Diaspora Studies

תקופת המלוכה והכהונה בארץ ישראל לעולם משמשת או נקודת שיא בתולדות העם היהודי ובמימוש הייעוד שלו או נקודת זינוק בדרך להשגתו מחדש. תקופה זו לא שינתה ממעמדה למרות השינויים התרבותיים העמוקים שעברו על ישראל לאורך שנות הגולה ולמרות השינויים ביחס לגולה. גם השינויים בעצם ההגדרה של הזהות היהודית, שינוי יעדיה והתמורות שחלו בנקודת המבט ההיסטוריוסופיה של המחשבה היהודית, גם אלו לא ערערו את מעמדה. אמנם השחג התכנים שיוחסו לעבד הארץ־ישדאלי בהתאם לנקודת ההשקפה, ברם צורת ההתייחסות העקרוני לא שונתה; כל בחינה מחודשת של הקיום הבראשיתי בארץ ישראל באה לשמש גיבוי ואסמכת
להגדרה חדשה של הזהות היהודית ולתפיסה היסטוריוסופיה חדשה. ׳לגיטימציה מהפכנית׳ היא אכן המטווה רבת־הרבדים ורבת־המשמעויות שברקע מיקוד הזיכרון היהודי בתקופות בית ראשון ובית שני עוצמתו של המיקוד ההיסטורי בארץ ישראל וההתמדה בו נעוצים בשני גורמים. הראשון נובע מהקיים והעומד, הוא הגרעין הבלתי משתנה של המהות היהודית, שההתייחסות ההיסטורית והתודעה ההיסטורית אימננטיות לה; והשני נובע הן מן המאפיינים של מהפכת התרבות שהתחוללה בציבוריות היהודית החל מראשית תקופת האמנציפציה בשלהי המאה השמונה־עשרה, והן מן הגורמים לה.

Tra il XVI e il XVIII secolo, le corti europee adottarono politiche demografiche di riforma dei rispettivi territori di confine attraverso l’impianto di coloni stranieri. Questo saggio prova a fornire un primo inquadramento di questo tipo di intervento pubblico osservandolo da una prospettiva logistica.

One of the main reasons for Tongans immigrating to the United States (U.S.) was to enter into tertiary schooling and further one’s knowledge within colleges and universities (Hafoka, ‘Ulu‘ave & Hafoka, 2014). As this has been an aspiration for many Tongan people entering the U.S. for themselves and/or their posterity, another location of knowledge attainment and financial sustainability has become a prevalent force within the Tongan U.S. diasporic community, the airlines. The study takes place in the Ano Māsima, or known as the Salt Lake Valley, due to the influx of Tongans that reside in Utah compared to other parts of the U.S. (US Census Bureau, 2015; EPIC, 2014; Davidson, 2011). The purpose of this study is to explore the phenomenon of how Tongans in the U.S. utilize the airline industry to maintain connections to the sources of Tongan knowledge, which is people (our relationships), and place (where they reside, and our homelands). Also, to better understand reasoning of the influx of Tongans within the airline industry. Through the lenes of Tā-Vā and Critical Race Theories, the study revealed knowledge of air travel to fly around the world to learn and connect, a sense of community and family nurtured within the workplace, and a form of knowledge production created through the undercurrents. The findings reveal content and resources to support marginalized communities (such as Tongans) through seeking to better engage with these groups beyond schooling, and recognizing recommendations regarding the study (such as data disaggregation (mixed race), labor and school experiences, etc.).

Current discourses about migrants and diaspora communities in Europe are often informed by a social worker's perspective and haunted by residual notions of supposedly pure and authentic cultures of origin. Between national entrenchment and transnational globalization, ethnic minorities are "imagined" as outsiders on a subnational level. The consequent othering of so-called "third" or "substate" cinemas by cultural producers, critics and policymakers is highly problematic. I therefore propose to reframe the discussion about such "minor" cinemas within a broader consideration of traveling cultures and global flows, of mobility between margin and center, between independent and mainstream productions, as well as crossovers between different genres and their reception across national boundaries.

