AHM Conference 2023: 'Diasporic Heritage and Identity'

Social change dynamics and debates such as migration are at the forefront of the phenomena that determine and affect the ways in which individuals and societies' search for identity as well as the construction of cultural heritage. The migration of people living on the same lands for centuries to other settlements causes an intercultural interaction with a physical change in the urban space and the formation of urban identity. The existence and protection of diasporas is a cultural heritage in terms of both the culture of these societies and the building bridges of humanity between cultures. This diaspora legacy contains authentic remnants of tangible heritage and intercultural influences of intangible heritage. While the coexistence of different cultures strengthens the relationship between culture and tourism, diaspora tourism, which is revealed by the diaspora heritage, also causes changes in the urban space. The city of Izmir, which carries the traces of many ancient civilizations throughout its history, hosts different diaspora groups with its multicultural texture. This study includes qualitative analysis of data obtained from interviews with different associations and foundations representing diaspora groups living in İzmir. As a result, this study draws out migration stories of the members of the diaspora, the images of the homeland they tried to keep alive in the urban space, their connections and visits, their efforts to build a diasporic identity through material or spiritual patterns, and the intergenerational transfer of the social memory in the diaspora and its reflections in the urban space were revealed.

Being Javanese-Surinamese in the Netherlands constitutes a double diasporic identity. When slavery ended in Suriname in the late nineteenth century, the Dutch colonial administration brought indentured laborers from the East Indies (now Indonesia) to work on Caribbean plantations. A century later, around Suriname’s independence in 1975, many of its residents relocated to the Netherlands. At present, in Suriname and in the Netherlands, music, dance, linguistic, culinary, and other collective practices that developed among Javanese workers on the Surinamese plantation convey this colonial history in sounds, images, words, and flavors. Recent efforts of the Javanese-Surinamese Dutch community to raise visibility and awareness of their distinctive culture and history have engaged formal heritage discourses and archival institutions in the Netherlands, such as organizing to induct the Javanese-Surinamese gamelan musical tradition onto the Inventory of Dutch Intangible Heritage and donating photos and oral histories to Dutch municipal archives. In this paper, I consider this postcolonial diasporic community’s efforts to engage with institutions of heritage and archive in the European metropole in relation to scholarly discourses of what I term “archival optimism” and “archival pessimism.” Is it possible to simultaneously acknowledge the deeply colonial roots of diasporic histories and archival institutions on the one hand, and, on the other, to engage with the archive as a potentially useful tool that can be used for a postcolonial community’s own goals and purposes?

Global South researchers have encountered several challenges that have posed significant obstacles to their mobility, especially with the strict global immigration policies. The consequences of these obstacles have made it challenging for Global South researchers to move freely and access scientific opportunities in the Global North, which has become the hub of scientific research. The disparities in scientific resources between the Global North and the Global South further exacerbate these issues. Drawing on my personal experience as an African researcher in Brussels, I discuss the significant issues faced by migrant researchers. Using autoethnography as a method, I examine the impact of the coloniality of migration politics in Francophone Belgium and how it has contributed to the marginalization of migrant researchers in the university. To achieve this, I analyse funding conventions documents, visa/travelling conventions, and email exchanges to identify the experiences of migrant researchers in Francophone Belgium. The findings of this study can indicate that migrant researchers are subjected to various forms of exclusionary practices and discrimination, including but not limited to difficulties in accessing funding and information as well as the right to representation. The significant impact of coloniality in the Francophone Belgian scientific field has resulted in exclusionary practices and discrimination against migrant researchers, causing them short and long terms consequences. The findings highlight the need for policy interventions from all levels of power that can address the challenges encountered by migrant researchers in accessing scientific opportunities.

