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The authors of this text believe that “areas” as assemblages of social processes requiring distinct, culture-bound explanations cannot be replaced with global theories, but that the meaning of “the area” can be different depending on the question one studies. The study of China and Chinese, in particular, is a good arena to challenge the disciplinary and geographic boundaries of conventional area studies for several reasons. First, because of the wealth of simultaneous processes of rapid political, social, and discursive change in contemporary Chinese society; second, because of the problematic relationship between state, territory, nation, and ethnicity in China; third, because China studies, perhaps more than any other area studies at the moment, is a highly competitive political and academic industry whose internal working must be critically examined. In addition, the subject of China has become one of the primary loci of contesting the meanings of globalization and the universality versus relativity of “values” and modernity.
This study presents a comprehensive, balanced and factually grounded narrative of the Turco-Greek Exchange of Populations as a historic event that has been the subject of much distortion in the historiographical traditions of nationalist lore in Greece and Turkey, as well as in scholarly publications of various sorts elsewhere over the span of the past eighty years. Diplomacy and Displacement contributes to the general literature on the Exchange by incorporating into the broader picture the Turkish dimension of the event, particularly the Turkish side of the decision-making process, and the episode of the Muslim refugees that have been left outside the scope of the research agenda, thereby, breaking up the established notion of the Exchange skewed towards the Greek side. It thus sheds doubt on the success paradigm attributed to this event. By adopting a people-centered approach to the Lausanne Treaty and its consequences, the book offers a critique of official versions of the story and encourages people to consider policy decisions together with their huge and often devastating implications for the lives of ordinary people.
Hannah Arendt argued that the “political” is best understood as a power relation between private and public realms, and that storytelling is a vital bridge between these realms—a site where individualized passions and shared perspectives are contested and interwoven. Jackson explores and expands Arendt’s ideas through a cross-cultural analysis of storytelling that includes Kuranko stories from Sierra Leone, Aboriginal stories of the stolen generation, stories recounted before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and stories of refugees, renegades, and war veterans. Focusing on the violent and volatile conditions under which stories are and are not told, and exploring the various ways in which narrative reworkings of reality enable people to symbolically alter subject-object relations, Jackson shows how storytelling may restore existential viability to the intersubjective fields of self and other, self and state, self and situation.
Narratives of displacement -- Life in the Sudan camps -- A patchwork of emplacements -- The household food economy as the locus of community construction -- "We have each lost a child": birth, death and the role of life-cycle rituals in emplacing the individual within the community -- Ada Bai's place in the wider world -- Conclusion: forced migration, anthropology and the politics of international assistance -- Epilogue: the Ethiopian-Eritrean war as felt in Ada Bai.
Laura Madokoro recovers the lost history of millions of displaced Chinese who fled the Communist Revolution and recounts humanitarian efforts to find homes for them outside China. Entrenched bigotry in predominantly white countries, the spread of human rights, Cold War geopolitics, and the Vietnam War shaped refugee policies that still hold sway.
This book argues that the changing character of Muslim community and their living space in Delhi is a product of historical processes. The discourse of homeland and the realities of Partition established the notion of 'Muslim-dominated areas' as 'exclusionary' and 'contested' zones. These localities turned out to be those pockets where the dominant ideas of nation had to be engineered, materialized and practiced. The book makes an attempt to revisit these complexities by investigating community-space relationship in colonial and postcolonial Delhi. It raises two fundamental questions: · How did community and space relation come to be defined on religious lines? · In what ways were 'Muslim-dominated' areas perceived as contested zones? Invoking the ideas of homeland as a useful vantage point to enter into the wider discourse around the conceptualization of space, the book suggests that the relation between Muslim communities and their living spaces has evolved out of a long process of politicization and communalization of space in Delhi.
How do communities grapple with the challenges of reconstruction after conflicts? In one of the first in-depth ethnographic accounts of refugee repatriation anywhere in the world, Laura C. Hammond follows the story of Ada Bai, a returnee settlement with a population of some 7,500 people. In the days when refugees first arrived, Ada Bai was an empty field along Ethiopia's northwest border, but it is now a viable—arguably thriving—community. For the former refugees who fled from northern Ethiopia to eastern Sudan to escape war and famine in 1984 and returned to their country of birth in 1993, "coming home" really meant creating a new home out of an empty space. Settling in a new area, esta...
Mimi Thi Nguyen examines the self-interested claims of the United States to provide freedom to others, even as it does so by generating violence and displacement through overpowering warfare.
The civil war between the Sri Lankan state and Tamil militants, which ended in 2009, lasted more than three decades and led to mass migration, mainly to India, Canada, England, and continental Europe. In Marrying for a Future, Sidharthan Maunaguru argues that the social institution of marriage has emerged as a critical means of building alliances between dispersed segments of Tamil communities, allowing scattered groups to reunite across national borders. Maunaguru explores how these fragmented communities were rekindled by connections fostered by key participants in and elements of the marriage process, such as wedding photographers, marriage brokers, legal documents, and transit places. Marrying for a Future contributes to transnational and diaspora marriage studies by looking at the temporary spaces through which migrants and refugees travel in addition to their home and host countries. It provides a new conceptual framework for studies on kinship and marriage and addresses a community that has been separated across borders as a result of war.