The dislocated, deterritorialized discourse produced by repatriates from formerly European colonies has remained overlooked in academic scholarship. One such group is the Eurasian “Indo” community that has its roots in the former Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia. This article focuses on Tjalie Robinson, the intellectual leader of this community from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. The son of a Dutch father and a British-Javanese mother, Robinson became the leading voice of the diasporic Indo community in the Netherlands and later also in the United States. His engagement resulted in the foundation of the Indo magazine Tong Tong and the annual Pasar Malam Besar, what was to become the world’s biggest Eurasian festival. Robinson played an essential role in the cultural awareness and self-pride of the eventually global Indo community through his elaboration of a hybrid and transnational identity concept. By placing his focus “tussen twee werelden” (in-between two worlds) and identifying “mixties-schap” (mestizaje) as the essential characteristic of Indo identity, Robinson anticipated debates on hybridity, transnationalism, and creolism that only much later would draw attention from scholars in the field of postcolonial studies. This article highlights Robinson’s pioneering role in framing a deterritorialized hybrid alternative to nationalist essentialism in the postcolonial era.

Diaspora, circulation et mobilité: les jeunes Haïtiens au Brésil [Diaspora,
Circulation and Mobility: Haitian Youth in Brazil] examines the circulation
and mobility of Haitians in Brazil, following the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and analyzes the diverse ways in which the Haitians studied used the term diaspora as a cultural category (emic).
This chapter draws from ethnographic research conducted between
2012 and 2013. The first phase of fieldwork was conducted on the borders of Brazil, Colombia and Peru, notably in the city of Tabatinga and in Manaus (the capital of the Amazonas states), from January to February 2012. The second phase of fieldwork was conducted in Suriname (Paramaribo) and French Guiana (Cayenne) from March to May 2013. The third phase of fieldwork was conducted in Haiti (Fonds-des-Nègres and Pemerle) in July 2013.
From 2010 to 2012, approximately 7,000 Haitians crossed the borders
between Brazil, Colombia and Peru in the Amazonas states. Between 2010 and 2015, forty thousand Haitians crossed the borders between Brazil, Bolivia and Peru in the Acre states. Others arrived through various Brazilian airports, including São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia, with a valid visa obtained by the Brazilian Embassy in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Based on the official reports of the Federal Police Department, which is under the jurisdiction of the Brazilian Ministry of Justice, between 2010 and 2016, eighty thousand Haitians were granted a humanitarian visa. This does not mean, however, that these Haitians remained in Brazil.
Following the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games, due to the political and socioeconomic crises affecting Brazil, rising unemployment
and the devaluation of Brazilian currency, as well as rising racism and xenophobia across the country, some Haitians left Brazil for Chile,
French Guiana, the United States, among other places. Based on official
data, over a six-year period (from 2010 to 2016), more than 60,000 Haitians either resided in or passed through Brazil. This data suggests that Brazil now represents the sixth most popular migration pole following the United States, Canada, France, the Dominican Republic and Cuba, respectively.
During fieldwork in Brazil and Haiti, the ways in which the term diaspora was employed by and among Haitians who migrated to Brazil and those who have remained in Haiti were examined. It was employed as a noun and adjective to describe and qualify people, objects, currencies, homes and actions. This study elucidates how the term diaspora has become central to understanding the social significance of mobility in the Haitian transnational space. The term is used to refer to fellow Haitians who reside abroad but return to Haiti for short periods. The polysemic semantic field of the term diaspora revolves around three verbs: reside
abroad, return to Haiti and return abroad. The data show how the social
uses of the term diaspora are linked to the world of mobility and how such mobility has become constitutive of the social world of Haitians.

This paper explores the importance of Kendrick Lamar in the entertainment industry, in hip-hop and in American History. The essence of this paper explores his celebrity black body in relation to history, identity and his contribution to rich black historical archives on the black experience. At large, this paper examines his performance in his DNA music video, to see how his lived body, equipped with its historical DNA, informs our modern perception of the black body.

