation, cross-cultural transition and adaptation, identity and migration." -- Colleen Ward, Victoria University of Wellington
In this original and compelling book, Mary Chamberlain explores the nature and meaning of migration for Barbadians who migrated to Britain and elsewhere. It is a unique oral and social history, based on life-story interviews across three or more generations of Barbadian families. Locating migration within the contemporary debate on modernity, Narratives of Exile and Return highlights the continuing role of migration in shaping the culture and history of Barbados. But it does more by providing post-modern theorizing with concrete national and ethnic settings.
Many African migrants residing abroad nurture a hope to one day return, at least temporarily, to their home country. In the wake of economic crises in the developed world, alongside rapid economic growth in parts of Africa, the impetus to ‘return’ is likely to increase. Such returnees are often portrayed as agents of development, bringing with them capital, knowledge and skills as well as connections and experience gained abroad. Yet, the reality is altogether more complex. In this much-needed volume, based on extensive original fieldwork, the authors reveal that there is all too often a gaping divide between abstract policy assumptions and migrants’ actual practices. In contrast to the prevailing optimism of policies on migration and development, Africa’s Return Migrants demonstrates that the capital obtained abroad is not always advantageous and that it can even hamper successful entrepreneurship and other forms of economic, political and social engagement.
The Routledge Companion to Migration Literature offers a comprehensive survey of an increasingly important field. It demonstrates the influence of the “age of migration” on literature and showcases the role of literature in shaping socio-political debates and creating knowledge about the migratory trajectories, lives, and experiences that have shaped the post-1989 world. The contributors examine a broad range of literary texts and critical approaches that cover the spectrum between voluntary and forced migration. In doing so, they reflect the shift in recent years from the author-centric study of migrant writing to a more inclusive conception of migration literature. The book contains sections on key terms and critical approaches in the field; important genres of migration literature; a range of forms and trajectories of migration, with a particular focus on the global South; and on migration literature’s relevance in social contexts outside the academy. Its range of scholarly voices on literature from different geographical contexts and in different languages is central to its call for and contribution to a pluriversal turn in literary migration studies in future scholarship. This Companion will be of particular interest to scholars working on contemporary migration literature, and it also offers an introduction to new students and scholars from other fields. Chapter 15 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.
Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing "Guest workers of the United Arab Emirates embody multiple worlds and identities and long for home in a fantastical debut work of fiction, winner of the inaugural Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.… The author's crisp, imaginative prose packs a punch, and his whimsical depiction of characters who oscillate between two lands on either side of the Arabian Sea unspools the kind of immigrant narratives that are rarely told. An enchanting, unparalleled anthem of displacement and repatriation." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review In the United Arab Emirates, foreign nationals constitute over 80 percent of the population. Brought in to construct and serve the towering monuments to wealth that punctuate the skylines of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, this labor force is not given the option of citizenship. Some ride their luck to good fortune. Others suffer different fates. Until now, the humanitarian crisis of the so-called “guest workers” of the Gulf has barely been addressed in fiction. With his stunning, mind-altering debut novel Temporary People, Deepak Unnikrishnan delves into their histories, myths, struggles, and triumphs. Combining the linguistic invention of Salman Rushdie and the satirical vision of George Saunders, Unnikrishnan presents twenty-eight linked stories that careen from construction workers who shapeshift into luggage and escape a labor camp, to a woman who stitches back together the bodies of those who’ve fallen from buildings in progress, to a man who grows ideal workers designed to live twelve years and then perish—until they don’t, and found a rebel community in the desert. With this polyphony of voices, Unnikrishnan maps a new, unruly global English and gives personhood back to the anonymous workers of the Gulf. "Guest workers of the United Arab Emirates embody multiple worlds and identities and long for home in a fantastical debut work of fiction, winner of the inaugural Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.… The author's crisp, imaginative prose packs a punch, and his whimsical depiction of characters who oscillate between two lands on either side of the Arabian Sea unspools the kind of immigrant narratives that are rarely told. An enchanting, unparalleled anthem of displacement and repatriation." —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review "Inventive, vigorously empathetic, and brimming with a sparkling, mordant humor, Deepak Unnikrishnan has written a book of Ovidian metamorphoses for our precarious time. These absurdist fables, fluent in the language of exile, immigration, and bureaucracy, will remind you of the raw pleasure of storytelling and the unsettling nearness of the future." —Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine “Inaugural winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, this debut novel employs its own brand of magical realism to propel readers into an understanding and appreciation of the experience of foreign workers in the Arab Gulf States (and beyond). Through a series of almost 30 loosely linked sections, grouped into three parts, we are thrust into a narrative alternating between visceral realism and fantastic satire.... The alternation between satirical fantasy, depicting such things as intelligent cockroaches and evil elevators, and poignant realism, with regards to necessarily illicit sexuality, forms a contrast that gives rise to a broad critique of the plight of those known euphemistically as ‘guest workers.’ VERDICT: This first novel challenges readers with a singular inventiveness expressed through a lyrical use of language and a laserlike focus that is at once charming and terrifying. Highly recommended.” —Henry Bankhead, Library Journal, Starred Review “Unnikrishnan’s debut novel shines a light on a little known world with compassion and keen insight. The Temporary People are invisible people—but Unnikrishnan brings them to us with compassion, intelligence, and heart. This is why novels matter.” —Susan Hans O’Connor, Penguin Bookshop (Sewickley, PA) “Deepak Unnikrishnan uses linguistic pyrotechnics to tell the story of forced transience in the Arabian Peninsula, where citizenship can never be earned no matter the commitment of blood, sweat, years of life, or brains. The accoutrements of migration—languages, body parts, passports, losses, wounds, communities of strangers—are packed and carried along with ordinary luggage, blurring the real and the unreal with exquisite skill. Unnikrishnan sets before us a feast of absurdity that captures the cruel realities around the borders we cross either by choice or by force. In doing so he has found what most writers miss: the sweet spot between simmering rage at a set of circumstances, and the circumstances themselves.” —Ru Freeman, author of On Sal Mal Lane “Deepak writes brilliant stories with a fresh, passionate energy. Every page feels as if it must have been written, as if the author had no choice. He writes about exile, immigration, deportation, security checks, rage, patience, about the homelessness of living in a foreign land, about historical events so strange that, under his hand, the events become tales, and he writes tales so precisely that they read like history. Important work. Work of the future. This man will not be stopped.” —Deb Olin Unferth, author of Revolution “From the strange Kafka-esque scenarios to the wholly original language, this book is amazing on so many different levels. Unlike anything I've ever read, Temporary People is a powerful work of short stories about foreign nationals who populate the new economy in the United Arab Emirates. With inventive language and darkly satirical plot lines, Unnikrishnan provides an important view of relentless nature of a global economy and its brutal consequences for human lives. Prepare to be wowed by the immensely talented new voice.” —Hilary Gustafson, Literati Bookstore (Ann Arbor, MI) “Absolutely preposterous! As a debut, author Unnikrishnan shares stories of laborers, brought to the United Arab Emirates to do menial and everyday jobs. These people have no rights, no fallback if they have problems or health issues in that land. The laborers in Temporary People are sewn back together when they fall, are abandoned in the desert if they become inconvenient, and are even grown from seeds. As a collection of short stories, this is fantastical, imaginative, funny, and even more so, scary, powerful, and ferocious.” —Becky Milner, Vintage Books (Vancouver WA)
This open access book offers new insights into the ageing-migration nexus and the nature of home. Documenting the hidden world of France’s migrant worker hostels, it explores why older North and West African men continue to live past retirement age in this sub-standard housing. Conventional wisdom holds that at retirement labour migrants ought to instead return to their families in home countries, where their French pensions would have far greater purchasing power. This paradox is the point of departure for a book which transports readers from the banlieues of Paris to the banks of the Senegal River and the villages of the Anti-Atlas. In intimate ethnographic detail, the author brings to life the experiences of these older labour migrants by sharing in the life of the hostels as a resident, by observing at close quarters the men's family life on the other side of the Mediterranean as a guest in their homes, and even by accompanying them in their travels by bus, sea, and air. The monograph evaluates several theories of migration against rich qualitative data gathered from multiple methods: biographical narrative and semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and archival research. In the process, it offers a thoughtful contribution to broader debates on what it means for migrants to belong and achieve inclusion in society. This book has been awarded an ‘honourable mention’ in the Khayrallah Prize in Migration Studies, courtesy of the Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies at North Carolina State University. For more information please see: https://lebanesestudies.ncsu.edu/awards/scholarly/2018.php. This book has been nominated for the 2019 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize
"There I was, standing alone, unable to cry as I said goodbye to Sidimé Laye, my best friend, and to the revolution that had opened the door of modernity for me--the revolution that had invented me." This book gives us the story of a quest for a childhood friend, for the past and present, and above all for an Africa that is struggling to find its future. In 1996 Manthia Diawara, a distinguished professor of film and literature in New York City, returns to Guinea, thirty-two years after he and his family were expelled from the newly liberated country. He is beginning work on a documentary about Sékou Touré, the dictator who was Guinea's first post-independence leader. Despite the years that have gone by, Diawara expects to be welcomed as an insider, and is shocked to discover that he is not. The Africa that Diawara finds is not the one on the verge of barbarism, as described in the Western press. Yet neither is it the Africa of his childhood, when the excitement of independence made everything seem possible for young Africans. His search for Sidimé Laye leads Diawara to profound meditations on Africa's culture. He suggests solutions that might overcome the stultifying legacy of colonialism and age-old social practices, yet that will mobilize indigenous strengths and energies. In the face of Africa's dilemmas, Diawara accords an important role to the culture of the diaspora as well as to traditional music and literature--to James Brown, Miles Davis, and Salif Kéita, to Richard Wright, Spike Lee, and the ancient epics of the griots. And Diawara's journey enlightens us in the most disarming way with humor, conversations, and well-told tales.