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Drawing on examples including rap music, Qwaali and Kirtan, this book offers new empirical material and new insights into conceptualising religion and music, and the ways in which music performs sacredness and secularity in different geographical and historical spaces.
Diaspora & Hybridity deals with those theoretical issues which concern social theory and social change in the new millennium. The volume provides a refreshing, critical and illuminating analysis of concepts of diaspora and hybridity and their impact on multi-ethnic and multi-cultural societies’ - Dr Rohit Barot, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol What do we mean by 'diaspora' and 'hybridity'? Why are they pivotal concepts in contemporary debates on race, culture and society? This book is an exhaustive, politically inflected, assessment of the key debates on diaspora and hybridity. It relates the topics to contemporary social struggles and cultural contexts, p...
By bringing queer theory to bear on ideas of diaspora, Gayatri Gopinath produces both a more compelling queer theory and a more nuanced understanding of diaspora. Focusing on queer female diasporic subjectivity, Gopinath develops a theory of diaspora apart from the logic of blood, authenticity, and patrilineal descent that she argues invariably forms the core of conventional formulations. She examines South Asian diasporic literature, film, and music in order to suggest alternative ways of conceptualizing community and collectivity across disparate geographic locations. Her agile readings challenge nationalist ideologies by bringing to light that which has been rendered illegible or impossib...
Having built much of their wealth, power, and identities on imperial expansion, how did the Portuguese and, by extension, Europeans deal with the end of empire? Postcolonial People explores the processes and consequences of decolonization through the histories of over half a million Portuguese settlers who 'returned' following the 1974 Carnation Revolution from Angola, Mozambique, and other parts of Portugal's crumbling empire to their country of origin and citizenship, itself undergoing significant upheaval. Looking comprehensively at the returnees' history and memory for the first time, this book contributes to debates about colonial racism and its afterlives. It studies migration, 'refugeeness,' and integration to expose an apparent paradox: The end of empire and the return migrations it triggered belong to a global history of the twentieth century and are shaped by transnational dynamics. However, they have done nothing to dethrone the primacy of the nation-state. If anything, they have reinforced it.
When compared to studies of the Indian diaspora, or even in the wider framework of diaspora studies, there is relatively meagre research about the Pakistani diaspora. This collection is the first to bring together the extant literature and provide both a historical and contemporary set of accounts. It is primarily about the processes associated with migration and settlement as seen from the receiving end. Even though Roger Ballard and Junaid Rana offer accounts of Pakistan's political economy, it is only in Frances Watkins chapter that migrant voices within Pakistan themselves speak. Even in this chapter their life stories are focused on the impact of migration. Though, given the transnation...
Drawing on insights from theoretical engagements with borders and subalternity, Beyond Religion in India and Pakistan suggests new frameworks for understanding religious boundaries in South Asia. It looks at the ways in which social categories and structures constitute the bordering logics inherent within enactments of these boundaries, and positions hegemony and resistance through popular religion as an important indication of wider developments of political and social change. The book also shows how borders are continually being maintained through violence at national, community and individual levels. By exploring selected sites and expressions of piety including shrines, texts, practices ...
This book addresses the centrality of race and racism in consolidating the nationalisms currently prominent in Brexit Britain. Particular attention is given to the issues of refugees, borders and bordering, and the wider forms of nativist and anti- Muslim sentiments that anchor today’s increasingly populist forms of nationalist politics. It is argued that the forms of scapegoating and alarmism integral to the revival of nationalism in British politics are fundamentally tied to racialised processes. Equally however, it is argued that such a political climate is not simply discursive, but also yields acute forms of governance, wherein an increasingly violent attention is given by the state t...
Policy-makers tend to view the residential segregation of minority ethnic groups in a negative light as it is seen as an obstacle to their integration. In the literature on neighbourhood effects, the residential concentration of minorities is seen as a major impediment to their social mobility and acculturation, while the literature on residential segregation emphasises the opposite causal direction, by focusing on the effect of integration on levels of (de-)segregation. This volume, however, indicates that the link between integration and segregation is much less straightforward than is often depicted in academic literature and policy discourses. Based on research in a wide variety of weste...
This title was first published in 2000: Contemporary academic studies on economic activity and South Asians in Britain have tended to concentrate on self-employment and entrepreneurial business success, and it may be possible to forget that many South Asians came to Britain to work in declining manufacturing industries. The phrase "from textile mills to taxi ranks" is not only a metonym for the movement to a service sector economy, but also presents a shift in place of work for many (Azad) Kahmiri/Pakistani men. The author explores the way in which issues of employment, work, income generation and economic status affect, and are affected by, a section of the Mirpuri/Pakistani "community" based in Oldham. The men discussed have strong emotional, spiritual and material ties to the geographical district of Mirpur and stories of workers and industry, home and aborad, dreams and realities, merge and entwine with the practices of everyday life.
The history of Sikhs in Britain provides important clues into the evolution of Britain as a multicultural society and the challenges it faces today. The authors examine the complex Anglo-Sikh relationship that led to the initial Sikh settlement and the processes of community-building around Sikh institutions such as gurdwaras. They explore the nature of British Sikh society as reflected in the performance of Sikhs in the labor markets, the changing characteristics of the Sikh family and issues of cultural transmission to the young. They provide an original and insightful account of a community transformed from the site of radical immigrant class politics to a leader of the Sikh diaspora in its search for a separate Sikh state.