This paper, written from a feminist perspective, seeks to understand the oppressed black body in popular culture to see how public figures like Kendrick Lamar are reclaiming their history. By creating a rich archive of soulful music and meaningful videos, Kendrick is mainstreaming the black reality in a time where the African-American body is at a political crossroads.

Kendrick Lamar is writing history with his embodied performances and his profound written reflections and ensuring that future generations have a reference point in understanding, participating with and learning from their collective history.

Despite their numerous similarities, Marranos in inquisitorial Spain and Recusants (and the so-called ‘Church Papists’), English Crypto-Catholics, in the wake of the English religious reforms, have rarely been studied concurrently. In this paper I will argue that secrecy was a central feature of the daily lives of both these minorities, and it helped them function as groups despite their internal diversity, experiencing a wide array of expressions of belonging. The elasticity of the groups’ religious practices clearly contributed to the rise of new forms of worship and to the creation of new ritual objects which could be validated by diasporic belief systems. As a consequence, beyond criticisms, these communities functioned as significant vectors of change in how their entire religious groups practiced their faiths. Ultimately, it appears that both Crypto-Jews and Crypto-Catholics existed as cohesive groups as much because their members shared religious practices as due to the diasporic culture of martyrdom.

Many qiaoxiang in southern Fujian and Guangdong appear derelict, but from documenting the material heritage and interviewing people about its social significance, another image surfaces. The homeland of Overseas Chinese was not only found to be significant to the diaspora, but serve as an enduring reminder of a grassroots-based modernity in rural China. The qiaoxiang effectively became a transnational legacy of migration from southern China that has undergone the following stages of transformation: exodus-led emergence of a remittance landscape, sudden abandonment, and sometimes revival. Today, it has become a “repository” or “living museum” where tourists and scholars alike can visit and ponder about how humans adapted to post-rural life.

An updated, contextual picture of the Salonikan Jewish working world from the Balkan Wars (1912/3) until the onset of the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas (1936) is proposed in this paper. Based on the Ladino and Greek press, the list of applicants for certificates to immigrate to Mandatory Palestine between 1930 and 1935, and statistics compiled by Member of Parliament Mentesh Ibn Shanji in 1936 concerning Jewish professionals in the city, it is argued that the decline of Salonikan Jewry and its chronology must be understood against the backdrop of the ebb of the city at large and changes in Greek tobacco politics during the interbellum period, rather than solely interethnic tension and efforts to hellenize the city. This portrait of the interwar working world in Salonika also refutes the commonly accepted view of the success of Zionism in that city.

Otto and B.D.G., a black and desi gay couple in the film Loins of Punjab Presents (Manish Acharya, 2007), are an exceptional representation of interracial desire in South Asian diasporic cultural production. Beyond the novelty of their representation, they use a variety of black and South Asian performance styles to critique normative and disciplinary systems that surround them. This essay explores the unconventional ways through which Otto and B.D.G.’s intimacies are depicted, and analyzes the performance styles they use to express critical perspectives on racism, homophobia, and Islamophobia. I argue that Otto and B.D.G.’s performances offer alternative ways to think through contemporary conversations around cultural appropriation and interracial desire in ways that decenter whiteness or a white desiring subject. However, I also observe how their critical deployments of hypermasculinity potentially skew public conversations about racialized violence.

This paper engages with the involvement of Jewish Diaspora organizations, and the ramifications of their role with regard to both the rebuilding plan of the burnt zone created by the big fire that devastated Salonika in August 1917  , and the rehabilitation of those left homeless by the fire. This study sheds further light on the subject, yielding a fascinating portrait of a broader issue, namely, the response of diasporas in general when one of their communities is in distress. Accordingly, this paper can serve as a case study of the motivations and actions of diasporas in such situations: At what point do they become involved on behalf of their injured kin? How far do they take this involvement? And does such intervention always prove worthwhile?

