Identities Journal Blog
  • Home
  • About
    • About Identities
    • Identities Collection
    • Latest Articles
    • Special Issues
    • Open Access Articles
    • Most Read Articles
    • Most Cited Articles
  • Identities Blog
    • Blog Collection
    • Blog Categories >
      • Anti-racism
      • Culture
      • Decoloniality
      • Ethnicity
      • Migration
      • Race
      • Commentaries
      • COVID-19 Blog Series
      • COVID-19 Symposium
      • More Blogs
    • About Our Blog
  • Blog Series
    • COVID-19 Blog Collection
    • Call for COVID-19 Commentaries
  • Events
    • Race and Class
    • W. E. B. Du Bois and his Strange Synthesis of Spirituality and Sociology
    • Decolonizing Politics Symposium
    • The Subject of Decolonization: Literary Critical Insights
  • Contact
    • Subscribe for Updates
  • Home
  • About
    • About Identities
    • Identities Collection
    • Latest Articles
    • Special Issues
    • Open Access Articles
    • Most Read Articles
    • Most Cited Articles
  • Identities Blog
    • Blog Collection
    • Blog Categories >
      • Anti-racism
      • Culture
      • Decoloniality
      • Ethnicity
      • Migration
      • Race
      • Commentaries
      • COVID-19 Blog Series
      • COVID-19 Symposium
      • More Blogs
    • About Our Blog
  • Blog Series
    • COVID-19 Blog Collection
    • Call for COVID-19 Commentaries
  • Events
    • Race and Class
    • W. E. B. Du Bois and his Strange Synthesis of Spirituality and Sociology
    • Decolonizing Politics Symposium
    • The Subject of Decolonization: Literary Critical Insights
  • Contact
    • Subscribe for Updates

Reflections on diaspora and soft power

3/2/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
In the 1930s, the retired British governess Mary O’Neill lived in Florence in the company of her female co-nationals. A close-knit diaspora of English aristocratic intellectuals and bohemians, they sought to spread English cultural traditions to the Italian masses. They tried to help ordinary Italians enjoy Shakespeare and Renaissance art, not only to dream about glamorous cars and other pleasures of the Jazz Age. Mary O’Neill and her friends greatly contributed to the upbringing and the artistic rise of the young Franco Zeffirelli. But did they manage to gain prestige within their Italian community? Known for their poignant wit, those expat women, whom the locals sarcastically called ‘Scorpions’, were, in fact, totally alienated from a wider Florentine community.
 
Depicted in Zeffirelli’s Tea with Mussolini, this story of cultural resilience finds a lot of resonance with diasporic reality today. In the large volume of studies on diaspora, an issue of concern is that many expats who speak culturally and civically on behalf of their homeland find zero reciprocity within their local community (Nye 2004; Watanabe and McConnell 2008).
 
Why do highly intellectual expats, who seek to morally enrich their host society, often fail to be accepted by their local communities? This question is explored in-depth in our Identities article, ‘Reflections on diaspora and soft power: community building among female US expats in Southern Europe’, which looks at life experiences of highly educated US-national expat women in Italy and Greece from the 1990s to 2015. They all hold degrees from leading US universities. Many of them are married to local men. And all of them seek to spiritually invigorate their local communities by showing them how to take care of the public space, such as to clean streets from litter and set up shelters for stray dogs and cats. They see these as typical ‘North American civic values’ that they are teaching to their ‘unenlightened’ neighbours.

Read More
0 Comments

Kinning as intimate disaster response: the Chernobyl children from Belarus in Italy

18/3/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
Photo credit: 'Hands' by George Hodan. License: CC0 Public Domain.
The Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred on 26 April 1986 in the Soviet Union. Children born before and after 1986 were at risk of developing different health conditions. For example, instances of thyroid cancer increased 40 times due to release of radioactive iodine. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, borders opened and many Western charities offered recuperation to affected children in host families abroad during summer. The idea was to take children out of contaminated territories and provide them with an environment free from radiation. Belarus was the most affected, having 23.5% of its territory contaminated with radioactive cesium and strontium. Italy was the most active in these recuperation programmes; it has hosted more than half of all affected children from Belarus.

The goal of my Identities article, 'Kinning as intimate disaster response: from recuperation in host families to educational migration of the Chernobyl children from Belarus to Italy', was to uncover what happened to these children and their host families over time. I demonstrate that one of the unexpected outcomes of Chernobyl children’s recuperation in Italy was their educational migration to Italy for further education as they grew up (some went on to attend high school in Italy; the majority of these went on to do their Bachelor and/or Master’s degrees in Italy, as well). I argue that educational migration became possible due to kinning – strong emotional bonds developed between the Belarusian children and their Italian host families over their repeated encounters during the humanitarian programme of child recuperation abroad. The concept of kinning has been used in the studies of transnational adoption (by Signe Howell) and domestic and institutional care work (by Loretta Baldassar and colleagues). My article applies kinning to the studies of disasters, migration and humanitarianism.

Read More
0 Comments

Rethinking kinship in diasporic context: how has it become 'hegemonic'?

26/2/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
By studying a Hmong community located in a rural village in Laos and their transnational families and relatives residing in California, I have learned that the surname-based, clan kinship system is not only critical for them to maintain their cross-border economic relationships and promote cultural traditions, but it has become hegemonic despite the salient generational and national differences between the two countries. For example, Hmong's clan identification has been the basis for the remarkable hospitality Hmong extend towards strangers and unexpected guests who are members of the same clan. 

Many Hmong jokingly told me that I am technically 'Korean Hmong', because the English pronunciation of my Korean surname sounds identical to one of their eighteen clans. I came to wonder what makes Hmong clan kinship, based on a surname system, so dominant and inclusive that it allows Hmong to consider complete 'strangers' as family members and kin. Moreover, the strong emphasis on clan-based kinship causes Hmong to strictly adhere to the principle of clan exogamy (members of the same clan cannot marry or even become romantically engaged) and ethnic endogamy. ​

Read More
0 Comments

    Blog Categories

    All
    Activism
    Anti-racism
    Asylum Seekers
    Belonging
    Black Lives Matter
    Blackness
    Borders
    Boundary Work
    Cities
    Citizenship
    Colonialism
    Commentaries
    Conflict
    Cosmopolitanism
    Covid-19
    Cultural Memory
    Culture
    Decoloniality
    Diaspora
    Discrimination
    Displacement
    Diversity
    Ethnic Boundaries
    Ethnic Identity
    Ethnicity
    Exile
    Far Right
    Gender
    Global South
    Identity
    Immigration
    Indigenous
    Integration
    Intersectionality
    Islamophobia
    Justice
    Kinship
    Marginalisation
    Migration
    Multiculturalism
    National Identity
    Nationalism
    Nationhood
    Nativism
    Othering
    Policing
    Populism
    Postcolonial
    Race
    Racial Identity
    Racialisation
    Racism
    Radicalism
    Refugees
    Religion
    Resistance
    State Racism
    Stereotyping
    Stigmatisation
    Subjectivity
    Transnationalism
    Victimhood
    Whiteness


    Blog Collection

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019

Explore Identities at tandfonline.com/GIDE