Confederate monuments in the United States of America are part of a public, emotional debate that is increasingly heated since the events in Charleston in 2015, Charlottesville in 2017, and the murder of George Floyd in 2020. This work focuses on the potential impact of transitional justice mechanisms on the Confederate monument debate in the Southern United States. The ‘monument debate’ ties into the theme of diasporic heritage and identity. United States heritage protection laws decide whether to keep or remove the monuments. Confederate monuments hold close ties, positive or negative, to the identity of Black and white Americans, at home and in the diaspora. The history of and debate around these monuments continues to shape American identity. This paper describes the impact that transitional justice processes could have on the Confederate monument debate in the Southern United States. Previous failures to enact transitional justice measures in the United States for slavery and systemic racism have exacerbated the current conflict surrounding these monuments. For the ‘monument debate’ to have a more successful outcome, transitional justice must take center stage. A transitional justice approach recognizes the heritage, identity, and collective memory that these monuments represent while at the same time acknowledging that they are symbols of suffering and oppression.

Although BIPOC artists have been dominating global popular music charts in recent years, certain artists’ music centre on narratives shaped by socio-political turmoil. The Sri Lankan civil war (1983 – 2009) resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Tamil peoples as well as one of the largest refugee crises in the twentieth century. This ethnoreligious divide between the Sinhala Buddhist majority and the Tamil Hindu minority continues to this day through the erasure of Tamil heritage and identity in the state via the destruction of Tamil memorial sites in Tamil Eelam (North Sri Lanka). There is a burgeoning music scene in Canada from the diasporic Tamil Eelam community in which themes of displacement, dispossession and exile are at the forefront. These artists pay homage to their homeland while also forging a sense of communal belonging by performing their diasporic identity through their music. In this paper, I focus on Shan Vincent de Paul’s (SVPD) album Made in Jaffna (2021) to explore how home is re-created and reimagined through the soundscape. This music album acts as a site for the lost home to be housed and preserved; a heritage object to uncover how the remembered past affects the present. I argue that SVPD returns home through his music and that the album is an archive or domicile of home- making and un-making. I employ Marianne Hirsch’s ‘postmemory’ (1996) to illustrate intergenerational narratives of rupture. I demonstrate where memorial sites are threatened or erased, we can look for alternative routes of memorialization through sonic reconstructions of home.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the national identities related to the Russo-Ukrainian War. The text highlights historical background information on the shared heritage of Russia and Ukraine and the gradual emergence of their distinct national identities. It explores the broader Russian objective of erasing Ukrainian cultural identity and the destruction of cultural assets as a weapon of irregular warfare. The article compared literature to convey the historical context relating to the heritage of Russia and Ukraine, tracing their origins back to Kievan Rus and the following developments, and used interview results to reflect the importance of intangible heritage in analysing the development of their national relationship.

This paper addresses the successes and failures of transitional justice measures for homosexual victims of Nazi persecution in Germany. It will examine transitional justice for these victims within the framework of Ruti G. Teitel’s transitional justice genealogy, particularly the idea of the evolution of transitional justice into a steady- state. Transitional justice is examined from two perspectives: narrow and broad. The narrow perspective focuses on legal measures and formal reparations, while the broad perspective encompasses a wide number of tools, and in this paper will primarily refer to symbolic acts such as official apologies and memorialization. To examine these ideas, a combination of transitional justice theory and historical writing about homosexual persecution and justice measures will be utilized. This paper ultimately argues that narrow transitional justice for homosexual victims of Nazi persecution in Germany failed due to a lack of social and political transition for homosexuals in the immediate post-war period, which permanently harmed transitional justice efforts. As there is no queer homeland, LGBTQ+ individuals exist in a complicated state of a sort of permanent diaspora, joined by shared experiences, identity, and a unique type of cultural heritage. Ultimately it is a reunification of the international LGBTQ+ communities through the formation of political and social homosexual identity groups in the 1960s and onwards that allowed for the collectivization of bargaining power working towards change. As acceptance and visibility grew and diasporic communities of LGBTQ+ individuals were reunited and newly formed, it allowed for successes with symbolic measures in the steady-state era of transitional justice.

The Palestinian diaspora has been marked by displacement, dispossession, and political violence since the creation of the Israeli state in 1948 on the occupied Palestinian lands. Despite these challenges, Palestinians have maintained a strong connection to their heritage and culture in and out of the Palestinian lands, using their diasporic identity as a form of resistance against occupation and colonialism. This paper investigates the role of diasporic heritage as a form of resistance in the Palestinian experience. By drawing on academic literature, personal narratives, and political discourse, the paper illustrates that diasporic heritage has been a key tool in the Palestinian struggle for justice and self-determination. It further shows how Palestinians in the diaspora have used their heritage as a means of challenging dominant narratives of occupation and dispossession, particularly through cultural production, political activism, and transnational networks. Despite this, it concludes that the diasporic heritage remains a powerful source of identity, defense, memory, and solidarity, allowing Palestinians around the world to connect with each other and with their homeland, and to continue playing a crucial role in the struggle for justice and freedom of their lands, especially in the age of social media and citizen journalism where everything can be shot in seconds.