In the first half of 1944, tens of thousand Ukrainians left their country together with the withdrawing German occupiers in order to avoid confrontation with the approaching Red Army and the Soviet authorities. Between the summer of 1941 and their time of departure, all of these Ukrainians had had some kind of experience with the Holocaust, either as observers, as rescuers or as perpetrators. In the second half of the 1940s they were relocated from DP camps to various western countries such as Australia, Canada, the USA and the United Kingdom, while some remained in West Germany and Austria. In their newspapers and numerous memoirs they frequently described and discussed the Second World War, but they either did not mention the Holocaust at all or portrayed it as a crime committed only by the Nazis and a small group of unpatriotic Ukrainians. The participation of the Ukrainian police, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), and various types of ordinary local Ukrainians did not appear in these memoirs and historical discourses. On the contrary, some of these actors, in particular the members of the OUN and the partisans of the UPA, were commemorated as freedom fighters and national heroes. Concentrating on western Ukraine, this article explores how, during the Cold War, the Ukrainian Diaspora forgot the annihilation of the Jews, turned Holocaust perpetrators and war criminals into heroes of Ukraine, and argued that survivors from eastern Galicia and Volhynia, who mentioned Ukrainians as perpetrators, were Soviet propagandists and Jewish chauvinists.

"The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist" is the first comprehensive and scholarly biography of the Ukrainian far-right leader Stepan Bandera and the first in-depth study of his political cult. In this fascinating book, Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe illuminates the life of a mythologized personality and scrutinizes the history of the most violent twentieth-century Ukrainian nationalist movement: the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Elucidating the circumstances in which Bandera and his movement emerged and functioned, Rossolinski-Liebe explains how fascism and racism impacted on Ukrainian revolutionary and genocidal nationalism. The book shows why Bandera and his followers failed—despite their ideological similarity to the Croatian Ustaša and the Slovak Hlinka Party—to establish a collaborationist state under the auspices of Nazi Germany and examines the involvement of the Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust and other atrocities during and after the Second World War. The author brings to light some of the darkest elements of modern Ukrainian history and demonstrates its complexity, paying special attention to the Soviet terror in Ukraine and the entanglement between Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, Russian, German, and Soviet history. The monograph also charts the creation and growth of the Bandera cult before the Second World War, its vivid revivals during the Cold War among the Ukrainian diaspora, and in Bandera's native eastern Galicia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

This book examines the concept of queer theory and combines it with the field of diaspora studies. By looking at the queer diasporic narratives in and from the Caribbean, it conducts an inquiry into the workings and underpinnings of both fields.

Globalization has brought about a new paradigm where socio-cultural, political, and economic landscapes get exposed to unexpected dynamics of challenges and change. It thus becomes a matter of both challenge and opportunity for the home and host countries. On the one hand, the economic changes over the past hundred years that includes close integration, opening of trade, ideas and information, have resulted in benefitting the industrially developed economies. On the other hand, for the developing economies, the challenges remain though of different level and kind. However, the changed circumstances globally also bring along opportunities for these states to help them overcome the challenges. The increased movement of people has resulted in the global development of new ideas, intercultural linkages, democratisation of global space etc. In this scenario , diaspora has emerged as an important player in the transnational sphere for both the home and host countries. The following are the Themes and Sub themes for the Conference. Diaspora and Transnationalism, Concepts of Migration and Diaspora (Critical appraisal of place of birth, duration), Transnationalism and Globalisation, Soft power diplomacy, foreign policy: lobbying with the host state governments, Dual Identity, Voting right of Diaspora, Diaspora Policies, Diaspora Engagement Policies: Legal, political, economic and socio-cultural, Emigration policy for the lesser skilled temporary migrant Submission of abstracts or requests for further information, email to: internationalconference@grfdt.com *GRFDT is trying its best to mobilise sponsorship to cover the cost of travel and accommodation of the partici-pants/delegates as much as possible. However, the forum cannot assure anyone at this point about it.

Judaism is, through its scholarly traditions, both inclusive and isolationist. In the Bavli Talmud, the rabbis discuss whether or not the Torah, or any other sacred writing, can be translated into the language of the 'goyim' (Hebrew for the nations) and have that translation continue to retain sacred qualities. In this paper, I argue that the rabbis were considering the Jewish diaspora seeing the problem of Jews assimilating into the world in which they lived or remaining a separate people. For them, the question was similar to that raised by W. E. B. DuBois who wrote of a middle alternative, acculturation. To acculturate means to know the world of the other while hanging fast to the world of the self and community, to exist in two worlds with the potential to live well in both.

Jacqueline Bishop's celebrated piece Tristes Tropique I (2013), exhibited in the 2014 Jamaican Biennale, is part of the artist's larger engagement with the utopic and the dsytopic, the local and the global, the image and the gaze, in representations of the island of Jamaica. In this piece, Bishop restructures and recasts portraiture as a means to engage with nature and the naturalistic in order to dialogue concerning the authorship of Caribbean subjectivity. This work is an interposition between the two parts of Bishop's A View from Afar series that I call Landscapes: Jamaica (2010-ongoing) and the Dudus Chronicles (2011), which together represent a juxtapo-sition of the different Jamaicas she depicts in her work. Bishop's artscapes sit in the midst of dialogic engagement between the rural and urban contexts in Jamaican society; between the gaze up close and the romantic gaze from afar; between a sense of outsiderness and insiderness, but always in a space of belonging to an island that is rimmed and defined by racialized capitalism, a legacy of colonial disequity, touristic dreams and delusions, and violent social relations that spring from its inability to reconfigure its broken economical terrain. In effect, these artscapes allow for art and politics , the abstract and the material, the analytical and the activist, to commingle and resonate through processes of unsettling accepted suppositions, conceptualizations, narratives, and edicts. Tristes Tropique is an obvious invocation of Claude Levi-Strauss's (1955/1961) famous text, and Bishop uses the title as an evocative reminder of the melancholy and distress that undergirds Caribbean life. Levi-Strauss's work is a memoir that also becomes an ironic critique of the impact of human exegesis in forms of domination and exoticism under the prism of tourism, travel, and study. With this particular image, Bishop, like Levi-Strauss, creates a self-reflexive work that imbricates the fragility of the ecology and the place of Jamaicans within the narratology of Island life. This work, measuring 50.8 cm x 25.4 cm, is part of a new, ongoing photographic series by Bishop. The work is formed out of ripped, jagged photographs, pieced back together in odd, asymmetrical patterns, and in the midst stands a black-and-white image of a child surrounded by a mix-match of tropicality, a testament to people who are often unseen and a place that is so paradoxical. However, it is very much representative of how Bishop generates her own aesthetic form in her use of the techniques of intermedia, bricolage, and collaging, which I call "patchwork aesthetics, " a form which Bishop says derives from her foremothers who were visual artists. In Tristes Tropique I, Bishop builds on Levi-Strauss's critique of how the indigenous are misinterpreted and elided from Western narratives by simultaneously interpolating her ancestral connect-edness in the mixed media she employs and by creating a different subject view that emanates from within the photograph, welling from an iris that gently overlays, but does not obscure, the black-and-white image of the child. The outer portions of the photograph are scenes of nature, the lushness of the bush, with a ring of bright pink bougainvillea across the top; the child-a studio portrait of Jacqueline Bishop herself-sits in its midst outlined by the shape of an eye, with its looming iris (Fig. 1). Only the lower half of the child's face is seen, along with her upper torso; her eyes are obscured by the bougainvillea that blocks her view, but since she is placed in the middle of the iris, she implicates the gaze facing her. This would normally control her representation. Here, it does not. In effect, Bishop creates a visual doubling of the gaze from inside the photograph and the perception from the viewer outside that allows for a reinscription of Jamaican subjectivity. The external perspective, in looking at the photograph, may have dismissed