Migrants’ geographic and temporal movements and border-crossings often involve the creative use of nostalgic attachments, embodied memories and everyday material objects as means of continuity and translation between past and present, the old home and the new home. This paper examines the transnational construction and negotiation of diasporic subjectivity from the perspective of nostalgic embodied memory and memory objects. Three novels by Anglophone Arab women writers Fadia Faqir, Leila Aboulela, and Layla AlAmmar will be considered as examples. The novels depict the migration experience of Arab Muslim women in Britain and represent the entanglements of cultural encounter, social trauma, domestic violence and gender through memory objects and experiences of food in diaspora. In this context, embodied and performative remembering through rituals, traditions, social customs, nostalgic experiences triggered by the senses and involving homely foods, and other emotionally relevant objects of everyday life and material culture function as vehicles to reconnect with lost realities and create bridges between cultural landscapes. Drawing on a cultural-materialist approach and emphasizing the positive value of nostalgia in the daily tasks of migrant homebuilding, I discuss nostalgia and memory objects as a narrative strategy and means of translation that resists geographic and cultural dislocation in affective ecologies of home and enables meaningful cultural exchanges, adaptations and transactions. This, I argue, is complicated by minority discourse and postcolonial identity and gender politics in a migratory context where cultural exchanges can be disrupted by trauma and hegemony.

How do we approach an object that lost its country of origin, its context and source community? The violent dissolution of Yugoslavia left little room for the people of the newly formed states to share their living experience, therefore making it impossible to share the interpretation of the history and heritage remaining as the relic of the former state. During the past three decades the heritage field of the respected region operated manly with concepts of dissonant, mutual, and shared heritage when attempting to determine who, how and why should deal with the historic objects made during the Yugoslavia’s existence. This process had its limitations, and the above posed questions were largely left unanswered. Since the 2000s a clear demand for defining and managing these objects as the outsider interest in all-things-Yugoslav entered its growth phase. Still, the consensus on the status of these objects and the values they embody has not been accomplished. The question is, why? One possible answer lies in the disappearance of the source community. In its initial structure, it is gone, and the objects’ home is now only imagined. This paper attempts to investigate the notion of a diasporic heritage by approaching it as objects that lost their home but didn’t not change the place they inhabit. Today, highly popular Yugoslav memorials and monuments dedicated to WWII can be interpreted as diasporic objects: objects equally building the imaginarium of a home for the deconstructed communities in the region and for the actual diasporic communities that are still recognized as Yugoslav by their surroundings.

Community-based heritage language (HL) schools play an important role in identity-building of diasporic communities. This study based on twenty-five interviews with HL school leaders and teachers of the International and Heritage Languages Association (IHLA) in Edmonton, Canada aims to understand the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on HL learners’ diasporic identity formation. We approached HL schools as communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) where learners acquire specific HLs while engaged in socio- cultural communal practices. In addition, Basu’s (2011) conceptualization of school as a space of integration through multilingualism helped us understand the changes affecting immigrant integration and identity perceptions during the pandemic. Findings show that the forced transition to online teaching and learning during the pandemic led to the development of new transregional and transnational practices and collaborations. These new practices helped expand and redefine the traditional understanding of community, identity, and belonging within HL communities. As a result of the pandemic, the conceptualization of community moved beyond physical land borders towards global cyber communities linked by the given HL. This finding signals the departure from land-based understanding of identities towards language-based cybercommunity-linked identities – the shift that prompted us to examine these new relationalities through the lens of groupness, which challenges the rather broad and overused notion of identity. Our findings further indicate that these newly forged relationalities and agencies of diasporic heritage communities generated resistance to the systems of power of the host societies that marginalize diasporic heritage communities.