The attribution of magical or holy properties to objects is inherent in religious consciousness. Treating fetishes as “unreal” overlooks the importance of the object as a mediator of social value. Fetishism suggests switching the religious connection between God and people onto the connection between people and religious material symbols. Objectified religious beliefs result in fetishizing sacred spaces, be it a shrine or a temple. As commodification is the order of the day, the “thingness of the objectified” must be enhanced by “refetishising.” Such an attempt to “fetishize the fetish” is seen in M G Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song. It is actually the exposure of the secret of the eternal flame that makes Karsan finally doubt the idea of spiritual powers and shakes his faith in the high mysteries of Pirbaag. At this moment his Bapuji happens to be preaching how all is a lie, a maya. He explains to Karsan how the eternal flame keeps hope alive. People seem to lose their way without miracles and need a little help. The objectification of hope in the eternal flame is made problematic when the perpetual is put under scanner thereby shattering the diffused sense of sacred in an object.

This is the brochure for the April 2018 conference “Corporeal Restrictions, Embodied Freedoms: Italian Interventions on the Body” organized by the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, City University of New York.  The final program will be posted closer to the conference date.

Este artículo pretende ofrecer una aproximación inicial al análisis de las migraciones forzadas a través de los estudios diaspóricos. Más allá de la perspectiva estadocéntrica de los procesos de movilidad indeseados, una aproximación trasnacional ofrece una visión más amplia del desplazamiento de las personas y sus consecuencias. En los últimos años, los estudios diaspóricos han conseguido señalar la relevancia de ciertas experiencias intergeneracionales asociadas al desplazamiento forzado en los campamentos de refugiados. Una perspectiva que tiene bastante relación con la construcción de identidades en las migraciones forzadas y que, sin embargo, ha sido poco abarcada. Así pues, centrar-nos en la experiencia personal y colectiva de los sujetos y su propia agencia nos permitirá conocer el impacto de ciertas experiencias en la construcción de nuevas subjetividades. Asimismo, se pondrá especial foco de atención en la perspectiva feminista de las migraciones forzadas, la agencia de las mujeres en el proceso de desplazamiento y la influencia de ciertas categorías en la creación de identidades.
Abstract: This article claims to offer an initial approach to the analysis of forced migration among diaspora studies. Beyond the state-centric paradigm of undesired mobility , the transnational approach offers a new vision of people's displacement and its consequences. In the last years, diaspora studies have highlighted the relevance of certain experiences between generations associated with forced displacement in refugee camps and this approach is linked with the identity construction in forced migration. However, this focus is less covered. Thus, focusing on the personal and collective experience of subjects, as well as their agency, allows us to know the impact of certain experiences in the construction of new identities and subjectivities. Also, this article focuses on the feminist perspective of forced migration, women's agency during displacement and the influence of certain categories in the creation of new identities.

Evoking the painful failure of overcoming the fallout of centuries of slavery in the United States and conjuring up the specter of state-enforced apartheid in South Africa, “segregation” nowadays appears to be almost ubiquitously condemned, but at the same time seemingly impossible to eradicate. Looking at (primarily urban, spatial, ethnic) segregation from a global angle, this seminar will reveal that the phenomenon has indeed plagued a great many societies since 1500, albeit in varying degrees and changing forms. Starting from recent arguments by historians (esp. Nightingale 2012) that segregation was primarily the result of state action, this seminar looks beyond the classic cases of the U.S. and South Africa in order to ask to what extent we should understand segregation as a side effect of the history of increasing global connectedness. Moving from rarely studied examples, such as 17th-century Ayutthaya, to better-known cases of late 19th-century Atlantic immigration cities, such as Buenos Aires, the seminar thus seeks to tease out the reasons and consequences of urban ethnic unmixing through wide-ranging comparisons.

This paper looks at the Federação de Entidades Árabes das Americas (Federation of Arab Associations of the Americas,” called FEARAB in Portuguese and Spanish), a social movement of mostly Argentines, Brazilians, Chileans, and Paraguayans of Arab origin. In 1973, South Americans of Arab origin founded FEARAB. Under varied forms of military authoritarian rule, they aimed to strengthen the bonds between the Arab world and the Americas as well as to build a “pan-American” alliance that included the “Association of Arab-American University Graduates” (AAUG) in the U.S..  I ask how FEARAB activists fostered ties with: Arab state powers;  South American authoritarian regimes;  and Arab civil rights groups in the U.S.. They reveal that Arabs, too, embody and extend the hemisphere.

The formation of ethnic and diasporic identities was studied by both domestic and Western scholars. In particular, the issue of the formation of diasporas has always been considered through the prism of the notion of classical diasporas, however, modern globalization processes force the emergence of “new” diasporas, qualities of which are possessed today by a predominant part of the Korean Americans. Contrary to popular belief, the community of the Korean Americans is not homogeneous but bimodal - in terms of language, kinship, generation, identity and class, time of immigration. The perception of ethnic belonging is an important factor for Korean Americans and Korean Christian missions are the main social institutions that play a significant role in the formation of the diasporic identity in the Korean American community. This article covers socio-psychological factors that influence the formation of ethnic and diasporic identities.

Keywords: Korean diaspora in the USA, Korean Americans, diaspora, ethnic identity, diaspora/diasporic identity.

The role of military service in spreading the Puerto Rican diaspora is an understudied phenomenon of relevance for understanding the Puerto Rican migration and its settlement patterns in the U.S. Active duty military personnel, veterans, and their families have dispersed the Puerto Rican population beyond what has been considered as traditional centers of Puerto Rican migration.

Europe's Transforming Identity. Part 1 of the book Islam and Tolerance in Wider Europe (ed. Pamela Kilpadi) including the articles:
* 'What Values for Europe?' by Michael Emerson
* 'The Role of Islam in Europe: Multiple Crises?' by Amel Boubekeur and Samir Amghar
* 'The Southern Gate to Fortress Europe' by Rutvica Andrijasevic

Everybody is born into a family. Each has its own history, therefore, 'our history' is not made by us, but by previous generations. The rise of International migration and the crumbling of family structures, however, only make it harder for descendants to learn about their family history. Inhibited by language and geographical barriers as well as lost connections to the bearers of knowledge, many offspring of migrant families year for answers to questions such as 'Where do I come from?' or 'How did I get here?' Answering these requires re-establishing lost connections and meeting family one previously did not know. This paper illustrates how the juxtaposition of two generations of Chinese Australian migrants' narrative (a 'pioneer migrant' and an 'overseas born Chinese' are vital to piecing together a segment of family history.

In recent years diasporas and their political impact have become an important research issue in political science and international relations science. At the turn of the 21st century, diasporas gained the status of important actors with impact both on the global politics, interstate relations and directions of domestic policies. One of the diasporas which in the 1990s actively participated in the American political life were Polish-Americans, with the reason being the intense efforts undertaken by Poland in 1992 to join NATO. The purpose of this article is to present the activities of the Polish Diaspora in the US undertaken in favour of the accession of Poland to the North Atlantic Alliance, analysed however not in the factual (historical) approach, but against the background of the theory developed so far regarding the functioning of diasporas and ethnic groups in the US political system. The article has
been prepared with the use of the historical method, the comparative method and the behavioural method, the basis for its preparation was primarily literature on the subject, press materials, and source materials (letters, articles and publications) contained in the collection of documents after Jan Nowak- Jeziorański entitled Poland's road to NATO
(Wrocław 2006). The conducted analysis indicates that the merits of Polish Americans for Poland's membership in NATO are invaluable and should be considered one of the most important achievements of the Polish Diaspora for the country of origin. The activities undertaken in 1993-1999 by Polish Americans are the most important but at the same time unfortunately also the isolated manifestation of the involvement and organized influence of the Polish ethnic group on shaping the American politics.